The movie “Backrooms” is coming out this May, and I’m ecstatic beyond words about it, which is rare for me. Backrooms is associated with an independent creator who clearly wants to make something meaningful. See the trailer here. I expect it to be a cult classic, if it is nearly as good as the YouTube series, and it might just go down as the most important movie release that I’ll ever get to experience.
The Backrooms is a horror concept, not a gory-horror, more ‘unsettling’ and thought-provoking, that originated on 4chan years ago and has slowly built presence on the internet. The concept flourished in a series of videos made by Kane Pixels on YouTube.
The general background of the lore goes like this: a secret government research project attempts to create an infinite-storage space by manipulating magnetic fields. It is successful in creating a system of hallways with the aesthetic of 90’s cubicle or office spaces accessible through a “threshold”, the door into the alternate reality. These spaces are generally entirely empty minus lighting and walls, creating an infinite maze. Some fragmented/distorted objects which are assumed to be remnants of the engineering process remain in weird orientations or repeated in odd ways, which it seems is the way the entire world inside there works: it duplicates its own design to create infinite space. Researchers enter the Backrooms to conduct experiments, fine-tune the system, and explore its quirks.
As the research continues, disasters happen. People go missing. The researchers find remnants of other people who somehow entered the space (even a car somehow entered in and crashed, with no victim present). Ordinary people find “thresholds” outside of the goverment facility, then enter and get lost. There is, of course, some sort of “entity” (or many, who knows) that lives inside the Backrooms and will chase down whoever enters and happens to cross paths with it. It’s not clear, but it seems that the researchers have created a portal to another dimension, or something, which is actively hostile to humans being in it - but our experiment tapped into some complex physics that lets us interact with the alternate reality space.
There are so many complex and deeply emotional themes involved with the Backrooms. The feeling of an unsettling, infinite maze with no escape as something hunts you down is of course the main component of the terror, but the broader concept touches on a number of finer emotions, like:
- Repetition and distortion: modern lives are repetitive in nature with the 9-5 grind, and this distorts, if not obfuscates, the path to finding meaning and happiness. The flood of media is not only producing distortion of truth (see 2), but it also usurps all emotions into its black hole - including rebellion against it - as it continually provides repetitive content that is distinctly not-interesting. See Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation. The Backrooms is repetitive, all-encompassing, and has no exits. It wears down people because of its boring, soulless aesthetic and industrial, brutalist design.
- Tension between reality and contrived reality: modern media has produced not only “fake news”, but an entire crisis of what is truly “real” and what is not. The way we interact with reality is quickly becoming based on information we have heard about it - NOT direct experience with reality itself. Information about reality then builds our perceptions of it, instead of experience with reality, and if we fail to recognize this we can easily spiral into extremism. Similarly, the Backrooms, with its distorted and unsettling maze of walls, lights, and bizarre physical objects creates tension between the reality of the space itself, and the anti-reality or other-worldly essence.
- Search for identity and feelings of being crazy for seeking it in an emotionally-devoid system: The modern world increasingly is unable to provide the necessary human-to-human care that initiates feelings of safety and security, leading people towards internal stress and confusion while searching for identity. With the full-scale normalization of crushing debt, and without an economic safety net, people find it hard to relax and truly “find themselves” or develop towards self-actualization. Similarly, the Backrooms has no resources for humans to survive on: no water, no food, no space that feels safe and secure. It tunes into the emptiness and sadness emotional space, the realization that the system we’ve built has no escape.
- Confusion, emptiness, and the unknown: The maze that the Backrooms presents appears to have no real purpose. Why is there nothing there, and who designed it to be like this? The remnants of an engineer are surely present, but the layout is bizarre and unsettlingly awkward. It seems to touch the primordial fear of entering a space that’s not yours, and wondering when the owner will find you - and if they’ll be amicable about your trespassing.
- Pining for an older world that’s analog: Technology has caused a lot of problems, and part of the allure of the Backrooms concept seems to be the interest in nostalgia from the 90s or 00s, or perhaps in another vein: the desire for a physical place to discover that hasn’t been overrun by humans yet, something entirely new to build in, almost like an empty Minecraft world.
