Is The Backrooms a Real Place?
Originating as a photo of an empty, yellowed office space posted online without context, Kane Parsons’ and A24’s feature-length Backrooms film builds on years of Internet lore, liminal horror tropes, and our understanding of subconscious and unconscious states.
In our world, the ‘Backrooms’ are both real and unreal – ‘real’ in the sense that the original photo that spawned a new Creepypasta is of a real location, and ‘unreal’ in that the urban myth around it is all exactly that – a myth.
But what about the Backrooms depicted in the movie? Let’s get to the bottom of this question, one that is key to understanding this high-concept horror film. Naturally, expect major spoilers from this point on.
The Backrooms Are (Terrifyingly) Real
For the first half of the film, it’s easy to believe that Clark, a furniture store owner and trained architect, is seeing things when he discovers an endless maze of rooms and hallways through an invisible door in his store’s basement. The dissolution of his marriage, leaving him living in the store and working through his feelings of intense resentment with therapist Mary, could believably induce a dissociative state, after all.
However, this assumption is shattered when, to prove to Mary that what he experienced is real, Clark brings his assistant manager, Kat, and her boyfriend, along with his camera, into the liminal space. Aside from the admission that one or both of them may be mildly high (and weed “doesn’t count”, apparently), we have no reason to doubt them as reliable witnesses. Plus, everything is captured on videotape. Couple this with the opening sequence of the film, in which we saw, through a first-person POV, someone in a hazmat suit running from a tall, dark entity in the same space, and it’s pretty conclusive that the Backrooms are a real dimension that anyone can travel to.
Final confirmation is given at the very end of the film by Phil, a man who works for ASYNC Research Institute, the company that the man in the hazmat suit also worked for before his untimely death. After she escapes the Backrooms, Phil tells a shell-shocked Mary that he has been visiting it every day for research purposes. His company once made MRI machines; now, “we do this.” He also reveals that more and more entrance points to it, like the one in Clark’s store, have been appearing lately.
This positions the film as less supernatural and more in the realm of X-Files-esque sci-fi. The Backrooms being unambiguously real is far more terrifying than them being purely allegorical or hallucinatory.
How do the Backrooms Work?
This question has far less of a concrete answer. What is clear is that the space populates itself with items, and even people, that it draws from the minds of those who enter. When Clark enters, for example, he finds copies of the furniture he sells scattered across various rooms and hallways, malformed or placed in random spots that make no sense – like a glitching video game. There are even entire ‘scenes’ from his memories: the broken throne, his pirate costume parrot, and the shoes of his employees, for instance, from when he shot his disastrous commercial, half-buried, like objects in sand.
When he holds Mary hostage in a version of his kitchen, he explains further, using three ‘people’ – a small man in a wheelchair, a man in a striped shirt, and a woman in a red suit – that somewhere in the world, these people exist. In the Backrooms, they are remembered over and over again, but each time they are remembered, they come out slightly wrong. This is the same as how our memories work: over time, we no longer recall things as they actually happened, but the memory of them. The more time passes, the fuzzier the memory can become. It also mimics dream logic, in which our unconscious throws up random images from our memories, out of context, in a random stream of junk information.
Clark also proves the fallacy of these Backrooms inhabitants by stabbing the man in the striped shirt through the neck with a knife, getting no reaction from him, and then even removing some of his ‘flesh’, which looks like white goo, and claiming it’s edible. They seem to be stuffed mannequins, perhaps even representing the way Clark’s life has become overrun by the furniture he resents so deeply.
What’s unclear is whether the Backrooms begins this process as soon as someone enters or whether it can do this before that point. After all, Clark only discovers the doorway because he’s drawn to it. There’s a switch in a strange place in the store’s malfunctioning breaker box that doesn’t seem to do anything, and when he’s watching TV at night in a bed for sale on the warehouse floor, it flashes to one of the Backrooms’ rooms.
Had the Backrooms been seeping out beyond the doorway and already begun generating things from Clark’s mind? Why did it lure him inside? This is the part of Backrooms that brushes up against the paranormal, or at least science we just can’t explain.
The Mythology & Psychology Behind the Backrooms
While the subgenre of liminal horror is closely associated with Internet culture, liminal spaces and the eerie feeling they generate go far further back. Mazes have, of course, existed for a long time in human history, and the most famous is perhaps the story of Theseus and the Minotaur in ancient Greek mythology.
You don’t have to squint too hard to see a possibly deliberate connection between Parsons’ film and the Minotaur myth: the beast’s maze is on the island of Crete, and the nautical theme of the furniture store and dead seagulls in Backrooms echoes this location. Clark’s pirate persona, ‘Cap’n Clark,’ the sand-like quality of the floors that swallow objects, the swimming poos, and the room with a tropical wallpaper scene also play on the idea of being marooned on a strange, undiscovered island.
This would make the Backrooms’ monstrous version of Clark the Minotaur – a half-man, half-beast with a tragic backstory, doomed to roam the endless maze and kill whoever enters indiscriminately. Its existence also gives us more insight into how the Backrooms may work, separating id from ego: Clark’s rational, conscious mind from his destructive impulses that Mary says are “wired” into him. Do we imprint our strongest emotions and urges on the Backrooms? Is the Backrooms version of Clark a monster because, deep down, Clark is a monster?
Other than being difficult to escape from, the film strongly implies that the Backrooms are not a malevolent place, but what we bring into them could force whatever power they hold to reflect our own darkness back at us – and we only have ourselves to blame.
