My thoughts on Backrooms
can black peepo be pirates? ☠️
Yesterday evening I went to go see “Backrooms.”
Please find my thoughts on the film below.
one thing that sort of broke my immersion is that the female lead has a thick European accent despite her character ostensibly being fully American
this isn’t a “horror film” per se so much as an artsy fartsy statement about the paralytic effects of rumination and possibility of acting freely in a world where the deterministic mechanics undergirding human action are increasingly legible with a bunch of jumpscares resembling 2005 ebaumsworld screamers thrown in. Both of these components were done well, but you won’t get the heebie jeebies from this at any point like in an ackshual well-made horror flick unless you’re literally a woman or eight years old. But it’s also shot in such a way that both feedbrained Zoomers and schizotypal subtext enjoyers will find it equally compelling, even if the two sides of the film aren’t always as integrated as I’d like.
obviously the Backrooms are supposed to be a Jungian thing representing one’s unintegrated shadow and its ties to the collective unconscious as represented by archetypal nineties-era dream imagery like you see in Liminal Spaces porn e.g. basements, extensive tiled indoor swimming pools, empty offices and libraries, large hotel courtyards and so on. In much the same way people in poopcountries all dream about snakes on account of that being the most common animal to eat our monke ancestors we dream about liminal spaces because they map through unconscious second order associations to our most salient life experiences and threshold moments like moving, sleepovers, status competition in school or work, vacations that slice up the year, or getting molested.
Wandering the backrooms is a metaphor for introspection and getting lost in them a metaphor for maladaptive rumination.
the film intentionally leaves it ambiguous how “real” the Backrooms are, with the Psycho-esque protagonist shift midway through the film and especially the ending functioning such that the whole thing can plausibly be interpreted as allegory for psychoanalysis and especially its failure modes
the film takes place in 1990 but apart from everyone dressing like Full House characters you can’t really tell because the film’s 20yo Zoomer director writes everyone with a 2026 therapybrained interiority including the protagonist who as a gruff black man presumably born in the fifties definitely wouldn’t have been seeing a shrink back then and if he did wouldn’t be talking like an edgy goth kid about how he’s “wired to hurt people” and “deserves to be alone”—but the film is sufficiently well made that I’ll indulge that as deliberate anachronism
the black protagonist of the film—“Clark” (probably a meaningful name given it connotes emasculated low-status male labor)—is revealed to be an architect that for some reason now owns a pirate-themed discount furniture store called the “Ottoman Empire” he was using to pay for his redheaded wife Barbara to go to law school and then take a break from law school after not having enough Spoons for it. Only it seems he was a workaholic and alcoholic both who one night came home late drunk and dropped a glass, which woke Barbara up and in turn led to him yelling at her for not working + calling her ass fat + doomspiraling about how she’s going to leave him once she gets her degree, which caused her to leave him before she got her degree and kick him out of his Own House that he Pays For, which one wonders how she was able to do given they didn’t have kids and he was perfectly entitled legally / morally / socially to kick her honkey ass to the curb.
the woman deuteragonist of the film with a weird accent is a shrink named Mary (which probably has some religious meaning but idc about that since god doesn’t exist) who Clark decided to visit after watching one of her crunchy late night infomercials about how peepo get precognitively stuck in ruminative / habitual loops that limit them but she’ll help them escape from and Open The Window—which again sounded way more like a modern somatic coach than a nineties psychotherapist, but also made me realize there’s heaps of demand in 2026 for actionable rumination escape vectors and Katie O'Connor and I could probably start a pretty dece cult together if we gave it a try, so mb 2026 will be Wally B’s NXIVM arc? Anyway point is 1990 was NOT a year where people were held back by too much rumination. The late 90s definitely were, and we needed 9/11 to break us out of that, but if anything 1990 was the opposite and we were still high on post-Wall residual Reaganism sniffing our farts about incinerating the Republican Guard. Ergo this is not a period piece—it is using the 90s aesthetic as allegory (some fat chick on YouTube tied this also to the End Apartheid sweater that’s randomly foregrounded early on and almost certainly was coded anti-Jizzrael invective) to make a statement about contemporary ruminative self-indulgence.
it’s a little retarded that the protag advertises with a pirate aesthetic when his store is called the Ottoman Empire, and this is a deliberate move—note that early on when he’s shooting an infomercial he says “every Sultan needs his throne!” and his comic relief stoner employee Bobbeh asks him “are you a pirate or a sultan?” Which on the one hand was such on the nose symbolism I can’t help but find it irritating how the Zoomer director is undoubtedly convinced he’s a genius for coming up with it but on the other hand will no doubt be missed by 90% of the peepo who watch the film so I guess I’ll let him feel like Kubrick. But anyway if you’re one of those 90% the point was that the protag clearly wants and needs a Throne—a settled and reliable base of power he can feel Sultanic in—but in practice he’s a lot more of a Pirate e.g. self-interested, appetitive, and unwilling to take accountability for his actions, which is why the film is packed with bent and broken chairs that represent his failed attempts at occupying seated power. Only dude’s not an especially good pirate either because his peg leg is fragile af and even breaks halfway through his early infomercial (+ later in the final boss fight, which we’ll come back to) because in practice he’s needy and indecisive when it counts and overly reliant on womanly ratification.
The switches in the circuit board (representing the brain) Clark first uses to access the Backrooms are crooked and not part of the official circuitry regime—that’s our hint we’re dealing with some genuinely nefarious shit in there that isn’t supposed to be engaged with per the rules of polite society.
Inside the Backrooms we constantly see seagulls trying to fly away and instead getting killed when they slam into walls and break their neck or just randomly die in the sky out of nowhere—these are dreams and ambitions that never get fully realized because they’re trapped in a maze of rumination.
He first falls into the Backrooms on his face entirely on accident—which is how it usually happens IRL when forced to confront the stinky parts of ur unconscious—and then comes face to face with a massive pile of broken chairs or chairs stuck together with a television on top. This represents his past failed attempts at building a Seat for himself that have only accumulated into psychic detritus.
After passing a mirrored stop sign (again p on the nose) Clark passes a cardboard caveman playing a pre-recorded set of greetings in dozens of languages. This tells us we’re dealing with a precognitive evolutionary apparatus of lizardbrained somatic impulse universal across the species even if culturally mediated—that it’s not just Clark’s shadow alone but his shadow refracted through the collective unconscious.
Clark then opens a hidden passage in the wall where he finds a backpack with some shit in it (I want to say rope? could be wrong) and then a passage behind it which leads to a big room with a giant ornate purple throne in the middle beside a whole full of more degraded chairs and then two pairs of shoes buried in the floor in front of the throne like supplicants. This probably indicates a kind of learned helplessness before seated feminine authority obviously associated with Barbara but likely antecedently attributable to his mother. He then starts to get chased by the main Backrooms monster (later revealed to be a huge pirate version of himself) and only escapes by climbing up a steep incline he keeps slipping down only to just barely squeeze out a tiny door in the wall with three knobs that opens only with the top one, representing how feminine emasculation scripts frequently require men to shrink themselves / perform busywork / adopt an undignified frame that doesn’t offer secure footing to remain legible (and note that even Mary seems to agree that Barbara was sort of a bitch, which her behavior in a scene we’ll discuss later seems to confirm).
Clark leaves the Backrooms the first time with a stool stolen from the entry pile as proof (it seems entirely for himself)—this is an instance of introspection yielding solid masculine growth from dealing with your shit. It feels good to him to have overcome one of his demons like that. Thus he starts mapping out the backrooms extensively and well—remember, he is an architect—and comes to see Mary with a map needily hoping she will ratify it. When she hesitates he tells her he’ll bring back proof and she’ll Owe Him An Apology #entitled. This is the point where his introspection stops being empowerment so much as a liability and energy sink that consumes his life (note the later bills piling up).
Mary we discover has her own shit going on due to being raised by an agoraphobic mom I thought was a tranny at first who kept her isolated in the house and not allowed to leave or even Open The Window until a construction company started to demolish it with them both inside it, which I think the film leaves ambiguous as to whether that ackshully happened or was more just a womanisn. But either way her mom got sent to the loony bin when she was a preteen and all she has of her childhood home is this imprint of her hand ✋️ in the cement she carries around with her I guess to remind her Who She Is.
Back to Clark—he decides to enlist his two early 20s employees Kat and Bobbeh to explore the Backrooms with him and record footage to ratify what happened (apparently he can't get a camera himself and so requires Bobbeh to use his uni privileges to borrow the institution's). He brings rope with them I think he found in thet backpack earlier and Kat jokes he'll use it to tie them up, which he does just to rappel Bobbeh down a super deep shaft into an area he was presumably too big of a pussy to explore himself (Kat objects and wants Clark to go but Bobbeh is a Man about it and points out the camera is Attached to him as it was obtained via his student ID so he needs to go).
As they lower him down Bobbeh falls and Clark says it was because it snagged around a bed leg or something; methinks this is a clue he wants to fug Kat (who has extremely qt feet) and is trying to get rid of Bobbeh.
The area Bobbeh explores is full of literal Dirty Laundry including the aforementioned End Apartheid shirt (clue Clark wants IR katpuss?) and a random head in the pile that's super obv but nobody ever mentions. Anyway Bobbeh is attacked down there by something and they pull him up and then he gets pulled back down because the knot Clark tied was way too tight. So yeah he was def trying to murk Bobbeh and fuck Kat probs because he was insecure about a man more accountable and self contained than him having her erotic loyalty. Anyway Kat gets pulled down after Bobbeh and Clark tumbles in too and we see a creature with a tail that never again shows up pulling the dying Bobbeh into a vent. RIP.
At this point Clark and Kat get separated running around and Clark runs past a bunch of kids toys and ends up approaching a Christmas tree like a kid sneaking down after dark and this midget in a wheelchair turns on a lamp. This midget is totally random but is dressed in an urbane early 20th century style so I wonder if it means to suggest that Clark got molested as a kid?? Idk seems crazy maybe but that is the connotation in a scawy movie context of toys and semiotically turning a lamp on and off gives child molester kind of. Think about the earlier rope in the backpack. But it could also just represent e.g. his candid reflection on his own helplessness and especially the impotence of understanding and illumination.
Anyway the lamp summons a scawy version of Barbara to chase him, and next Clark ends up in a liminal spaces indoor dreampool area I'd hazard is meant to represent his alcoholism or workaholism or solipsistic rumination and he hears Kat yelling out at him to save her through the wall she sees as a window but is opaque to him. Then Kat yells watch out for something behind him at which point the big pirate version of Clark takes the cam pov and seems to Get Him. This scene obv represents how inward journies both blind you to the damage other people see in you and cause collateral damage to loved ones you can't help when they get ensconced in your bullshit.
Yet then we get the Psycho protag inversion and now the hero is Mary, who gets a message from Clark saying he's done with therapy which prompts her to go check on him. She enters the Backrooms and immediately runs into Clark and his giant mythopoetic mapwall who is well acclimated now and warns her to be quiet and then when the big pirate approaches randomly chokes her out from behind. We then see her descending through her own backrooms—various versions of the house supposedly destroyed with them inside it but progressively degraded, until she wakes up tied to a chair with the same blue rope as before and sitting at a table with Clark and three stationary but apparently living Backrooms creatures he has by all appearances subjugated: the pedophile wheelchair midget, Barbara, and some random old fat guy I surmise is supposed to be a former boss or maybe Barbara's dad who disapproved of his baby girl marrying a Negro hence the Apartheid shirt? Anyway their faces are fucked up which he attributes to them being imperfect memories and from their docility it’s clear that he has now wrassled control of his demons, but instead of banishing them he is now literally Eating them, and cuts himself and Mary a slice of fat guy stomachcake to demonstrate. Basically this is the endpoint of ruminative withdrawal. Anyway he asks Barbara to get the lights and she doesn't proving that while he can act on his demons he can't control them, and in general she seems kind of contemptuous of Clark even in his own psychic spacetime bubble, later running into the corner in a kind of hysterical passive aggressive way that suggests a crybully temperament.
Now having Mary in his clutches he scalps Barbara and puts her hair on Mary, mirroring an earlier scene where during a session she forced him to relive the night of her kicking him out of his Own Home he Pays For with her playing Barbara when he didn't want to and was looking for practical ways of moving on autonomously. But now he is clearly anima projecting Barbara onto Mary and she gets ~uncomfortable and initially fawns but then becomes kind of foidlike and says his wife didn't leave because he was an alcoholic or neglectful (his agency preserving copestories) but rather because he’s a Weak Whiny Faggot who won't take Accountability for anything and will always just blame his brain and say he's wired that way and change is impossible.
Clark admits to Mary that he likes it down here and doesn't want to change and she gets more Foidlike and says that's fine I can't help you but you have to let me go, and this kind of triggered me tbh bc I think it's a very real thing that female mental healthcare professionals do when they experience a disgust response that lets them abrogate the hippocratic oath willy nilly bc I guess their cuntvibes take precedent or w/e and they can always moralize their way out of professional ethics or accountability but lowkey I had two female shrinks in 2018 & 2020 who literally just discouraged me from seeing them again saying they couldn't help me while flattering me about being too smart or something but it was basically the same shit Mary did to Clark, just giving up on a man who proved too Difficult. Which is fine I self medicated with steroids and taking advantage of dozens of isolated girls on SeekingArrangement, but Clark was less Agentic than me and so when the big evil pirate comes back he tells it Hey bro she says we're fine and can stay like this at which point the pirate bites his fucking jugular and kills him #based.
The rest of the moobie is basically a chase sequence where she tries to get away from the big evil pirate through environments that suggest domestic collapse and masculine isolation and then when he corners her she breaks his peg leg. But then she gets knocked to the floor by Brainfog and he somehow gets on top of her, and instead of killing her with his enormous superhuman strength lets her smash his head with her childhood hand imprint until it breaks, at which point she escapes through a crevice and seems him crying out to her helplessly proving the pirate was ackshully just an embodiment of socially unratified ugly needy male yearning for self actualization hence it throwing those seagulls around at the beginning.
Mary then gets knocked out by brainfog and is brought through a facility including a room where theyre operating on the pirate and brought before a proper shrink who works for an MRI company that discovered the place accidentally and now is dedicated to mapping them and getting whatever info they can. She asks what will happen to her and he says that's above his pay grade, but as he starts mansplaining the Backrooms to her she zones out and we see her in a Backrooms of her own in a degraded fucked up face version of herself similar to the fat Boomer and midget pedophile. Then the movie ends.
One thing that made the movie extra spoopy to me was the Backrooms had the same color as my condo hallway wallpaper in Orlando