Backrooms

I would have never thought in my life that someone would make a movie about the backrooms creepypasta. I feel like it’s impossible to make a movie based on a creepypasta, and the last movie I could think of that tried to do that was the Slender Man movie, but that movie was terrible. After seeing this movie in the theaters, I was wrong. The set design for the backrooms is just incredible. I always loved the aesthetic of liminal spaces because it always just gave me an unsettling feeling. I don’t know how they made the entire thing so vast and created so many different pieces. Just every time a character was in there, it somehow made me feel agoraphobic and claustrophobic at the same time. It didn’t help that there was such a contrast of the rooms with the bright lights and rooms that are just dark. The rooms that were just dark scared me, especially the Christmas tree room. I was so creeped out by the fact that Christmas lights were the only source of brightness and there was just that creature sitting in the chair not saying anything. It didn’t help that the Feliz Navidad song that was playing sounded so distorted. The found footage scenes were also unsettling for me. Of course some of it was hard to watch for me (I’m a bitch with motion sickness) but I still kept feeling uneasy and on edge. The overall vibe of the backrooms reminded me of those early 2010s horror games, where you’re trying to escape some entity but you don’t even know what it looks like or where it is. Even from the beginning of the movie, I was very unsettled and just waiting to see what was actually in the backrooms. I even got scared by stuff in the background, like when Bobby was investigating the room with the dirty clothes, I really got scared just seeing the face of the cardboard caveman sticking out of the clothes because I thought there was a monster hiding in there. And I do like the fact that we don’t see the creatures that live there until much later, as it adds to the eeriness of it. There were many times during the found footage stuff where I thought, if it was me in that situation, I would have noped out and ran back to the real world and never tried going back there ever again. I found the idea of the backrooms to be sort of like a brain, with the multiple rooms as separate channels and memories. The more the person tries to remember a memory, the fuzzier or blurry the details get of said memory, and that is represented by the multiple rooms getting more and more disintegrated until it turns into a void. That’s why the creatures living in the backrooms have many messed up details, because the memories are hard to fully recreate. Relating to that, I also saw the backrooms as a way to repress memories and trauma. Both Clark and Mary have different ways of dealing with their issues, and it leads to different outcomes for them. For Clark, he doesn’t seem interested in bettering himself, because he always makes excuses for why things didn’t work out for him and never takes responsibility for himself. The backrooms cause him to spiral and he tries to trap Mary in there with him because he was just so fed up with his life in the real world. In the backrooms there’s a creature that looks like Clark in his Pirate Suit, but he’s much bigger. When Mary tells him that he doesn’t need to change and he can stay there, he eventually gets killed by Pirate Clark, which represents his self-destruction due to not wanting to take responsibility for his actions. Meanwhile, Mary always felt guilty that her mother had to be institutionalized, that she puts it upon herself to try to help a lot of people as a therapist. However, it doesn’t seem like her approach in therapy work because it’s just passively talking. However, when she confronts Clark when they’re trapped in the backroom, she finally tells him what’s wrong with him and that he can stay in the backrooms, which gives her a chance to escape. She’s also been carrying a piece of concrete that reminds her of her childhood with her mother who has agoraphobia, and in a way, she’s also carrying that guilt. When she takes the concrete to smash Pirate Clark’s head, it basically helps her let go of that guilt and eventually help her escape the backrooms. It makes sense for an MRI company to be the ones studying the backrooms, because in a way, it’s like studying how the brain works and how the brain connects to the entire body. And what I love about this movie is that backrooms still remain a mystery in terms of how it functions, just like how we don’t know the full extent of how our brains work as a whole. The backrooms I also feel like could be a representation of AI. Throughout the movie, they keep mentioning that trying to explain what the backrooms are would be like trying to describe a dog to someone who’s never seen one and asking them to draw it. It would look similar, but not perfect because you need those exact details to make it perfect. And that’s what those creatures looked like to me; it’s like a person put into an AI prompt to describe a person, but the result has a lot of imperfections because AI isn’t accurate. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie and it exceeded my expectations. I feel like horror has been doing really well this year and I hope it keeps continuing this way. If they continue making more movies about the backrooms, I hope they expand the concept more and go more in depth with the exploration of the rooms and hallways.