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June 2026- BACKROOMSThere is a strange piece of architecture that resonates with me for reasons I can’t fully explain. I don’t know if there’s a proper name for this, but it’s a faux shingled awning, specifically on the inside of a house. It’s certainly not a modern design trend but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when a feature like this would have been popular at all. Maybe sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, but it’s the type of thing that seems perpetually out of time. I’ve seen the faux roof in restaurants, (mostly repurposed pizzarias), roller rinks, unrenovated kitchens, tiki bars, etc. The feeling I get when I encounter this design feature is a very acute blend of nostalgia and unease. Maybe it’s because I associate the instance of “roof” with the sensations and associations of “outside”. The asynchronicity of this feature makes me feel dissociated from my environment. I feel like I’m on a soundstage or inside a little fake town. It’s not an altogether unpleasant feeling.
The last place I saw the faux roof was in Backrooms, a horror movie built around the concepts of “liminal space” and concerned with the anxiety inherent in the subtle displacement of architectural elements. Throughout the movie, we are exposed to a labyrinthine sequence of interconnected rooms which make less and less architectural sense as we go. The terror (for a while at least) is almost entirely conceptual. We are made to experience physical spaces made up of familiar, recognizably human elements that were seemingly built with no intention for human habitation. It’s a movie with relatively few examples of traditional horror iconography or “jumpscares” that would signify an immediate danger to the physical body. Instead, Backrooms aims to activate a less immediate or visceral type of danger. The horror is apparent in the implications of these strange rooms, and what they signify or do not signify.
I think that horror is a reflexive genre that tends to deal with fear present in the modern condition, oftentimes forming oblique anxieties into tactile objects to be directly confronted. The danger that we sense in the psychosphere, through the filmic medium, becomes clear and present, and in a way, easier to process. The clear and unmistakable threat of a skyline-dwarfing sea monster rampaging through Tokyo is somehow easier to get our hands around than the hypothetical albatross of nuclear war. The paranoia of McCarthyism and the dissolution of trust in late 60s America goes down smoother in the form of a horde of flesh-eating zombies. The same can be said today. The past five or so years, in the wake of COVID-19, the theme of personal and inter-personal “trauma” has been of great interest to mainstream horror (see Smile, 2022 or Longlegs, 2024) so much so that it has almost become a cliche. What Backrooms signifies to me is a step forward in the topical lineage of horror film, and a progression of the collective consciousness deeper into abstract, existential fear.
Konstantin Petrov was an electrician who worked at Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th and 107th floors of the North tower of the world trade center. Online, you can find a series of photos taken by Petrov. His photos feature the empty dining room of the Windows on the World, with tables set for invisible patrons, the early morning sunlight shimmering through the skyline outside. The legend of the photos is murky. Some sources allege that the photos were taken just weeks before the September 11th attacks. Whatever the case, these pictures elicit a strong feeling of comfort to me. I can almost hear the tranquil quiet. I can transport myself through time and into an imagined time that never existed for me. It makes sense to me that Kane Parsons, the 20 year old director of Backrooms, decided to set his film in a vague, dreamlike version of the 1990s. It makes sense that his quiet purgatory, at times, gives me that same sense of profound calm. He too seems to take comfort in the imaginary promise of a simpler, more innocent time.
Harry J. Sonneborn, the first president of the McDonald’s corporation, once had this to say about the famous fast food chain:
“We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”
The casual cynicism of this comment makes my skin crawl but I think the honesty is illuminating. A post on r/decadeology that I recently stumbled upon, showed pictures of McDonalds restaurant architecture over the past 50 years, drawing attention to the architectural evolution the brand has undergone. You can see the “definitive” characteristics of the restaurant, such as the famous golden arches, which used to compose a major structural element of the building itself, become relegated to simple signage. The visual profile of the buildings becomes less and less distinct as time goes on. One commenter pondered “Maybe everything becomes a square eventually”.
Backrooms deals with the same idea of identity and memory in architecture and its psychological effects. One of the best scenes in the film has no dialogue. We see the living room of one of our main characters. It’s vacant but populated with furniture. Newspapers are pasted over the window. The room is teeming with traces of life, hints of the events which might have transpired. The camera moves down, through the floor and into another room. It’s the same room but it’s been changed. The smaller details have been removed. The newspapers are gone from the window. A couple of details in the room’s design have been warped slightly in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. The camera continues to move down and through the floor, several more times, cycling through versions of the same room, but with each cycle, the details become more sparse and asynchronistic. The couch is sunken halfway into the floor, then gone completely. We finally arrive in the final version of this room, now completely devoid of furniture, or detail. An archway has appeared in the corner of the room, leading away into complete darkness. The original intention of this room as a “living room” has been stripped down and extrapolated into nonsense. What we are left with is a physical, unnatural space without architectural intent. Nobody would build a room like this. There is an oblique sense of purposelessness that nags at our brains. The terrible cosmic unease of a world without an architect.
In a conversation with director James Wan for the A24 podcast, Backrooms director Kane Parsons had this to say about his approach to the film:
“I struggle with things that promote an overly human view of existence… I am biased towards things that feel like humans are incidental to nature in some way”
There are human characters in Backrooms. The main drama of the film concerns a middle-aged furniture store owner and his therapist, both of whom are struggling to overcome traumatic events from their past. The accidental discovery of the Backrooms acts narratively as a funhouse mirror into which the characters project their trauma, and from which their traumas are regurgitated back at them in mangled and fractured new forms. The trauma narrative is the most traditional and archetypal element in Backrooms. It’s also the least interesting. The Backrooms themselves are such a revelation that the inter-personal relationships of our human characters feel superfluous, a mainstream horror narrative shoved into a world that is infinitely more conceptual and experimental. As a viewer, I was disappointed that the movie was using such a revolutionary conceit as a springboard to tell a trauma narrative. Then, at a point, the human conflict in the film is resolved and the film keeps going. We discover that this purgatorial nightmare is somewhat impartial to the individual plights of its occupants. It isn’t about judgement at all. The movie’s final statement is haunting not because of the fates that befall our characters, but about how meaningless these characters have been revealed to be in the grand, unknowable architecture of this world. Kaine Parsons is quick to make a distinction about his version of the Backrooms in his interview.
“It’s not Hell”.
links:
Konstantin Petrov‘s world trade center photos
Kane Parsons’ interview with James Wan for the A24 podcast
Backrooms teaser trailer