If you are looking for traditional jump scares while watching this film, you are in the wrong place. This film frightens us not with blood or demons, but with the deepest and most forgotten corners of our subconscious.
In recent years, we have often seen films made by major studios with budgets of $200–300 million completely collapse at the box office. But A24 played a completely different game with Backrooms and won. Made on a modest budget of just $10 million, this production quickly earned nearly $250 million at the box office, becoming one of the year’s biggest phenomena.
Everything began approximately ten years ago on a social forum called 4chan. Someone uploaded a photo under the heading “post the image that makes you most uncomfortable and uneasy.” The image showed nothing more than an empty, office-like room with old yellow wallpaper, a damp carpet, and fluorescent lights. It was so ordinary and banal that this very banality was what made it terrifying.
This was at the very heart of what we call liminal space. Places that we are accustomed to seeing as noisy and filled with people in everyday life surrendering to emptiness and silence. Even when there is no danger in that space, our brains perceive the emptiness as a danger signal. The online world drew inspiration from this image and created a new legend. The rule was simple: If you take a wrong step in reality and pass through a wall, you will find yourself inside endless yellow rooms, known as the Backrooms.
In the early 2020s, while playing with free visual-effects programs in his bedroom, a 15-year-old teenager named Kane Parsons uploaded this legend to YouTube in a nine-minute found-footage format. That video received tens of millions of views, while the 22-episode web series that followed officially became an internet phenomenon.
Today, Kane Parsons is 20 years old and, as the youngest director in A24’s history, is bringing this massive universe to the big screen. Behind him is James Wan, the creator of legends such as "Saw" and "The Conjuring." That is also the biggest secret behind the film’s enormous revenue and box-office success. Studios usually risk large budgets, but here A24 bet on an enormous, loyal fan base that had already formed over the years and knew every detail of the film by heart.
Clark, at the center of the film, is not an ordinary victim. He is a failed architect whose life has fallen apart, who has been abandoned by his wife, and who suffers from alcoholism. Clark running and living in a strange, enormous furniture store with no customers, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, is actually the film’s greatest metaphor. The store’s cluttered, fake home designs are a mirror of the meaninglessness and lost sense of belonging inside Clark. When he falls into the Backrooms from the store’s basement, he is not really entering a foreign place, but the physical form of his traumas and inner emptiness.
When his therapist Mary enters these corridors to search for him, the film shifts into an entirely different layer. Renate Reinsve plays the character so quietly and profoundly that her fear passes directly from the screen to the viewer. We see that the Backrooms consist of more than just yellow rooms; they change according to people’s memories and minds, shifting from one form to another.
In complete contrast to the distinctive, purposeful, and aesthetic lines of modern architecture, the corridors in the Backrooms serve no purpose. Bolted doors, staircases leading nowhere, walls that are uniformly the same color... This is actually the visual manifestation of modern bureaucracy and the system that turns people into robots. You run, but everywhere is the same.
"Backrooms" does not tire viewers with grand philosophical questions, but when examined closely, it asks one fundamental question: How can we escape the role of the victim? This space in the film also shows how people remain dependent on their own traumas. Some people do not even want to leave the labyrinth because, although it is frightening, that loneliness is familiar to them.
The film may have a few plot holes and, at first glance, leave those seeking classic horror asking, “What is this supposed to be?” But the atmosphere Kane Parsons creates continues to echo inside your mind even after the film ends. Sometimes the most terrifying monster is not a creature chasing us, but being unheard by anyone behind the walls built by our own thoughts.
8.5
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