Is The Backrooms A Real Place?
Directed by Kane Parsons, Backrooms just hit theaters, bringing the terrifying liminal space that became an iconic Creepypasta to life on the big screen. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner going through personal trauma after losing his wife and unable to fulfill his dreams. But when he discovers the Backrooms, things get more fascinating and terrifying.
It’s hard to even explain what the Backrooms are to people who don’t know about the concept in the first place, and it’s impressive that the movie reeled in so many fans with that in mind. But by the end of the film, it does provide us with enough context to venture a guess at what the Backrooms could be.
The Backrooms Are (Terrifyingly) Real
In Backrooms, it’s teased that this location, per found footage that a mysterious company called Async is watching, could not be real. Inspired by Kane Parsons’ YouTube series, it adds to the ambiguity at first. However, the moment Clark and an electrician notice strange breakers in the fuse box, everything changes.
Beforehand, it could be argued that the Backrooms were more a mass hallucination of a location people have gone to in the past, fueled by mirroring our world and subconscious. As Clark finds the Backrooms after walking through an invisible hole in the wall, he’s greeted by the iconic liminal space that pioneered the concept. He learns, through exploration, that this place is not only real, it’s not a true extension of his furniture store.
The Backrooms Are Another Dimension
The chilling truth that is explained by Mark Duplass’ character at the end of the film is that there are more portals into the Backrooms opening up. This small piece of information is enough to confirm the truth that this location is another dimension. Even the Backrooms Wiki confirms this, as it’s a location with multiple layers that aren’t as stable as Earth, known as the Frontrooms.
By confirming interdimensional travel, Backrooms embraces its cosmic horror quality and enhances the terror of the mysterious location. It’s more than an unsettling space that feels like somewhere you have been. It’s a place that is trying to be exactly that while also being anything else it wants, per the strange entities known to live within it.
How Do the Backrooms Work?
It’s hard to understand how the Backrooms work, but there are two ways to venture a guess. Knowing that portals can open and you can stumble into them anywhere—“no-clipping,” as the fandom calls it—is the one constant. But to Clark, it’s more akin to dream logic. It tries to remember and reinterpret what we see and experience.
This is why the entities that Mark runs into feel as poor recreations of someone else’s memory remembered wrong over and over. The deeper into the levels you go, the worse they become, hence Clark’s pirate monster. But if you wanted to theorize further, factoring in the entities, the Backrooms could be a living place trying to mimic our world as it changes and evolves, potentially devouring us via the strange entities within.
The Mythology and Psychology Behind the Backrooms
There’s also blatant mythological inspirations that are tied to Clark’s time in the Backrooms, specifically the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Like Theseus, he has a string, in this case a rope, that he uses to navigate the Backrooms. But as one of his associates travels down a level deeper, into a labyrinth, the pirate monster is there: the Minotaur.
The pirate theme of the furniture store that’s mirrored in the Backrooms also emulates the Island of Crete where the Minotaur lives, giving the island backdrop more thematic weight. But the evil of the Backrooms could also be more reactionary, as it mirrors the darkness of an individual, like Clark, creating the pirate monster and its violent tendencies which are the same ones Clark tried so hard to repress. In the end, the Backrooms are any explanation and no explanation, but thankfully the film gave us a bit more understanding of what it could be.
