{"id":979,"date":"2026-09-03T16:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=979"},"modified":"2026-09-03T16:12:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:12:12","slug":"the-misremembered-90s-of-the-backrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=979","title":{"rendered":"The Misremembered \u201990s of \u201cThe Backrooms\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<p>In 2019, a strange image began to circulate on social media. It showed an empty hallway aglow with sickly fluorescent light, calling to mind the rear corridor of a movie theater or the cavernous antechamber leading to a mall bathroom. It\u2019s actually a photo of a Wisconsin furniture store under renovation. It was taken in 2003, which explains its blurry patina.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=977\">Is the Israel Lobby Doomed?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The image was originally posted anonymously in a thread on \/x\/, the paranormal board on the bulletin-board site 4chan, in response to the prompt \u201cPost disquieting images that just feel \u2018off.\u2019\u201d One user dubbed the space \u201cthe Backrooms,\u201d describing it as \u201csix hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.\u201d This exchange sparked an online phenomenon, popularizing the so-called \u201climinal space\u201d Internet aesthetic.<\/p>\n<div>\n<h4>More From Kate Wagner<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<h5>The Nostalgic Architecture of the Obama Presidential Center<\/h5>\n<p><span>August 11, 2026<\/span>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h5>What Makes American Architecture American?<\/h5>\n<p><span>June 30, 2026<\/span>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h5>How Trump Got His Tacky Arch Approved<\/h5>\n<p><span>May 26, 2026<\/span>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>The concept of the Backrooms has long fascinated me, more from the architectural side than the horror side. There is a generational element to it: Most of us who were children in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s logged many hours at vast malls waiting for our parents. It\u2019s also rich both theoretically (being a postmodern concept par excellence) and architecturally (being a vernacular interior par excellence).<\/p>\n<p>A 16-year-old visual-effects autodidact named Kane Parsons released a series of short YouTube films in 2022 that take place in and elaborate on the eerie realm of the Backrooms. The series caught the attention of the film-production powerhouse A24, which gave Parsons the budget and resources to realize a feature-length adaptation, released theatrically this past spring. It was a watershed moment: A Gen Z content creator had penetrated the traditional, institutional studio system, and his work was so high-grossing that it broke records. In an era of exhaustively rehashed IP, <em>Backrooms<\/em> was sourced from public-domain Internet content.<\/p>\n<p>Although it was inspired by a static image, the film\u2019s plot is sprawling. Clark, a failed architect relegated to running a discount-furniture store in a California strip mall, has been kicked out of his house by his wife and now sleeps at the store. Outrageous electricity bills and strange ambient noises prompt him to investigate the store\u2019s basement, at which point he passes through a solid wall and into the apparently interminable Backrooms.<\/p>\n<p>The Backrooms set is Parsons\u2019s pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance. It\u2019s a disorienting, labyrinthine series of largely soundless, yellow-hued rooms. It\u2019s littered with inanimate objects that scan as wrong: items fused together, or misshapen, or inappropriately scaled. Stairs lead to nowhere. Walls morph into chutes. Space expands and contracts. It might be endless. Also, there\u2019s some kind of monster element.<\/p>\n<p>The B-plot concerns Clark\u2019s therapist, Mary. She has her own demons, having been raised by an agoraphobic hoarder mother, and she\u2019s resentful of her selfish and controlling patient. A cryptic message from Clark lures her to the Backrooms. Mary has a showdown not only with her intransigent patient but with (spoiler alert) his manifestation as a monster, a gnarled, unnatural version of himself. And this is <em>Backrooms<\/em>\u2019 key gimmick: The monsters are, in fact, ourselves, our worst qualities, our most pernicious instincts.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=975\">Kaepernick and the Movement He Inspired<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Monster Clark ambushes his shrink, and the ensuing chase scene is the best part of the movie: It is dramatically shot, revealing the terrifying scope and sheer infinite modularity of the space. In one memorable moment, a deep chasm reveals the extent of the Backrooms, which replicate endlessly into the void. Also, the Backrooms are being monitored by a company called Async, which has been trying to investigate the space after unwittingly discovering it. When asked what this place is, Clark answers, \u201cIt\u2019s every place that ever was.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Parsons is trying to do a lot, perhaps too much, with <em>Backrooms<\/em>. The movie\u2019s plot and underlying message are undercooked. (Are the Backrooms the unconscious? A secret government project? Something else?) His aesthetic choices, however, are interesting and convincing. The 21-year-old director is clearly a digital native. Though he plays with found-footage tropes, aping a lo-fi VHS look, his world operates under a resolutely digital, video-game-inspired spatial logic, in which characters \u201cno clip,\u201d or pass through impenetrable barriers such as walls.<\/p>\n<p>Parsons\u2019s work is postmodern in the original, architectural sense of the term: The Backrooms are simulacra, copies for which no original exists\u2014they approximate recent pasts through pastiche. The malls of the 1990s, whose heyday Parsons is too young to have experienced, were usually themed, using referential architecture with elaborate, exaggerated set pieces (such as those displays of giant plastic fruit in a grocery store). <em>Backrooms<\/em> boasts distortions of these already distorted visuals.<\/p>\n<p>Parsons\u2019s 1990s are communicated to the audience through a series of signifiers and winks: a washed-out teal-and-pink color palette, wall-to-wall carpeting, chunky furniture, wide ties, etc. What is striking about these choices is that they are misremembered\u2014not the decade as it was, but as reproduced via nostalgia threads on Internet forums. Fredric Jameson famously described how certain films set in the mid-20th century made the leap from depicting the 1950s to a \u201c1950s-ness.\u201d Parsons similarly invents a highly mediated \u201c1990s-ness.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Backrooms<\/em> seems to be a movie about architecture: about the innate horror of the mundane, the liminal, the places that induce a level of boredom that a director who grew up with a smartphone has probably never suffered through. But it isn\u2019t, at least not directly. Watching someone as young as Parsons attempt to capture the horror of a now-defunct suburban mundanity is a bit like watching a kid get behind the wheel of a parked car and pretend to be his dad. The pantomime of steering by someone whose feet can\u2019t reach the pedals is a little silly, but it\u2019s also unsettling; likewise, the film\u2019s misremembered nostalgia produces something genuinely new and interesting. <em>Backrooms<\/em> the movie is flawed, but Backrooms the phenomenon may offer a compelling preview of the next generation of filmmaking.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=973\">The Fight for Serious AI Regulation Just Won a Big Victory in Massachusetts<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-razing-hell"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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