“It’s Massive in There”: The Inhuman Hell of Backrooms – Christ and Pop Culture

Note: This article discusses characters and events in the film Backrooms but seeks to avoid major plot spoilers.

We have returned to the era of Hollywood hand-wringing, as execs are desperately asking whether members of Gen-Z ever watch movies and, if they do, what kinds of movies will they watch? As such, autopsies are now being conducted on genres like the rom-com or the superhero film (so Millennial!). The genre du jour, by some lights, is the low-budget horror film, as evidenced by the immense success of Obsession and Backrooms, both made for under $10 million by directors of that coveted younger demographic.

We are a long way out from sounding the death-knell of the traditional cinematic summer blockbuster, and it may be unwise to lump the two films in question into the same bucket. Gen-Z has scarcely pioneered the modest horror flick—rather, its rediscovery (if it was ever lost to begin with) may be a reminder that the genre speaks to perennial concerns. That certainly seems to be true of the recent wave: Obsession’s plot is basically a modern hetero-pessimist riff on the age-old “Monkey’s Paw” theme, while Backrooms is actually set in a very lo-fi 1990, before any of its target audience was even born.

For those who have somehow missed the marketing or the phenomenon, Backrooms is the first full-length feature follow-up to a series of viral videos that director Kane Parsons began making when he was a teenager under the moniker Kane Pixels. These shorts, themselves expansions of “creepypasta” postings on 4chan, introduced viewers to the eponymous “backrooms,” mysterious otherspaces that appear and quietly fill with subtly or (not-so-subtly) mangled versions of dated American décor. The movie itself focuses on two characters, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a would-be architect who languishes as a dreadful furniture salesman, and his longsuffering therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). Clark, with the help of his employee Kat and her boyfriend Bobby (Lukita Maxwell, Finn Bennett), discovers the mysterious and seemingly endless backrooms and sets out to explore and map them. Mary, whose skepticism had enraged an already volatile Clark, stops by the store after he has been absent for a time, upon which she too finds herself entering the tortuous levels of the backrooms.

There is no doubt that Backrooms—both the web series and the film—owes no small amount of its success to the uncanny creepiness of touring seemingly endless corridors aglow with a gangrenous lighting that matches the sickly pallor of the walls and much of the upholstery. With so many twists and levels, the viewer is left with the unsettling sensation that anything might be lurking around a corner or past a doorframe. It is a postmodern (or post-postmodern) labyrinth, one whose Minos is unknown and whose Minotaur—if there is one—remains as elusive as it is terrible.

Still, why this horror for this time and this audience? I would contend that one of the key appeals of the phenomenon and the film—one of the key sources for its very particular type of terror—is the growing recognition of Gen Z especially (though also their predecessors) of the fundamental inhumanity inherent in the modern American experience. Many previous iterations of horror have emphasized a quality of otherness—an outsider or different entity or group that threatens the identity categories of the in-group (presumably the intended audience). Immense, crumbling Gothic architecture (and the monstrous or spectral beings that might haunt them) presented for late Enlightenment audiences the incursion of a past they regarded as savage and superstitious. Monsters like Dracula with origins outside the British Empire could represent to Victorians what Stephen Arata called “the anxiety of reverse colonization.” Put simply, much early horror took something frightening because it was obviously alien or foreign, invoked that terror, and then either widened or (more subversively) often closed the gap between the terror and the audience.

Backrooms, like much recent horror (going back decades), seems interested in reversing this direction. It begins by showing us what ought to be among the least horrifying sights we could imagine (its offenses to aesthetic taste not withstanding): bright lights, tacky floors and furnishings, quiet stillness. Anyone who has visited a certain kind of waiting room or a house from the 1970s has seen such settings, and we were more likely to roll our eyes than check our pulses. But Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox ensure that these vistas present viewers—and we always know we are viewers—with an immediate frisson of uneasiness, long before any formal monsters show up.

Is this just a trick of the camera and a nod to the filmmakers’ craftsmanship? Unlikely. There must have been something for them to build on to create such an effect. That something is, I would contend, articulated by longtime CaPC editor Alan Noble in his 2021 book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Noble interrogates the question of why so many people—including and especially young Millennials and members of Gen Z—feel so frustrated, alienated, and estranged when the material conditions of Western society would seem to suggest affluence, comfort, and conditions consistent with health and well-being. But even with those conditions, Americans appear to feel more discontent than ever, and also more subject to mental health concerns.

One solution that Noble takes aim at comes from individuals like atheist Steven Pinker, who doggedly insists that life is better and we should acknowledge and celebrate that fact. Meanwhile, many older generations (including Christians) feel that their younger counterparts are lazy or overindulged, suffering from the proverbial “failure to launch” and general irresponsibility. These voices insist that young people simply need to get over their hangups and do something.

According to Noble, both of those objections fail to acknowledge that the very architecture of modern society is poorly designed. The root of Western society’s malady is a fundamentally flawed anthropology, a misunderstanding of what it actually means to be human. A Christian anthropology maintains, in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism (from which his book’s title derives), “[t]hat I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ” (qtd. in Noble 5). The various solutions available to try to solve the modern meaning crisis are doomed to failure because they all proceed from an assumption that life’s meaning is self-generated, that we are autonomous beings whose lives are in fact our own to define and do with as we please.

This leads to the discouraging pendulum swings that Noble identifies as the Way of Affirmation and the Way of Resignation. Those who accept the contemporary falsehood of self-ownership place their hope in the Way of Affirmation: “They accept their Responsibilities of Self-Belonging and capitalize on them. . . . Everything must be done at full volume, at peak efficiency, at full speed” (78-79). But, he argues, this approach to life is foreign to our spiritual natures and sooner or later tends to become exhausting, discouraging, even despair-inducing. Those who opt out of such a lifestyle but cannot imagine any alternative find themselves drifting through life into the Way of Resignation—they know that Affirmation will remain forever unsatisfying, yet they do not know what else to do.

While members of younger generations may be castigated for their apparent listlessness or lack of ambition, Noble contends that they have arrived at this point by accurately recognizing fallacious assumptions of Self-Belonging. Seen in this light, the recent horror boom makes more sense. Like Smile, like The Substance, like countless other recent manifestations of the old genre, Backrooms demonstrates an awareness by younger filmmakers that their forebears’ definition of the Good Life was never that good at all. Because the modern pattern of life, to use Noble’s terminology, is inhuman.

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is an individual who has committed himself to the Way of Affirmation. We learn from visual cues that his training is actually in architecture, so in one sense, his current occupation as a furniture salesman may be read as a failure of his “authentic” self. Yet our sympathy for him necessarily remains tempered. His therapy sessions with Mary reveal his approach to relationships—including that with his ex-wife—to be deeply self-centered and one-sided. Indeed, he doesn’t appear to interact with anyone in the film in a way that isn’t aggressive, manipulative, or competitive. And while Clark may on some level hate his furniture store, he throws himself with characteristic Affirmer aplomb into the role, posing as a bombastic pirate for a silly, badly filmed commercial.

Renate Reinsve’s Mary, on the other hand, seems at first more level-headed, befitting her role as psychologist and the “straight woman” juxtaposed against Clark’s increasingly erratic antics. Yet Parsons and scriptwriter Will Soodik confirm for us that she isn’t fully well either. Flashbacks reveal her childhood imprisonment in the home of her paranoid, agoraphobic hoarding mother. Noble notes that a key mechanism of modern life is a tendency toward self-medication, whether literally or through various other activities, and Mary demonstrates a gamut of such coping mechanisms. An apparently accomplished author and minor celebrity in her world—and thus a seemingly successful Affirmer—she remains passive and unengaged with those around her, as free from meaningful relationships as her clients, and thus sliding toward Resignation.

I have not explored Parsons’s web series extensively and cannot say how well the film tracks with it. Backrooms, especially in its final minutes, is clearly laying the groundwork for a larger legendarium, of which the initial movie is only providing a glimpse. Whatever the details of this new mythology prove to be, it seems evident that the backrooms of the first film in some ways reflect the psyches of the characters involved. Thus, the initial locations that Clark encounters seem ripped from his own mind, and become less familiar the deeper he proceeds. Similarly, while Mary first emerges in “Clark’s” world, her escape attempt also passes through imagery that distortedly mirrors the flashbacks we have seen of her own history.

This is not to say that the backrooms are merely mental projections; the appearance of various scientific instruments reminds us that this space has its own sort of concrete reality. Yet, as is so often the case in the best horror, the film’s reality is still drawn from and transmogrifies the emotional or spiritual realities of the characters. And so, we encounter a monstrous picture of our own inhuman culture, one in which the creepiest visualizations we can see are manifestations of a materialist modern American world whose topography—physical and psychical—is as inhuman as it is familiar.

In this manner, the backrooms become not only uncanny or even nightmarish but downright hellish, and I mean this in a somewhat literal way. Of course, our first images of hell may only vaguely map onto Parsons’s world; tawdry sectionals and yellow wallpaper aren’t exactly horned devils or pits of flame or other imagery that we have inherited from the Bible by way of Dante and late medieval art. But what infernal realities were those older sources depicting? Dante’s hell is a series of spirals that become colder, more isolated, more self-centered, and farther from God the deeper in the pilgrim is led. And the film’s backrooms don’t just extend outward; they descend downward as well.

C. S. Lewis understood what the true nightmare of Dante’s inferno was, beyond the (admittedly terrifying) beasts and boogeymen and villains. In The Great Divorce, before Lewis’s narrator ascends to the threshold of heaven, he finds himself on the doorstep of damnation. Lewis’s hell is as unremarkable as the backrooms, a bland “grey town” filled with sullen people. Like Dante’s hell, it is filled with solipsists: as his fictional George MacDonald famously observes, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done’” (72). The underworld of The Great Divorce is populated by denizens who are infinitesimally small and who continue to put infinite distance between themselves and others. In a way, this is also true of Dante’s hell, where lost souls collapse into punishments drawn justly from their sins and can never connect—physically, emotionally, or spiritually—with God or their fellow prisoners. Even the famous former lovers Paolo and Francesca are tormented by the fact that their “love” was passionate and visceral lust; together in hell, they are as alone as anyone else.

Clark tells Mary, “You have to understand, it’s massive in there.” Yet the backrooms are as desolate as they are massive; audiences know something is lurking in these spaces, yet most of the space is empty. This, then, is the fear of the young generations who have inherited from their elders a society that is materially prosperous and spiritually empty. It is not the Gothic artifices of a crumbling aristocracy, nor the murderous savagery spawned from nightmares of high crime rates, let alone a Boschian hellscape born from all the anxieties of a post-medieval world. Hell may indeed be a space of eternal conscious torment, but the core of the Christian understanding has always been that its greatest torment is separation from God, with perhaps the concomitant implication of separation from neighbor—the ultimate inversion of the two Great Commandments.

Kane Parsons is not, to the best of my knowledge, building a full-fledged eschatology stocked with great deals on sofas and shelves. He is a horror auteur telling a good story with carefully attuned pacing and imagery. The fear into which he is tapping may be more difficult to place for some older generations, if they have embraced without interrogation the suburban vision of the American Dream as a picture of the Good Life. When Gen Z and Gen Alpha question the assumptions upon which this vision is founded, they might appear ungrateful; if they sink into Resignation or quietly opt out entirely, they can seem lazy or petulant. But perhaps they are demonstrating a spiritual intuition that no amount of luxury or income or personal security will ever be fully satisfying. That indeed, quite the contrary, when these pursuits become ultimate goals, they become infernal, and a society that presents them as satisfying is in fact contrary to our very nature. Past fire and brimstone, beyond blood and gore, this may be the most chilling terror we can encounter.