A furniture salesman discovers a secret in his store’s basement. And boy, is it a big secret. Backrooms, based on an internet Creepypasta and YouTube video series, is an eerie journey into an uncanny wasteland. But the film is marred by quite a bit of profanity and sporadic but significant sprays of blood.
It’s not like Clark wanted to sleep in his furniture store.
Nope. As he tells his shrink—repeatedly—his wife kicked him out of the house. His house. “It is my house, by the way,” he tells Dr. Mary Kline. “I’m paying for it.”
But after dragging home late one night—knocking over a glass after a long day of work and a few (or more than a few) beers—Clark and his wife got into it. And before he could say, “and another thing,” Clark was on the street, looking for another place to live.
Luckily, he owned a furniture store.
Unluckily, that furniture store held more than furniture. It held a secret: a big one.
Late one night, Clark finds it.
Clark is all tucked in, watching an old-timey sci-fi flick on television, when his boxy tube TV (up-to-date technology in the movie’s 1990s timeline) goes dark. The store’s lights once again, start to flicker. Clark, sick of the store’s wonky electrical system, storms down to its lower level and, in a pique, flips off all the building’s breakers. Yes, even the red ones set at an inexplicable angle.
And there, in the darkness, he sees it: a tiny sliver of light coming through one of the walls.
He walks over to investigate.
He reaches out his hand, and—
It passes right through.
There, on the other side of the wall that wasn’t, Clark finds a room: Yellow walls. Dingy carpets. Humming fluorescent lights. Furniture piled in the middle. And beyond that, Clark finds another room. And another. More rooms. Hallways. Doors. A stop sign written backward. A cardboard cutout with a speaker attached. And—
Wait.
Was that a noise? Was that a—
[Note: The following sections contain spoilers.]
Dr. Mary Kline, Clark’s psychologist, seems to want to help people. And Clark, it seems, wants to be helped.
We don’t see or hear much overt spiritual content here. No religious objects to note, no prayers to document. The closest we get to a spiritual element is a Christmas tree located in one of the rooms.
But this does give our review its first real opportunity to talk about the Backrooms themselves.
The Backrooms—the realm in which Clark unknowingly stumbles into—is a sprawling, perhaps infinite locale, filled with uncanny rooms and unsettling doorways. Clark describes it as a place filled with half-remembered or poorly remembered spaces. He compares it to what a picture of a dog might look like if the picture’s creator had never seen a dog and was drawing it based on someone else’s description.
This suggests a certain off-kilter, incredibly powerful sentience—either embedded in the Backrooms themselves or a force (or forces) behind the Backrooms. The rooms are being created somehow though, and those creations go on, seemingly, forever.
Moreover, the half-remembered elements of the Backrooms are apparently plucked straight from its visitor’s own mind and memories. As such, the portion of the Backrooms that we see here are filled with furniture and murals seemingly culled from Clark’s own furniture store.
And we must mention the Backroom’s other inhabitants, as well—some of whom appear to be rather benign and passive, while others are monstrous indeed. And all appear to be created, in whole or in part, by the Backrooms themselves (or, again, the forces behind the Backrooms). The powers at play here, whoever or whatever they may be, have the ability to create a facsimile of life—though it, like Clark’s dog, is inherently twisted.
Kat, the assistant manager at Clark’s furniture store, wears tops that reveal a bit of her tummy. Her boyfriend, Bobby, is seen shirtless at one point. And early one morning, when Clark hammers on Kat’s door, Bobby answers—suggesting that the couple spent the night together. (Whether they actually live together is possible, but unknown.)
The Backrooms are only mostly empty. Violent death lurks in its hidden recesses. And when that violence comes, things can turn bloody.
Before Clark’s story begins, we see an investigator in a hazmat suit lost in the Backrooms’ bowels. A seagull flies in and lands on the floor, dead and bloodied with a broken neck. (We see the gull again, along with a bloody blotch on a wall.) The lost investigator soon sees something, becomes terrified and then presumably gets killed. (We don’t see much from the man’s handheld camera before it goes dark.)
Someone gets pulled down to his doom. We see a wide swath of blood streak the floor where a still-living victim was dragged, and another spurt of red on a wall close to where he was pulled through a door. Someone’s head sits in a refrigerator. A monster chomps into someone’s neck and shoulder, showering the surrounding area (including a nearby character) in blood.
As mentioned, not all the denizens of the Backrooms are violent. Some are apparently benign, albeit grotesque. Many feature multiple sets of eyes or are missing parts of their bodies. One sprouts six or seven fingers from her hand. We’re introduced to a few, and a character stabs one of these “people” through the neck to show they’re not bothered by it at all. “The best part?” the stabber says. “You can eat them.” And with that, he opens a man’s shirt and rips into his stomach, pulling out a chunk of “meat” that almost looks like angel food cake. He essentially scalps another benign Backrooms resident, cutting off her hair and sticking it on another character’s head.
Someone smashes a monster in the head several times with a hunk of concrete. She breaks its wooden pegleg, slowing it down a bit. Someone renders a woman unconscious with a chokehold. Expelled gas seems to incapacitate any humans within its spray.
Mary, the psychologist, has flashbacks of her own childhood memories—but all terminate in violence that feels more like a commentary on her childhood than an actual memory. For instance, as Mary looks at her old apartment building, she remembers how she and her mother pushed their hands into the sidewalk’s wet cement—and then a bulldozer seems to dump a pile of rubble on them. In another scene, a section of her apartment gets destroyed while the child version of Mary sits idly by.
We hear about how Clark and Kat killed a rat in the store—and they debate as to whether it was “the rat” or just “a rat.” Someone twists a knee. We see some violent pictures painted on a wall. A room contains several piles of clothes, suggesting that they once belonged to the Backrooms’ victims. Human bodies (possibly mannequins) appear to be halfway submerged in a floor in the Backrooms.
More than 40 f-words and about 15 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “h—” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused twice, once with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is also abused twice, once with the f-word.
Clark was kicked out of his house in part because of his drinking habits, and we see him gulp from what looks like a bottle of whisky. He and Mary roleplay the last fight he had with his wife, Barbara. When Clark tries to tell “Barbara” that he lost track of time counting inventory, “Barbara” calls him on it. “I can smell it on your breath,” she says. Clark admits then that he had a “few” beers, while “Barbara” asks him to clarify what constitutes a “few.”
Later, when the two reenact this same scene, Clark says that a “few” beers equals however many he wants it to equal. He deserves to drink however much he wants, he seems to insist, because of how hard he works for Barbara.
Kat and Bobby squabble over whether Bobby is high or not. “Pot doesn’t count,” Bobby insists.
Mary hosts a party where people drink both wine and beer. When the crowd gets to be too much, she retreats into her office and takes what appears to be a pill that she stores in a plastic bag. A flashback to Mary’s childhood shows scads of medicine bottles strewn about the apartment that Mary shares with her mother.
Mary’s mother was clinically paranoid. In flashbacks, the windows of the apartment that she shared with her daughter are covered with newspaper. And when Mary tries to peer outside, her mom roughly reminds her that she’s not been given permission to go (or apparently even look) outside. Mary’s mother then peeks out of the papered window herself, reassuring herself that she and her daughter are not being watched. Later, Mary visits her mom in a mental health facility, where her mother is in an almost vegetative state.
We hear a lot about how we tend to make the same mistakes again and again, leaning on habits that protected us when we were younger but trap us as we get older. Those patterns mirror, in a way, the Backrooms’ own maze-like environs, which can feel inescapable at times. The film seems to lean into a certain fatalistic vibe—that those patterns are indeed almost impossible to escape. And some characters question whether they even should try.
Backrooms, the movie, begins its narrative in 1990. But the Backrooms internet phenomenon doesn’t go back quite that far.
The concept apparently launched in 2019, when someone posted a photo of an empty, yellow, warehouse-like space on a 4chan thread. A user soon added this caption to the photo:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in[.]”
Thus, the Backrooms were created, spawning a host of mostly Gen Z creators to spin their own Backrooms-based yarns and flesh out their own sprawling bits of lore. Among them: Kane Parsons, better known as Kane Pixels. In 2022, he released a short film titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” which, to date, has been viewed 78 million times and spawned its very own web series.
Backrooms, the A24 movie, is based on that series and is directed by Parsons himself.
You don’t need to know any of that background or Parsons’ sprawling narrative for the movie Backrooms to be plenty creepy. The film is set in the uncanniest of valleys—where everything feels familiar, yet askew. The lights. The walls. The doors. The shadows. Even the music feels like it was pulled out of a 1990s synthesizer and thrown, like a book, into a tub of water to warp. This film earns its scares through twists and bends and disorientation: a picture printed on taffy and pulled out of shape.
Which makes Backrooms’ dip into R-rated content not just unwarranted, but distracting.
Backrooms is at its weakest when the blood starts to flow. It moves away from its unsettling premise into a world far more familiar, where monsters act ever so predictably. The movie’s reliance on strong profanity does nothing to further the plot or themes or unsettling vibe. Many a purveyor of R-rated horror would insist that you need extreme content to tell an extreme story: Backrooms lays bare that myth. Everything that makes this movie terrifying could come in a PG-13 package.
That will not be the lesson that the creators and distributors of Backrooms will take away from this effort, though—one that could indeed line up for a series of sequels. Backrooms is an effective, disquieting film that could’ve been better if it had been cleaner. Those yellow walls are creepy enough.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
