‘An Eternal Indoors’

It is a persistent wonder of the Internet that so much can, at times, be built from so little. A simple doorway opens to a vast labyrinth, assembled by the seemingly infinite labors of the obsessed and anonymous.

The foundation of Backrooms, the new film by Kane Parsons—which has made him, at twenty years old, the youngest director ever to have a movie hit number one at the box office—is a single photo that appeared online in 2019. It shows a drab, empty room, with a drop ceiling, overhead fluorescent lighting, sickly yellow wallpaper, a grim expanse of carpeting. No doors or windows are visible, but walls cut into the space at odd angles, obscuring its size. This washed-out, amateurish image (later determined to have been taken in 2003 in a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), at once depressingly familiar and a little creepy, was posted anonymously to a 4chan thread of “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” Soon after, another anonymous user responded with a few lines of text, declaring it a photo of “the Backrooms,” a parallel reality “where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.” One of those disorienting places like the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, or the Catholic Church, as described by G.K. Chesterton: “much larger inside than outside.”

The idea stuck. Thousands and thousands of people became fascinated with it, wondering, as Parsons has put it, “Why the fuck does this picture make my brain feel so strange?” Some answered the question with more pictures, more writing, extrapolating more and more aspects of the Backrooms: dozens upon dozens of carefully enumerated “levels,” from Level 1, the “parking zone,” to Level 986, “Belphegor’s Nightmare,” and beyond. It became a vast, anarchic group project, another iteration of the online hivemind horror subculture known as “creepypasta,” which had previously given us the Slenderman character and the interlocking stories of the SCP Foundation, among much else.

In late 2021 Parsons began making his own contribution. He was sixteen, but had already been posting his work on YouTube for a few years; his most popular videos were animations based on the Attack on Titan anime. In “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” he ignored the “canon” that had been built up around the Backrooms idea (he later said he hadn’t even known about most of it) in favor of simplicity and physical immediacy. The nine-minute video shows a group of teenagers using a camcorder to make an amateur horror film, when the cameraman somehow falls through solid ground into the Backrooms. He wanders around the banal and baffling environment, muttering his confusion, the camera shaking in his hand. In the fuzzy, yellow-drenched footage the weirdness of the rooms and hallways builds: sometimes they proliferate endlessly, as if in a hall of mirrors; one otherwise featureless wall is broken, near the top, by a small, perfectly square, inexplicable passageway, with a ladder leading up to it; a few walls are scrawled with arrows or cryptic advice (“DONT MOVE STAY STILL”). A mysterious, unsettlingly angular creature eventually begins chasing the cameraman, who flees, is caught, and dies. (The camera, as it must, survives.)

The spell this video casts is an odd one. It is much more convincing that it has any right to be. These rooms are utterly fake, of course, not shot on a camcorder or any kind of camera but created, over the course of a month, in Blender, a free computer graphics program; the “cameraman” is just a simulated point of view moving through 3D-modeled spaces, the shaking of his footsteps and unsteady grip an effect added on top, like the VHS fuzz. And yet much of it feels not just real but recognizable, to the point where some people I know find the video simply boring. It has the lo-fi suggestiveness of The Blair Witch Project, but slowed down and emptied out: it is not the monster or the chase one remembers, but the wandering, which has all the tedium and awkwardness of truth. It does, in fact, make one feel strange, or rather it makes one feel several seemingly contradictory things at once: bored and fascinated, lulled and unnerved, unmoored and, unexpectedly, at home.

“The Backrooms (Found Footage)” was viewed over 20 million times within the first two weeks. (That number is now over 86 million.) Parsons followed it with some twenty additional videos, ranging from gnomic thirty-second fragments to the forty-five-minute epic of “Backrooms – Found Footage #3.” And now Backrooms, made with the full resources of A24, directed while he was still in his late teens. The feature is, inevitably, far more conventional, trading the assemblage-of-evidence style of his YouTube work for old-fashioned things like plot and dialogue, and a pair of fleshed-out characters to guide new audiences into this alien terrain. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a divorced, alcoholic failed-architect-turned-furniture-salesman in early-Nineties northern California, finds an entrance to the Backrooms in the basement of his store. He becomes obsessed with exploring them, even enlisting a pair of his employees to help him film them—which provides an excuse for most of the movie’s forays into the found-footage style. After Clark disappears, his therapist, Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), enters the Backrooms to look for him.

The best parts of the film are elaborations on the best of the YouTube series. The spell survives, it turns out, in high definition, on the big screen: the omnipresent fluorescent hum and flicker, the accumulation of banally off-putting details—chairs heaped in the middle of a room, doorways too numerous or too small, architectural elements repeated too often or in the wrong places, carpeting that continues even into a yawning pit. The presence of a lit-up Christmas tree in one room is somehow just as upsetting as the human figures half-buried in the floor.

There is surprisingly little difference between the versions of these rooms faked-up in Blender, the shortcomings of the rendering obscured beneath fuzz and YouTube compression, and the ones actually built as sets for this film, visible in all their detail. These are fake spaces either way, or rather fake fake spaces: the barely tolerable institutional environments in which we spend so much of our lives, imitated just badly enough that their own strangeness and hostility become visible too. How shocking it is, in these hallways, to suddenly encounter a seagull—not just because of the mystery of how it got there, but because these environments, even in their “normal” form, so carefully exclude any hint of the natural or the free.

The found-footage segments, which are again largely CGI, allow Parsons an additional freedom of invention: undulating walls, dizzyingly vertical hallways, sudden openings onto enormous vistas. It is here that the Backrooms most clearly show their debt to the long history of “paper architecture,” plans never intended to be built—from Piranesi’s “Capricious Inventions of Prisons” to the impossible skyscrapers of Brodsky and Utkin to Lebbeus Woods’s disorientingly evocative renderings of “freespace” constructions, all of which have filtered down through the years in video games and science fiction. One does not envy the characters desperately attempting to navigate these spaces, but their fear becomes secondary to the pleasure of seeing these utilitarian forms reconfigured into pure play.

The story itself, the actual movie that takes place in and around those spaces, is less satisfying. Parsons’s YouTube work struggled to find a narrative adequate to its setting—the backstory that emerges over the course of the videos is a well-worn one of corporate and governmental conspiracy, complete with faked deaths, secret labs, and malevolently cheerful PR—and one can feel the writing in Backrooms straining to incorporate this material into a salable genre film. (The screenwriter, Will Soodik, brought in by the studio, is a veteran of TV shows like Westworld and Homeland.) The protagonist has, as usual, a traumatic backstory—this one, too perfectly, involves being trapped at home by her shut-in mother. It is, likewise, far too neat that our guides to this deranged space are a psychotherapist and a former architect. We get the standard horror tropes of a character (usually male) descending rather suddenly into madness, and of another (usually female) overcoming their passivity to flee and fight back. The monster, when we finally see it, is a little silly. And though Ejiofor and Reinsve are wonderful actors, their presence only adds to the ersatz quality. Reinsve’s character is meant to be a native of northern California but her accent is clearly Scandinavian, a fact that is never addressed. Ejiofor’s accent is better, but his charisma is destabilizing: Clark is never quite the pathetic everyman he’s meant to be; his boxy Nineties chinos and wrinkled button-down can’t quite hide the glow of stardom. It is as if the film itself is another product of the Backrooms: plausible, familiar, but not quite right—too much, and not enough. As in the YouTube videos, all the power comes from the spaces, and the movement through them.

Parsons has often been discussed as part of a wave of post-YouTube cinema, along with Curry Barker, a comedy YouTuber whose horror film Obsession was another unexpected hit this spring, and the wildly popular Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, whose self-funded Iron Lung was a success earlier in the year. But in many ways his languid, recessive films stand apart from most of the standard forms of online video, with little of the platform’s relentless ingratiation and direct address, and Parsons has said that he does not consider himself a “YouTuber” in the fullest sense. His films do their most effective storytelling, and create their complex, ambiguous moods, through spatial exploration, usually in a first-person point of view.

This kind of spatial narrative has a long history, from theater experiments and art installations—the Backrooms have more than a passing resemblance to the Meow Wolf series of enormous interactive art installations, in which one might open the door of an ordinary refrigerator and discover the entrance to a vast psychedelic labyrinth—to, especially, video games, which have profoundly inflected the Backrooms idea from the beginning. The word the original post used to describe the way people enter the Backrooms was “noclip,” a gaming term for passing through seemingly solid surfaces in a level due to a glitch or a cheat code: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” It is a view of the world as consisting of polygons and collision geometries, a reality digital to its core.

When asked about his cinematic influences, Parsons’s first response was not a film but a video game: Portal, a 2007 first-person game in which the player is forced by a malevolent AI to solve puzzles in a series of sterile corporate chambers. Portal is a comedy rather than a horror story, and its intricate puzzles have little to do with Parsons’s work (that there is no “solving” the Backrooms is a large part of the point), but its influence is nonetheless inescapable. In Portal 2 (2011) the chambers are significantly more expansive, sometimes impossibly cavernous, many of them now in the process of collapse or decay. Parsons has called its setting “an eternal indoors”—one of the best descriptions of the Backrooms I’ve heard. (And a reminder that its surge in popularity coincides with the Covid pandemic, a time of endless indoor loneliness and eerily empty public spaces.)

The games’ environments also emerge directly from the constraints of their programming. The Portal series—like the sci-fi shooter Half-Life 2 and the 3D sandbox program Garry’s Mod, which Parsons has also cited as inspirations—was built using the Source engine, one of the most prominent software toolsets for making 3D games for about a decade, starting in 2004. Source is far better at rendering indoor environments than outdoor ones and, like almost all 3D engines, better at straight lines than curves. Davey Wreden made his game The Stanley Parable—which, like the Backrooms, spins out its dizzying metafiction from the most generic imaginable office decor, and tells its story mainly through walking around—using Source, which he later called “an engine that is very good at producing linear, boxy corridors.”

Backrooms is surely the most Source-engine movie ever to hit theaters. It might, for that matter, be the most purely video game-influenced movie ever made, at least in the mainstream. Plenty of films have adapted video games directly, of course, but Parsons takes up video games’ deeper structures, their unusually indirect way of creating narrative and meaning—how they can let the story seep in around the edges, while you attend to the matter at hand. In fact, the rhythms of most Backrooms videos, by Parsons or others, tend to follow certain well-established video game patterns: the constriction of visibility followed by a sudden, dramatic opening up to a distant vista; the maze of hallways unexpectedly looping back to an earlier room, seen now from a new angle.

It is a shame that these hallways always need to have a monster in them. This is not a Parsons innovation—malevolent “entities” of some kind or another are present in pretty much every version of the Backrooms, including the original 4chan post, which ended with the words, “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” But, as is so often the case in horror movies, the monster’s actual arrival releases the tension, rather than adding to it: at last the threat can be pointed to, recognized, dismissed.

This is especially true in the Backrooms, whose mix of the familiar and the inexplicable is so delicate and unnerving. “Backrooms – Found Footage #3,” the most sustained expression of Parsons’s version, has its humanoid monster show up only briefly and inconclusively; its protagonist succumbs not to any such specific threat but to the inescapable endlessness of the environment itself. It is unclear if he dies of starvation or despair. “There’s nothing spiritual” about the Backrooms, Parsons has said. “There’s not a morality to it…. There’s no fairness in it.” Its blank, inscrutable indifference is fundamental. So why should anything in it want to kill us? Why should it want anything at all, where humans are concerned? The monster, be it the jittery stick figure of Parsons’s first video, or the disembodied Smilers of the online lore, or the shambling grotesque of Backrooms, always comes as an incursion of the conventional, a bulwark against the actual mystery.

And that mystery remains. None of the narrative expressions of the Backrooms seem to exhaust it, or even quite touch it. It may be that the idea itself resists narrative, that these tentative stories are no more at home in it than their characters are—the idea is, in a sense, about the pointlessness of narratives, a place with no end and no beginning, a space so generic it becomes unique. Late in the film, having spent days and days in the Backrooms, Clark explains his theory of how they work: this place, whatever it is, “remembers” things. “And the more times it remembers something, the less it does…. I’m pretty sure that’s how you get all of this, y’know, all these places, rooms—buildings, misremembering themselves.”

This—the most thorough explanation of the Backrooms anyone gives in Parsons’s work, only slightly undermined by Clark having, at this point, lost his mind—makes it sound like a vast three-dimensional Xerox machine, or a corporeal form of generative AI. That may be a large part of the fear, and the fascination, it inspires: a physical manifestation of the endless, indifferent copying and regurgitation that seem to make up more and more of our culture, the worldslop whose dreary halls we wander every day.

Just beneath the revulsion, though, is a kind of relief. As with the rest of the so-called liminal spaces—deserted hallways, waiting rooms, and the like—that have attracted online interest over the past few years, there is a soothing quality to the emptiness of the Backrooms, to their indifference and pointlessness. Their inhabitants have “no thoughts, no pain,” Clark declares, “no ego, no fear.” It can feel like Backrooms videos tilt horror so much toward ambient dread that it becomes simply ambient, riding the edge not of terror but of tedium. What bliss, at times, to visit a place where nothing means anything.

On the other hand, the Backrooms are also, clearly, about the way we make meaning, which is to say about memory itself. They have always been suffused with a strange form of nostalgia. Most depictions of the Backrooms are explicitly set in the late twentieth century, that heyday of fluorescent lighting—before, it seems, most of its fans and creators were born (and, as it turns out, a few years earlier than that original picture was actually taken). Parsons’s work is mostly set at the very beginning of the Nineties, and parts of Backrooms foreground a kind of Nineties technological kitsch: floppy disks, cassette tapes, CRT screens, and, of course, camcorders. It hardly seems accidental that these Internet-native nightmares are so focused on the years just before the spread of the World Wide Web, the last gasp of a pre-digital America, the event horizon past which the Internet struggles to see.

Is it longing, or is it fear? Much of the power of the Backrooms comes from the way they express both at once. The mere fact that there is a past, especially one before your own memories, is uncanny and a little horrifying: an unreachable, invisible world that nonetheless shapes every aspect of your own. This is especially true for the young, who remember so little, whose time is dwarfed even by the recent past; and perhaps especially true in America, which denies so much of its past, and where so much of our surroundings seems designed to deny the existence of anything beyond the present.

One of the most confusing things about the Backrooms, especially for someone of an older generation, is that the object of this longing is not any far-off era of innocence or beauty, but such a recent, and ugly, built environment. The one YouTube genre Parsons’s work does closely resemble, at times, is the “dead mall” video: tours of abandoned malls, sometimes simply empty, sometimes actively decaying. Though generally more depressing than creepy, they have a similar mix of nostalgia, tedium, and gloom. In 2023 he made that connection explicit in his series The Oldest View—his first major non-Backrooms work since that series began. Its centerpiece is the forty-six-minute video “The Rolling Giant,” in which a YouTuber, voiced by Parsons, descends an impossibly long staircase he discovers in the woods and finds at the bottom an enormous, empty, seemingly supernatural mall. This space, it turns out, is an elaborate Blender recreation of the Valley View Center, a real mall in Dallas that was demolished that same year. The video is perhaps Parsons’s definitive creation, an amazingly convincing display of digital simulation in the service of quotidian unease and an odd, oddly affecting tenderness toward the banally commercial place it depicts.

The final video in the series, “The Remains of Valley View Mall (Post-Demolition),” is one of the few he has made that seems to involve no digital trickery at all. In it, he gives a slow, slightly awkward tour of what is left of the mall: the weedy, puddled concrete; the tiled floors now open to the elements, still studded here and there with power outlets; a metal trashcan; a useless staircase. It is a sunny day in Dallas, and Parsons’s shadow is present in many of the shots, the only sign of human presence. “Human ghosts are boring,” Parsons declared in one of the many interviews he has given about Backrooms. “I want this to be the ghost of buildings, and tap into the feelings that I have with the spaces I inhabit.” Or as the front page of one of the Backrooms wikis puts it: “They say that it’s an afterlife—not for people, but for places. For every chain storefront demolished, every retail outlet bought out, every dead mall razed to the ground. A limbo for every building without purpose.”

This, for me at least, is one of the most uncanny feelings the Backrooms inspires: the realization that these places—so utterly artificial, so carefully devoted to the idea that the present is all there is, that we can move through the world consuming and consuming, without ever needing to look back—are in fact receding into the past. That even our malls are now becoming ruins, and that many of our ruins will have once been malls.

Eliot Weinberger wrote that “there are two stages of American horror. The first is the terror of the forest, the ‘savages’ who lurk just beyond the settlement clearing in Hawthorne or Parkman or Chapman or the captivity narratives. In the second stage, the forest is gone, but the architecture of progress still contains, usually somewhere in the foundations, a forest within.” That was over forty years ago. Now, it seems, the architecture of progress is all we have. The forest within is just more of it, a little older, its hallways quaint and musty, the fluorescents overhead flickering without mercy.