[COLUMN] Backrooms Is the Nightmare of a Generation Trapped in the Detritus of the 1990s | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Kane Parson’s Backrooms, which is in theatres right now. If you’re looking for a recommendation, I had a good time with it. Oddly enough, it was least interesting in terms of basic narrative, but very compelling as a piece of mood and atmosphere reflecting a very young and modern sensibility. It’s not quite as good as Obsession, the other YouTuber-turned-filmmaker horror movie, but it’s a pretty incredible debut film from a 20-year-old filmmaker. If you want to go in unspoiled, feel free to bookmark and come back(rooms) later.

As the film enters its third act, Backrooms offers a striking visual expression of its central thematic conceit.

The camera begins in a perfectly normal sitting room. It then moves downwards. Beneath that sitting room is another sitting room. However, the details of that room seem off. The dimensions of the chairs are wrong. Some of the detail is missing. Beneath that sitting room is another sitting room. In that, the chairs are even more warped and the furniture seems to be sinking into the floor. Beneath that sitting room is another more abstracted sitting room. And so on and so on, ad infinitum.

Each of those rooms is more uncanny than the last, until all that is left is the idea of a sitting room. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of a furniture store who stumbled into this liminal space, likens the endless yellow corridors that occasionally contain echoes of finer detail to the experience of asking somebody who has never seen a dog to draw a dog based solely upon the description of one. It might end up vague resembling the original idea, but it will also be decidedly unnatural.

It is, Clark explains, towards the climax of the film, like a memory. "All these rooms,” he observes. “This place builds them. Actually, it's more like it remembers them. And the more time it remembers something, the less it does.” It is a literalization of the way the human brain works, where the very process of remembering something ultimately overrides the original memory and replaces it with the memory of the memory, so over time the original distorts in particular directions.

Backrooms director Kane Parsons is only twenty years old. He grew up on YouTube and has transitioned into adapting his own internet video idea into a theatrical feature film starring Oscar-nominated actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Reinsve praising Kane for being “so particular about his ideas and vision.” He is part of a recent wave of YouTube creators transitioning to film, including Curry Barker, Michael Shanks, the Philippou Brothers, Markiplier and Kogonada.

As with so many of these directors, one of the most striking things about Parsons’ work on Backrooms is the extent to which it feels like a very traditional feature film. In some ways, it feels like a conventional narrative film than veteran director Jon Favreau’s recent work on The Mandalorian and Grogu. There is a surprising amount of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre to be found in Kane Parson’s Backrooms.

Indeed, the film’s narrative is surprisingly conventional for a concept that originated as a series of interlinked and abstracted found footage videos. Backrooms can be understood as part of the wave of recent horror films about “trauma.” Clark is a recent divorcee who is living out of his failing furniture store. The central relationship in the movie is between Clark and his therapist Doctor Mary Kline (Reinsve), providing a vehicle for Clark to exposit about his back story and emotional fragility.

In terms of story, Clark ventures into the strange liminal realm, bringing his trauma with him. Mary follows him. The climax of the film finds Clark using the abstracted world of these interconnected rooms to restage his final conversation with his ex-wife, populating the room with vague echoes of human beings who exist out in the world, while seemingly attracting a distended nightmare version of himself as the mascot of his furniture store. It is a very straightforward, character-driven plot.

However, there is something interesting stirring beneath the surface. Part of the appeal of Backrooms as a concept, beyond the general resonance of liminal horror to younger audiences, that the mythology is deliberately open to interpretation. There is an entire subculture online obsessed with trying to make sense of the logic and lore of the world. This is no small task considering that Backrooms is effective open-source internet lore, the work of multiple authors over years.

Still, it makes sense in the context of Parson’s film to take Clark’s arguments at face value. Clark’s framing is certainly a valid way of engaging with the space as it is presented to the audience. The yellow corridors are decorated with strange echoes of Clark’s furniture store, implying a distorted and warped connection to the outside world; there are piles of furniture, sales banners and even ship steering wheels to tie into the nautical theme of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire.

So, these spaces are in some ways an echo of the real world, but a copy that has broken down and degraded like an echo bouncing through a cavern. However, that echo encompasses more than just Clark’s world. It is populated by the ghosts of other visitors. At one point, fleeing Clark’s monstrous mascot, Mary escapes into what looks like an entire suburban street recreated within the corridors. It is a warped reflection of the entire world.

Despite this emphasis on decay and degradation, on entropy and erosion, Backrooms places a very strong emphasis on the physical. As with so much of the source material lore, the film unfolds in 1990. From the opening sequence, there is a strong recurring fixation on the analogue and the tangible. When Clark returns from his first foray into the other realm, he makes a point to return with a wooden stool, as if craving tactile proof that his experience really happened.

Backrooms is set in a pre-wireless world. Information is stored on floppy discs and video cassettes. Cameras have to be wired to external power sources. It’s not uncommon for Mary or Clark to find power leads running into the space from some outside location to power camera or tape recordings. Even incongruous objects like light-up Christmas trees have to be plugged in. Early in the film, it is heavily implied that this liminal realm is driving Clark’s power bill up by siphoning electricity.

There is a recurring suggestion that the space quite literally feeds on these physical objects, consuming and devouring them. Chairs are stuck together. Shoes seem to melt into the floor. Indeed, Clark himself points out that the residents of the space are edible and his mascot monster seems to crave human flesh. The physical is being consumed and through that consumption transformed into something less tangible and more abstract.

The film’s setting feels important here. Much of the Backrooms lore is set between the 1980s and the 1990s, and it is centered on California. The film takes place in San Jose. The Loma Prieta earthquake that hit California in October 1989 is a major part of the mythology. In the online videos, there is the implication that the United States government is looking to actively colonize the environment, to expand into it by using it as storage and residential space.

In some ways, Backrooms feels like the vague lingering echoing memory of the 1990s. It is a concept that speaks to “the end of history”, the idea that the end of the Cold War represented the culmination of the American project. The series unfolds in California, the literal end of the American West, where the idea of Manifest Destiny must give way to the unyielding Pacific Ocean. It is the point at which there is no more frontier and no more expanse.

California occupies a strange place in the American consciousness, a place of unreality. It has been home to various cults and fringe movements. It is where Hollywood and the film industry creates American mythology and where Silicon Valley charts the new digital frontier, where reality gives way to something more fanciful. It was home to the original Disneyland, part of a network of similar hyperreal stations that, to quote philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation.”

Backrooms presents a vision of 1990s California that has reached the end of America and the end of history, and so has turned back in on itself. That sunken golden throne that Clark encounters as if “on the sand, half sunk” cannot help but evoke Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, a poem about faint remnants of a once-great empire. Even Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire must fall and sink into the sand, becoming an echo of itself robbing of meaning or context.

Not that there was much context there to begin with. As Clark’s videographer Bobby (Finn Bennett) asks while shooting a promotional commercial for the furniture store, “Are you meant to be a pirate or a sultan?” With the collapse of the clean dichotomy of the Cold War, with the end of communism as an other against which America might define itself, the boundaries of identity and image become porous. They collapse into one another.

The film opens with Mary watching the destruction of her childhood home, which is being torn down to build condos. She remembers putting her hand in the concrete of the driveway, as a marker of her own permanence. For the rest of the film, she carries a piece of that smashed handprint with her, although it is destroyed in her attempt to escape the backrooms. This is the horror of Backrooms at its most literal, something concrete that is still destroyed and lost.

It feels worth acknowledging here that Kane Parsons is too young to remember the 1990s firsthand. However, his generation has arguably lived in the shadow of that decade, absorbing the culture of a decade that they never directly experienced through osmosis; through Friends reruns, Oasis reunion tours, Frasier revivals, the return of VHS. There is a sense, as Kurt Andersen argued, that “the decade never did end.”

However, as one gets further and further from it, as the memory of it is filtered through the lens of a generation that was not even born during it, the 1990s becomes a sort of abstraction of itself. And if the present is still defined by the 1990s, then that logically means that the present must become abstracted itself. The image is warped and distorted. It is that picture of a dog, drawn by somebody who has never seen a dog, but has had it described to them.

This is a sensation that is probably recognizable to an internet-native generation that is used to experiencing an iterative culture based on memes and references. What are memes but images cut and clipped, separated from their original context, repeated and recycled to the point that any original meaning or identity is lost. How many people posting reaction .gifs online even know where those images even came from or what the context for them was? That must feel uncanny. There is very little new, and what older culture exists is wiped of meaning through repetition.

This is perhaps the true liminal space of Backrooms. It is the extended nightmare of a generation still navigating the cultural detritus of the 1990s.