Dr. Wife and I took in another indie horror-ish flick on Saturday, checking out the Internet sensation Backrooms (2026). The film is based on director Kane Parson‘s YouTube series, Backrooms, which itself is based on a 4Chan thread from 2019. “The Backrooms” are a series of liminal spaces that exist extradimensionally, but are accessible from the real world. They consist of seemingly endless corridors decorated in the drab yellow wallpaper and builder-grade carpet of every 1990s dentist office. Indeed, the original photo that inspired the Backrooms is from a Wisconsin furniture store renovation in 2002.
Neither of us have watched the YouTube series, and I knew very little about the Backrooms extended universe. I wanted to go into the film blind, although I knew a little bit of the plot and characters just from watching reviews. That said, here is a playlist of the original YouTube series:
Having seen the film, you don’t really need to watch the YouTube series to appreciate what the director is doing, and to get some hazy understanding of what the Backrooms are. However, be aware going into the film that you’re going to leave with more questions than answers, and that is the point.
The film’s protagonist is Clark, a divorced, alcoholic furniture store owner and failed architect. His store, “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire,” is failing, despite Clark’s early 1990s-style furniture store commercial in which he dresses in an outlandish pirate costume. Clark attends session with therapist Mary Kline, a woman dealing with her own childhood trauma. The events take place in 1990.
My late paternal grandfather owned a (successful) furniture store, and while his differed aesthetically from Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire—it was large, but had far less of a warehouse feel to it—the film did capture what a furniture store felt like in the 1990s. Notably, the basement area—which, naturally, is where Clark finds access to the Backrooms—really reminded me of Papa’s store.
As kids, it was always really creepy going down there, as the lights were often off. Because it was a furniture store and the basement was used largely for storing excess inventory, the stairwell as very wide, so as to accommodate big pieces of heirloom furniture. The effect, then, was that of looking down into a gaping maw of darkness. Even when the lights were on, there was something eerily haunting about being down there, with ghostly mattresses and random bits of furniture looming in the shadows of the fluorescent lights. That drab, fluorescent glow added its own sense of hopeless dread to the place. It was only as I got older that I could really stomach being down there for long.
Clark’s store really captures that sense of dread and foreboding well, especially when he stumbles upon the Backrooms. It happens when (presumably) breakers flip in the store, with only a flashing, beaconing light emanating up from the basement’s stairwell. Clark follows the beacon and toys with the breaker box, including two oddly-positioned breakers that, after doing nothing during an earlier inspection, not cut power to the entire building. It’s then that Clark sees a thin sliver of light through one of this walls, and he passes through it to the Backrooms.
Clark begins mapping out the Backrooms, but when he shares this knowledge with Mary, she scoffs at him (in the way a therapist would, in that she doesn’t actually scoff, but she shows it in her body language; as Clark says, “for a therapist, you have a terrible poker face.” Clark becomes obsessed with the Backrooms, and Mary, growing concerned, heads to the store. Predictably, she, too, finds the Backrooms.
Within the Backrooms is heavy-footed entity that is heard throughout, but only seen near the end of the flick (naturally). Its approach strikes instant fear into Clark and the other explorers (he brings two employees along at one point), and it adds anote of unpredictable dread to an already unpredictable and dreadful place.
Everything I’ve described unfolds very deliberately—really, a bit too slowly—over the course of about forty or fifty minutes. The film is 110 minutes, so almost half of the runtime is easing the viewer into this world, almost as if we’re exploring the Backrooms with Clark. As we go deeper with him, the Backrooms grow stranger and more absurd, and it becomes apparent that it is a copy of the real world, but done imperfectly. Clark (and, later, Mary) describes it as asking someone who has never seen a dog before to draw a dog—they’d get some details right, but it wouldn’t quite look like a dog. In the age of AI, I would liken it to asking AI to create an image, and then to keep copying that image; eventually, the image would become a distorted, grotesque version of the original (the same thing happens if you keep copying the same image on a copy machine over and over—each copy of a copy of a copy of copy gets more and more degraded as visual information is lost; it happens with analog audio copying, too). The rooms within the Backrooms feature furniture that is embedded within the walls and floors; doors on ceilings; rooms with odd slopes; doors that don’t open; etc.
Much of the horror of the film comes from the desolation and confusion of the Backrooms; when a heavy-footed entity begins lurching its way towards you, and you don’t know if you can trust that the room you’re in will remain the same, or if the door ahead will open, it adds to the panic.
The whole things builds to an odd conclusion that leaves the viewer with more questions; again, I think that’s the point. I don’t think we’re meant to understand what the Backrooms are, beyond the broad explanations given in the film and the wider “universe” of the concept. There is a metaphor for getting caught in psychological patterns or patterns of trauma, which, through even therapeutic repetition of the trauma, grow more distorted and unreal as we attempt to relive them in our minds. In other words, while some can face the past and cope with it, others get trapped in the endless repetition of their flawed perceptions or memories of traumatic events. We see this phenomenon in Clark, who never escapes his sinking ship of a furniture store to pursue his true passion for architecture.
All heady stuff. Dr. Wife’s assessment was that she wasn’t sure what she thought of the film, but that she “did not dislike it.” That is largely my assessment as well. It’s a film you should see just so you can discuss it and theorize about it with others. It might be the first “water cooler” movie of the Post-Virus Internet Age, a film that many have and will continue to see, and which will inspire much discussion at work by the water cooler.
Beyond that, it is entertaining after a fashion. It’s cultural significance, I think, outweighs its sheer entertainment value, though, by far. The film reminds me very much of Skinamarink (2022), an experimental film that captures the kind of loneliness and dread of waking up to weird cartoons playing on the television in the middle of the night, and which also takes place in the 1990s (the current fascination with that decade continues; it seems that Gen Z pines for the more analog, rooted feel of that decade, which is when yours portly was a kid and early teenager). The films are very different, but they both capture that odd blend of isolation and hopelessness that seem to pervade certain hours or certain places, or even certain lonely moments (again, like waking up to television static or rubber-hose cartoons at 2 AM).
Perhaps that is the brilliance of Backrooms—it’s a film that invites analysis and dissection, but is really meant to be felt. That the film gives no easy answers is, maybe, a clue. We’re not meant to understand; we’re just meant to experience. And the experience is dreadful in the best way.