‘Backrooms’ Movie: A look at the film’s origin and how it became a global cultural phenomenon | EXPLAINED

Traditionally, the horror genre relies on jump scares, gothic castles, monsters and shadows draped in darkness that never seems to go away throughout the course of the movie. However, a new cinematic experiment has completely flipped the genre on its head, proving that terror can be just as potent when it is bathed in the harsh, unyielding glow of fluorescent lights.

A24 Studios' psychological horror thriller, Backrooms, has officially become the studio’s highest-ever-grossing movie with $212 million globally and was shot on a modest budget of $10 million by a 20-year-old, Kane Parsons.

As this massive global box office sensation makes its highly anticipated theatrical debut in India today, June 12, the audience will be introduced to a deeply psychological strain of dread: the horror of the liminal spaces.

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An Internet Nightmare

To understand why Backrooms has successfully captured the global cultural pulse, one must look back at its origin. A digital urban legend originated in an anonymous 2019 thread on the 4chan imageboard. A user posted a slightly tilted, low-resolution photograph of an empty, nondescript office building with slick yellow wallpaper, damp carpets, and endless corridors stretching into a sterile void.

The accompanying caption described this modern digital urban legend, where if you accidentally "noclipped" – a video game term for clipping through solid physical geometry – out of reality in the wrong areas, you would plunge into the backrooms. It was described as a randomised, infinite maze of empty offices, totalling roughly 600 million square miles of silent, mono-yellow misery.

It captivated internet attention. This 'creepypasta’ – an internet-native horror story – evolved into a massive lore project across Reddit and fan wikis.

What are liminal spaces, and why do they terrify us?

At the centre of the Backrooms phenomenon is the architectural and psychological concept known as a liminal space. The word originated from the Latin word 'limen', which means 'threshold', and is inherently transitional.

While the Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, never explicitly theorised about the modern concept of 'liminal spaces', as this concept emerged decades after his death however his 1919 essay The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) provides the ultimate psychological framework for understanding them. He defined the uncanny as the unsettling feeling when something deeply familiar suddenly appears strange, alien, or eerie.

He also defines the uncanny by using words taken from the philosopher Friedrich Schelling as an experience of something which 'ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light'

Even English cultural theorist Mark Fisher touches on the concept in his book The Weird and the Eerie. The "eerie" manifests as a chilling absence—the ghostliness of an empty airport or an abandoned mall where human life should be but isn't.

Meanwhile, the 'weird' introduces a jarring presence—the feeling that something alien has ruptured our normal reality, turning a mundane corridor into a surreal, logic-defying labyrinth. Together, they explain how liminality strips away the familiar, leaving us stranded between a world we know and an unknown, haunting 'outside'.

From this academic perspective, we can infer that these places are solely built to pass through and not to be inhabited, and places like empty school corridors during the summer break, deserted airport terminals, abandoned shopping malls or office complexes after working hours are prime examples of liminal spaces.

It triggers a sense of unease because they are completely stripped of their intent and purpose, as these places are designed to be loud, functional, crowded and bustling with human activities, but when you remove the people and keep the infrastructure intact, that makes it an architectural uncanny valley that may seem to be deeply familiar, yet fundamentally wrong.

Opposite to the traditional horror, which thrives on the dark and the unknown, liminal horror sticks to the sense of the too-known, as it taps into the collective modern anxiety of getting lost in the repetitive, clinical monotony of modern commercial environments.

There are no dark corners to hide in, as almost everything is exposed under the clinical fluorescent lights overhead. Here, the terror is not that you are completely by yourself in this maze, but rather the ever-growing suspicion that you might not be.

WATCH the trailer of Backrooms here: 

From The Shining to Backrooms 

Though the term ‘liminal space' seems explicitly an invention of the internet age, conversely, the cinematic use of transitional spaces to induce madness is a technique pioneered decades ago in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie, The Shining.

Kubrick used the empty interior of the Overlook Hotel to achieve the same psychological unravelling, as this hotel proves to be a perfect textbook definition of this phenomenon, as it is a seasonal resort designed for bustling crowds, left completely deserted in the dead of winter.

Even the anomalies enhance the whole experience. When young Danny Torrance pedals his tricycle through the winding, symmetrical hallways, the wide-angle Steadicam shots make the space feel infinite and oppressive.

The audience cannot mentally map the hotel because it cannot logically exist. This architectural gaslighting mirrors Jack Torrance's descent into insanity. The Overlook becomes a physical manifestation of a broken psyche.

A24’s Backroom inherits this DNA. Both films tap this genre of psychological horror: when a physical space defies the rules of geometry and human purpose, the human mind rapidly follows suit.

As Backrooms arrives in Indian cinemas today, it will bring a fresh flavour of psychological horror to the Indian audience and challenge the old guard that the most terrifying thing sometimes is not demons and monsters but simply a brightly lit place that never seems to end.