Write a comment"I don't know what's scarier. Losing the nuclear weapons or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it." - Broken Arrow (1996)
I've been terrified of liminal spaces before I was aware there was a term for it. Once I learned of the term, it made me significantly more anxious. You mean OTHER people are scared of it, too?
Usually, there's an iota of camaraderie that develops when you find out others are similarly afflicted. That never rang true with me, at least not for this. Ironic, I guess, that I would want to be alone when the fear of liminal spaces is predicated upon being by yourself.
But, what exactly makes a liminal space scary? Of course, I can't speak for anyone else. I used to, and kinda still am, afraid of the dark. An odd confession for someone of my age to make, but it's not the dark that scares me. It's what could be in the dark that I am unable to see. Sure, it could just be an empty bedroom but there's nothing saying Michael Myers or some spooky ghost won't be in there, waiting to kill me or take me away.
Thanks in large part to my father, I developed an early worry that I would just go missing. My father was a police officer for many years and his media consumption was old westerns, gangster movies, Jerry Lewis and true crime. My father was obsessed with true crime before it was popular. One of his favorite shows was Unsolved Mysteries.
While, sure, much of Unsolved Mysteries was goofy with the alien segments as well as some of the cryptid pieces, they didn't shy away from missing people or unsolved crimes. Even almost 40 years later, the segments have this air about them. This air of unease that you can feel in your chest. The show would typically air from 8-9 P.M.
Guess whose bedtime was 9 P.M.?
My father thought nothing of it. Because I was the youngest, my bedtime was before anyone else's. So, we would sit down and watch an hour long episode of a show where they're showing re-enactments of kids getting stolen off bikes and thrown into vans and my father seemingly didn't understand why I didn't want to go upstairs alone. I know I've written about my father in the past, and he was a good man, but man, oh man was he sometimes completely unable to read a room. He had this weird unerring faith in things. Even as a kid, I needed evidence.
"There's nothing up there. You'll be fine," he'd say.
"What if there is, though? You don't know. What if I become one of those mysteries?"
"Adam, I'm a police officer. You're fine. Good night," he said.
I'd stand at the bottom of the stairs, focusing on the darkness of the hallway. Trying to see something that probably wasn't there and my mind would play tricks on me. If you stare at something long enough, you'll see something you don't want to see. I realized this pretty early on so my tactic for bed was to sprint up the stairs. Now, I've never been exactly an athlete and I am also incredibly clumsy so these mad dashes would typically result in a scrape or a scratch, but at least I would get to my bed without getting snatched up by some invisible Boogeyman that had taken up residence on the second floor of my house.
And that's when I realized how terrifying nothing can be. Because there should be something, right? Something makes more sense than nothing because you see something more often than nothing. This may read a little like the ramblings of a crazy person but if you see a guy in a mask with a kitchen knife stomping towards you, you sort of know what you have to do. Find a way to disable him and/or run. You can make the assessment and there's a definite method to dealing with it.
However, if you can't see what you're up against and you feel something is around a corner just out of sight, you have no idea how to deal with it. Could be a ghost, could be an alien. Could be a chipmunk. You have no idea. My father had a tendency to downplay danger. Figuratively speaking, he'd see a fire and he'd throw water on it. Me, I'd be heaping gasoline on it. I guess that's the difference. While my father definitely used to experience stress, he never really experienced unfettered anxiety.
I don't think my father would have found Backrooms very scary, but scary is like funny. Not everything is for everyone. Backrooms works in that strange space of not seeing a lot but the anxiety of what you might see being what sustains the suspense. The concept of "backrooms" has been an online phenomenon for a few years now. I was introduced to it last year and I was hooked. Despite practically nothing being seen, the atmosphere was so unsettling that it stuck with me.
The feature film adaptation concerns Clark (Ejiofor), an alcoholic furniture store owner, who finds an entrance into an unexplained space. His therapist, Mary (Reinsve), has a hard time understanding, seemingly believing Clark is going through a manic episode. From here on, we get a series of found footage style filmmaking, similar to the viral videos that made this concept so popular.
So, for me, each of the sequences where they're in the backrooms and we hear the strange sounds and see the images, I was hooked. Terrified. It played directly into my fears as a child, of being alone, of the unknown. And this is where the film excels. Parsons has a keen eye for a lot of these sequences as well as a talent for pacing them out. There were many moments in the theater where it was dead silent. The fact so many were so locked into the film says a lot. It's clear to me that Parsons has a promising career in front of him...
...for directing.
While I know that he didn't write the screenplay, I'm sure he contributed to the story beats. The issue with a movie like this is much of it is more interesting when you don't know what's going on. Once things start to get explained, it becomes a whole lot less interesting. I think that's specifically where the film falters. And when I say "falters", I don't mean that it ruins the entirety of the film.
Maybe this will help. There's a scene in Arachnophobia where the main character sees what he believes to be a spider on the wall of his bedroom. As he is deathly afraid of spiders, and the spiders in this particular film are deadly, he freaks out but approaches it slowly. The music builds as he gets closer. Once he gets close enough to it, he realizes it's just a coat hook and it's shadow. He's relieved and we move onto another scene. The coat hook is no longer scary because we know it's not a deadly spider. Similarly, once Backrooms starts to explain itself, it's just not as scary.
And it's a major catch-22. If the film didn't explain anything, people would probably complain. If it explained everything, the same. Backrooms starts to explain and then pulls back at the last second so we're in this kind of limbo. By the end, it's not entirely explained, but enough to make it less scary. I remember seeing The Blair Witch Project when it first came out. I'm easily rattled so it scared me pretty badly, so much so that it became a joke amongst my friends. Part of the production lore was there was supposed to be a shot of the witch but the cast, as they were the ones operating the cameras, got so intensely into the scene, they forgot to film the witch. Years later, they attempted to reboot the intellectual property with Blair Witch and they showed the witch/creature a few times. Wanna guess which film is scarier?
I think there are a lot of positive elements at play in Backrooms that work incredibly well. The directing and acting are superb, but the script needed wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to be mysterious while also explaining things. It doesn't always work, but the atmosphere and tension of the first half of the film are remarkable. It worked on that childhood anxiety I had watching an old Twilight Zone or, heaven forbid, Unsolved Mysteries episode. Just don't think about it too much. Let yourself sink into the unknown and don't worry as much about the explanations.
After all, a show called Solved Situations wouldn't have the same impact.
Backrooms (2026)
Directed by Kane Parsons
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Runtime: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (for language and some violent content/bloody images)
Rating (out of ****): ***
Backrooms is currently in theaters.
