“Liminal.” There. I’ve said it. Now let’s talk about Backrooms without using that word or concept, because there’s so much more to say.
During my first job, I was fortunate to be at a small business that was experiencing strong growth. I was the tenth employee, and – at it’s height – the business would have three offices with more than 40 employees. I was there for a little more than a decade, and in that time we moved twice, always upsizing the space. I was able to walk through each space before the moves, and it was eerie to spend time wandering through disused offices, poorly-lit hallways and warehouse space littered with whatever was leftover from the last company. Even more eerie was working late nights, by myself, in a cubicle farm. Printers cycling on and off for no discernible reason, intermittent HVAC sighs and clicks, the steady drone of electric lights. I can remember multiple occasions of having to get up and look for a person I thought I saw just out of eyeshot. A regular room can be haunted. A backroom? Doubly-so.
A labyrinth of dismay
In Kane Parson’s Backrooms film, a continuation of his YouTube series of the same name, haunted houses are out and haunted office space is in. Gone are the Boomer and GenX, dilapidated, Victorian homes of small-town America. In their place loom an endless series of windowless, empty offices, department stores, corridors, suburban streetscapes and conference rooms. Secret passages behind a grandfather clock or bookcase have been swapped with walls that suddenly lose their clipping1 and halls that are too narrow or too short to maneuver through.
The Backrooms are just that: rooms connected by doors, ramps, hallways and stairs behind the real world. BAFTA-winner Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) is Clark, a failed architect and hapless furniture store owner who discovers a hidden world behind a wall. Clark journeys into – and becomes obsessed with – this hidden world, eventually moving in to escape his collapsing life. His therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve, nominated for an Oscar for 2025’s Sentimental Value), stumbles after Clark. To her horror she finds herself pursued through the labyrinth of rooms by a mysterious presence.
The metaphors of the Backrooms are not subtle: the crumbling twilight of late-stage capitalism, the dread of work, the soul-crushing anti-design patterns of corporate environments, our traumas which pursue and consume us. Conceptually there’s a lot going on.
Parson, born in 2005, situates his Backrooms lore firmly in the anxieties of the so-called Zoomer generation. Born between the late 90s and the mid-2010s, this cohort has no connection to a pre-9/11 world, a pre-internet world, a pre-smartphone world. The analog world of the 1900s is a mythic land that cannot be re-created or re-visited. It’s a memory of a memory, investigated through ephemera like paper photos and VHS recordings. GenZ has more depression, social isolation, uncertainty, despair and distrust than all of us put together. And for good reason: as one critic has put it “I don’t love that I live in the Find Out century — having been born at the end of the Fuck Around century.”2 It isn’t just vibes, it’s a whole worldview.
The backrooms are a place without clear purpose or goals; its objects and structures have no meaning or order. It is haunted, not by the ghosts of innocent victims or wrathful murderers, but by the spectre of modernity. The promises of technology and the financial stability represented by a white-collar office job have curved in on themselves. Who built it and why? Are we alone in there? The answers don’t matter (there aren’t any), but the questions don’t really matter either. In the dreamscape of the backrooms, the only momentum is feverish wandering. It’s all wardrobe: no lion, no witch.
Art in the frontrooms
Like all art, Parson’s Backrooms is a response. It is a reaction to a loss of purpose and certainty, to the agonizing question of possibility3 which has become almost impossible to answer.
Art is what people in the frontrooms do when the chaos of reality needs sorting.
Unlike the detritus of the backrooms, frontrooms art is always generative. “Making,” writes artist Makoto Fujimura, “is the foundational reality of humanity.”4 Where the backrooms are a source of chaotic content with its confusion of office furniture, bricked-over doorways and distorted creatures, the frontrooms are an expression of “gratuitous love”. Every atom in the frontrooms is imbued with meaning and purpose. While each layer of the backrooms further twists reality until it is unrecognizable, the layers of the frontrooms reveal a super-abundance of fruitfulness. Where the Backrooms is something like an architectural stochastic parrot, regurgitating random copies of things it has consumed, the frontrooms are the place where one square foot of forest has an excess of life so profound it’s almost embarrassing.
Photographer David Liittschwager visualizing the micro-biome in a cubic-foot frame of Central Park, NY. Click the image to see more of his work.
A human artist is compelled to create from that fecundity and add to it. What Fujimura calls the New Newness, the creational impulse to make that which does not yet exist, pointing toward an ultimate future where all things are made New. A novelist calls forth a room in a building in a city in a country, a playwright creates people with inner lives speaking to each other, a painter pushes pigment around a canvas to shape an emotion, a musician assembles sound waves into coherence, a filmmaker refracts a memory toward a story. None of this is pre-existent: it is New. Humans make, Fujimura argues, because we are the image of a Maker — creating is in our DNA. We make because we are longing for the New.
The thing that makes the horrors of the Backrooms so affecting is that they represent the despair of a generation: what if meaning is undiscoverable because there is no meaning? What if collapse is all there is? What if there is no goal or purpose, just the bones of the failures of the past? But within the Backrooms lie its own most convincing contravention: it’s a story someone in the frontrooms made ex nihilo. It’s something New. It’s a reaction and comment on one way to perceive the world. Parsons has already been asked about turning his filmmaking toward old narratives. “I pretty much entirely want to focus on original projects. I do this because it’s my way of processing life, as an artist…[Stepping] into someone else’s view of life tends to just kind of damage the initial point for me.”5 Like all makers, Parsons wants to pursue his ideas of the New as far as they will take him, through the backrooms and into the unknown future on the other side.
Want more Backrooms?
We did a podcast about it, too! Listen to Jon and Tim discuss Backrooms with a whole different set of takes.
- “Clipping” is a term from computer graphics that refers to the models in a scene that are enabled or disabled from rendering to the viewport. In simple terms this means an in-game camera can’t see through a wall, or that objects in a level will only appear when the camera sees them. A “Noclip” or “no-clip” code is often used by game designers during the testing phase to zoom out of a character’s viewpoint and see the entire level with all layers and models displayed. The “noclip” code also disables collisions so that designers can walk through walls or float above ceilings. A character in a video game with “noclip” floors will simply fall through every layer of the model until they are in a void of nothingness — and keep falling forever. Go to noclip.website to view a ton of classic 2000s-era games with noclip enabled. [↩]
- Riley, “From the Desk of Peter Mandelson,” Podcast (Trashfuture, June 2, 2026), https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-dykmv-1adb7a9. [↩]
- André Breton, Le Manifeste Du Surréalisme, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (1924; repr., Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andre-breton-manifesto-of-surrealism. The Backrooms has a lot in common with Surrealism, and Breton’s Manifesto is perhaps a partner text, especially his statements on dreams as a window on the real-real. [↩]
- Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven ; London: Yale University Press, 2020). [↩]
- Alex Welch, “‘Backrooms’ Filmmaker Kane Parsons Says No to Idea of Directing ‘Star Wars’ or Other IP Projects,” The Wrap, June 4, 2026, https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/backrooms-kane-parsons-next-movie-not-star-wars-sequel/. [↩]
