What Is the Backrooms Monster?: The Psychology and Mythology Behind the Real Horror

After an incredible opening weekend (grossing over $100 million globally on a $10 million production budget), A24 and Kane Parsons’ liminal horror film Backrooms is a certified sensation.

The film has the benefit of years of user-generated Internet lore inspired by the original ‘Creepypasta’ image – the kind of digital urban legend that inspired the Slenderman movie a few years ago. With or without knowledge of this, Parsons’ original Backrooms content on YouTube, or the related video games, this feature-length iteration is still an eerie puzzle to unravel, much like the titular space itself.

At the centre of the mystery is a tall, dark entity stalking the yellow corridors and rooms and killing anyone who steps into the dimension indiscriminately. It isn’t until the last act of the film that we finally get to see what this entity looks like, and it’s a reveal that sews together a lot of dangling story strands up to that point.

Understanding what the Backrooms monster is is key to understanding the film’s themes and inspirations, so let’s break it all down. To do so, we’ll need to journey into heavy spoiler territory, so those yet to travel into the Backrooms might want to turn back at this point...

What Is the Backrooms Monster Revealed to be?

In short, the Backrooms monster is a Still Life version of Clark, the film’s central male protagonist, who first discovers the space in his furniture store’s basement. The term ‘Still Life’ comes from the lore around Parsons’ earlier Backrooms web projects, and refers to the warped human copies generated by the dimension. It’s theorised that these copies are hollow facsimiles of their biological originals, appearing slightly ‘wrong’ as the Backrooms’ attempt to understand and reproduce human beings in the way it more successfully reproduces objects and architecture. It’s also theorised that the Backrooms perhaps struggle to tell the difference between us and inanimate objects, explaining the lobotomised nature of a Still Life.

Referred to commonly as ‘Pirate Clark’ since the feature film’s release (because it apes the pirate costume he wears to promote his store), Clark’s replica stands out significantly from the other Still Life entities: the beaded man, the red-headed woman and the man in the wheelchair. While those three come across as docile and aimless inhabitants, Pirate Clark seems driven by an animalistic need to hunt and kill. It’s also massive, and appears more wooden and mannequin-like than the others, almost as if the Backrooms couldn’t differentiate properly between Clark and the furniture he sells, possibly mirroring his own dissatisfaction with how his life has ended up.

Greek Mythology May Have Inspired Pirate Clark

While Backrooms’ brand of liminal horror is a relatively modern subgenre driven by Internet culture, liminal spaces, the disconcerting feeling they create, and the creatures we fear might inhabit them are far older. We can look to the ancient Greek tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as one of the oldest and most well-known templates.

In the myth, a war between Athens and Crete resulted in a grim bargain with King Minos: seven young Athenian men and women had to be sent into a Labyrinth on Crete every nine years. Inside, they’d be stalked and likely eaten by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature. Theseus, an Athenian prince with divine heritage, volunteered as one of these tributes, planning to slay the beast and end the deal. Minos’ daughter, Princess Ariadne, fell for the young hero and gifted him a sword to kill the Minotaur, as well as a magical ball of thread so he could retrace his steps back out of the Labyrinth. He successfully used both of these to complete his task, freeing his people from the endless, violent cycle.

It’s easy to see how Backrooms mirrors both the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, right down to the Grecian island flavours and dead seagulls, but the roles that Clark and his therapist, Mary, who enters the Backrooms in search of him, play offer interesting subversions of the classic tale. 

At first, Clark could be seen as Theseus – a courageous traveller determined to unearth the strange place’s secrets. He creates a map of everywhere he’s been and even uses a rope at one point to help himself and the others he brings inside navigate. However, the more time Clark spends in the maze, the more he unravels, culminating in his kidnapping and holding Mary hostage in a disturbing dinner scene mimicking the night he fought with and left his wife.

By the time Pirate Clark lumbers into frame, revealing its true appearance, it’s clear we’ve not been a heroic explorer but a broken anti-hero, maybe even the hidden villain of the whole film. The Minotaur is a hybrid of man and beast, and Pirate Clark is similarly a hybrid of the real and unreal. Both are big, intimidating creatures driven by impulse and impossible to reason with. 

Unlike Theseus, Clark has no desire to slay this monstrous reflection of himself; in fact, he embraces it and the Backrooms themselves. Mary, on the other hand, who may have appeared to be Princess Ariadne by virtue of her gender, as well as trying to give Clark the tools he needs to escape the prison of his life, morphs into the hero: she’s the one who kills the monster and escapes the maze. 

The Psychology Behind Pirate Clark

The Minotaur and its hybrid nature represent the constant struggle between id and ego – our rational and impulsive sides. An unseen force of uncontrollable rage and hunger that dwells deep within a layered, isolated realm of the unknown, it’s a metaphor for the fear of what lies buried in our psyche, and that if we ever come face to face with it, it’ll devour us.

Throughout Backrooms, we’re given clear hints of Clark’s barely concealed capacity for violence. The insight we get into the argument with his wife, Barbara, paints the picture of a frustrated man stumbling home drunk, breaking things, and then losing his temper. The result is being kicked out of “my house” to live in the furniture store that was supposed to be a stopgap gig until his architecture career took off. As he feels his life sliding out of his control, he lashes out at his environment, failing, as Mary identifies, to look within the labyrinth of his subconscious for answers. Before he even enters the Backrooms, he already feels trapped and alone. In contrast, the liminal space he discovers offers endless freedom of exploration, creativity, and most importantly, no consequences. He demonstrates this when he shows Mary, unflinchingly, that the bearded Still Life man can’t be harmed, stabbing him through the neck, and then ripping a chunk of weird, gooey stuffing out of his belly, claiming it's edible. How would he have discovered these facts without an inclination to hurt those around him?

In this light, Pirate Clark seems less like a version of Clark ‘gone wrong’, and more like an exaggerated manifestation of the true darkness inside him. Ultimately, Mary summises that she’s unable to help Clark because he’s incapable of change; he’s just “wired” this way. He can’t escape himself because he doesn’t want to, just like he can’t leave the Backrooms because he doesn’t want to, nor kill his monstrous id. This realisation liberates Mary psychologically, and that’s what enables her to do what Clark can’t – escape the Backrooms, and the monster it didn’t create, but copied.