'Backrooms' Weird Caveman, Explained (And How It Ties To… Aliens?)

A24’s Backrooms (2026) may just be the most interesting horror film of the year. The psychological horror film from Kane Parsons isn’t big on jump scares, but it successfully creates an unsettling atmosphere that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater. Eerie, slow-burning, and ambiguous, Backrooms’ meaning is open to interpretation. The most it tells us is that the Backrooms function as the molecular memory of the universe. It’s a never-ending, self-expanding afterlife that misremembers and missassembles its memories, much like the human brain.

Still, much about the contents of the Backrooms and the work of Async, the company exploring them, remains somewhat ambiguous. One such aspect is the weird caveman cutouts that Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) comes across in the Backrooms. Use our guide to find out what the caveman cutouts mean and how they may tie into the extraterrestrial.

What Is The Caveman In ‘Backrooms’ And Where Did It Come From?

When Clark first enters the Backrooms before understanding what it is, he looks for any sign of life. Upon hearing voices, he believes he has stumbled upon other humans in the eerily isolated space. Turning a corner, he sees a silhouette standing in a hallway, but the figure doesn’t move when he calls to it and approaches. As he comes closer, he realizes it’s not a real person, but a cardboard cutout of a Caveman: a shirtless man with a scraggly beard and a long walking stick.

The cutouts appear several other times throughout the film, including when Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) knocks one over while running from Pirate Clark (Robert Bobroczkyi). While no explanation is given, Backrooms heavily hints at the Caveman’s origin when Mary finds herself at the Async research facility. As researchers lead Mary to an interrogation room, she catches glimpses of other rooms, including one filled with Caveman cutouts.

Hence, it appears that Async is responsible for creating the cardboard cutouts and placing them throughout the Backrooms. Just like Clark mistakes the cutout for a human, Async likely hoped to lure the Backrooms’ Still Life entities with the cardboard cutouts.

One Weird Caveman Detail In ‘Backrooms’ Points To Aliens

Although the purpose of the Caveman cutouts is understandable in Backrooms, there’s another perplexing detail about these figures. As mentioned above, Clark is drawn to the first cutout by voices. However, as he approaches, he realizes the figure is a cutout and that the voices come from an audio player attached to it. Upon first listen, you may think it’s a random collection of voices in various languages. If it sounds familiar, though, it’s likely because you have heard it before.

The audio is from the real-life Voyager Golden Record. In 1977, NASA attached the Golden Record to its twin Voyager spacecraft before launching them into space for interstellar exploration. The record contains the audio of greetings in 55 different languages, including one in English that says, “Hello from the children of planet earth.” The idea behind the Golden Record is that if the Voyager ever encounters intelligent extraterrestrial life, they may be able to understand the story of planet Earth.

In Backrooms, Async chose the Voyager Golden Record to pair with its cutouts in an attempt to lure its entities. On the one hand, it makes sense to use the record to communicate with or trap entities that researchers don’t fully understand. At the same time, one can’t help but wonder if the choice in audio hints at the extraterrestrial. Perhaps Async is using the audio to communicate with potential extraterrestrial lifeforms, much as NASA once tried to do. While the Backrooms are supposed to be the universe’s memory, the Golden Record provides a potential alternative theory about something alien in nature.

‘Backrooms’ Isn’t The Only Recent Film To Feature The Golden Record

Interestingly, Backrooms isn’t the only recent film to include a nod to the universally recognizable Golden Record. TikTok user @jbillinson pointed out that the Golden Record also appears in Project Hail Mary (2026). While exploring his ship, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) comes across etchings that tell the story of Earth. It’s a reference to the Golden Record, which is etched with diagrams showing Earth’s location among other information. While Project Hail Mary and Backrooms are very different movies, the presence of the Golden Record seems to serve a similar function in both, as an ambiguous hint to audiences about the true intentions and knowledge of the figures pulling the strings behind the scenes.