We have been living in the horror of the backrooms for decades

A “backroom”, in the physical world, is a room at the rear of a structure, usually not intended for representation but for the practical needs of those who inhabit or work inside the building. A service space. Online, however, the “backroom” has become the inaccessible place one enters through a glitch in the fabric of reality. It is, essentially, the backstage of our world: the place where all the unpresentable things are hidden and, by extension, the hidden side of our own minds, where the worst thoughts and the monsters of the psyche reside. That is why, even though the film Backrooms now brings this idea to the surface and makes it explicit, backrooms as a metaphysical concept have always existed in cinema. They were not called that, of course, and entire films were not built around them, but horror cinema has always used them. What Kane Parsons’ new film does is simply make the connection between fear and architecture even clearer, linking it to the mind of a frustrated architect.

Before this film, perhaps the most famous and influential backrooms — spaces representing the repressed unconscious, whose architecture suggests something fundamentally inhuman — were those inside the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Kubrick’s film is filled with liminal environments: empty transitional spaces that become unsettling precisely because they are places of passage, imagined almost as different sectors of the mind of those who inhabit the hotel. There is Room 237, the epicentre of every horror and corruption, the bar where consciousness itself seems to reside through the figure of the bartender, and finally the basement, repository of everything repressed. But the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks is also an extraordinary backroom: the room with zigzag floors and red curtains where the living, the dead and dwarfs speaking backwards coexist. And, in a certain sense, so is a room we never even see — the upstairs bedroom in Norman Bates’ house in Psycho, where Norman keeps the skeletal corpse of his mother while pretending she is still alive. These are the rooms one never wants to enter and yet cannot stop wanting to explore.

Starting from this premise, Backrooms, through an idea of radical simplicity, has a man walk through the wall of his store’s basement and suddenly slip into another reality: a gigantic liminal zone made of furniture fragments, tunnels and endless corridors. It is a post-industrial landscape, like a vast office building caught between tenants or a showroom waiting to be installed, illuminated by fluorescent lights and branching out impossibly in every direction. It is a place where anything can happen. Not on the other side of the mirror, as in Lewis Carroll or the surrealists — worlds governed by inverted rules — but within the folds of our own reality. The idea of the backrooms was originally conceptualised online through a very specific phenomenon tied to videogames: what happens when, inside a three-dimensional game, a programming error allows players to end up somewhere they were never supposed to reach. One slips through a wall, a rock face or a supposedly inaccessible door and suddenly enters a non-programmed section of the map, a place that was never meant to be explored.

The powerful intuition behind the backrooms myth is therefore to apply to the physical world a concept that naturally belongs only to digital space. And what is found inside these “non-programmed” areas of reality are emptied-out, profoundly inhuman workspaces.

One of the most interesting aspects of Backrooms is that its backrooms were physically constructed. The film was largely shot on practical sets, only occasionally extended digitally, but designed specifically to reproduce some of the imperfections typical of virtual environments. Human beings appear with too many eyes or too many fingers, like the mistakes generated by artificial intelligence image systems; objects are half-buried or incomplete; furniture stretches unnaturally, as though affected by a depth-coordinate error in a broken AutoCAD rendering.

Exploring a real place filled with glitches that normally belong to digital environments creates an intense sensation of inhumanity. And this is precisely what makes Backrooms so contemporary. The inhuman spaces of classic horror cinema were usually disturbing for organic reasons: because they were dirty, rotten, filthy or filled with revolting details. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for instance, there is a spectacular backroom filled with body parts: the room where Leatherface carries out his atrocities. Another appears in the first Saw: a decrepit bathroom covered in blood and grime. Or the abandoned basement at the end of The Blair Witch Project, presented as the origin point of all evil.

Backrooms, instead, performs a far more sophisticated architectural operation. It uses floor plans and places at its centre an architect who failed at becoming an architect, leading us into what gradually reveals itself to be the projection of his frustrated mind. The backroom becomes a construction site designed according to irrational logic and therefore fundamentally inhuman — a place where, as always in cinematic backrooms, fragments of memory, nightmares and materialised frustrations accumulate.

The illogical and the broken — like a tiny opening reachable through a slope that recalls the absurd house Homer Simpson designed for Ned Flanders — become gateways into fear. Even viewers with little interest in architecture instinctively recognise that this type of design contains nothing human, and the mere thought of what kind of mind could have conceived such a space becomes terrifying.

Severance had already explored a similar intuition, transforming office interiors into spaces of madness and existential horror. Places from which it becomes almost impossible to escape. If the backrooms of classic horror are frightening because of what hides inside them, the backrooms of Backrooms are frightening because of the way they are built and because their irrationality suggests there may be no exit at all. Inside this labyrinth of liminal rooms — where a sort of Minotaur roams endlessly, screaming and stomping through the corridors — emerges the primordial fear of the office-work era: the fear of never being able to leave, of remaining trapped forever inside a nightmare made of working life, pale yellow walls, almost no windows and fluorescent lights designed only to save money. Which, in the end, may be the truest form of the inhuman: a life spent as an office worker inside miserable spaces.

Opening image: The Shining, 1980