Over the course of its runtime, Backrooms paints a haunting picture of how bad people think.
You might notice that I haven’t written anything for this blog in a week. You might think that this violates the “contract” I set for myself in my earlier post, where I want to write every day, except for days when it’s just not possible.
You see, in the past few days I have found myself unable to write. This was because I was spending every free moment I had playing Deltarune. Can you really blame me? The newest chapter so thoroughly captured and thrilled me, I couldn’t help myself but to replay the entire game, secret bosses included, to immerse myself completely in Toby Fox’s gameworld.
I’ve justified myself in retrospect by saying that this is all research; if I write about it in a blogpost, I can justify anything. So I will now… not write about Deltarune, and instead talk about the newly released Backrooms movie. I just saw it, it’s fresh in my head, and I want to get my thoughts down before I start rambling about narrativistics or something.
This post contains spoilers for the Backrooms movie.
Prior to seeing the movie I wasn’t familiar with much of the mythos around the Backrooms universe. I’m still not. All I really know about Backrooms is the fairly small intersection between the SCP universe and Backrooms. This is to say, not that much. I never watched Kane Parsons’ web series about the Backrooms. In fact, the most I knew about the lore from the creepypasta that went around 4chan some time ago.
Still, I heard good things, and A24 usually makes movies that are worth seeing. So I decided it was worth it to buy a ticket.
I was expecting creepy murder monsters, cheap jumpscares and references to lore that would fly over my head. Instead, I found a fairly well-composed horror movie that’s still left me with a lingering sense of dread. The acting is somewhat wooden, but the sound design and cinematography excel in making you shrink down in your seat in preparation for something awful to happen1. It’s the most chilling film I’ve seen all year, and for 2026 that’s saying something.
By the end of the movie, something else leaped out at me. It’s a fairly potent metaphor for how the mind of an abuser works.
Clark, one of the movie’s two main characters, is introduced as someone down on his luck. His wife has divorced him, he’s gave up on his aspirations, and he now lives in the furniture store that he manages2. Although this does make him sympathetic, we are given hints to the anger that lies under the surface. He lashes out in anger at his therapist during a roleplay session. He drives to his old house and stares through the bedroom window, clearly envious of his former bed.
The lashing out was particularly evocative to me. He’s clearly resentful of his wife for pursuing law school while he works an unfulfilling job. Even though he himself admits he’s been an awful husband (coming home late from “work” after getting drunk at the bar), he uses the language of ownership to describe why he’s been wronged. It’s his house. It’s his wife. Her not “helping” him become an architect is like a tool not functioning properly. Whenever confronted with the logic, he falls back on these thought-terminating cliches; never willing to consider they were never his in the first place.
Even early on, this is an all-too-familiar pattern for abusers to follow. Someone who is abusive cannot be logically reasoned beyond their abuse, because they consider their position insurmountable. It’s his, it belongs to him, it’s under his control. Nothing else matters.
We’re left with this dark hint of Clark’s true personality as he eventually discovers the labyrinth beneath his furniture store. The backrooms is a textbook liminal space; an endless amalgamation of florescent-lit stale rooms put together with no apparent rhyme or reason. As more of the backrooms are shown, it becomes clear to the audience that it’s meant to be a pale imitation of places in reality. The final scene makes this clear: we see a reflection of the debriefing room as it exists in the backrooms.
I would take this a step further. The backrooms are not merely a representation of reality; they are a representation of human cognition. Think of the Metaverse from the game Persona 5. It’s a mix of everyone’s psyche, their thoughts and their fears and their impressions, stitched together into a single connected space.
The area closest to the furniture store consists mostly of Clark’s subconscious. This is implied early on by the mass of welded-together furniture in the main entry foyer. How furniture would look like to someone who’s clearly familiar with it, but not familiar enough to actually move inventory.
Similar implications are spread throughout the first half of the movie. The backwards “STOP” sign could easily be something Clark saw while drunk driving. The architecture almost seems to beckon to his sensibilities. He eventually finds the equivalent of his old house in the backrooms, as well as the backrooms zombie equivalent of his ex-wife.
There’s a reason why Clark becomes quickly engrossed into the backrooms. An abuser operates on their own logic, as mentioned above. Anything that runs contrary to that logic is exhausting, wrong. The backrooms are the inside of Clark’s own mind. Here he feels comfortable, for the first time in a long time. Reality is wrong. The world of right angles, furniture and wives that don’t talk back? That’s right to him.
Eventually, Clark’s therapist, Mary, stumbles into the backrooms. Clark has clearly been living there for quite some time. When he knocks her out, we are almost convinced it’s for her own good.
That is, until she wakes up tied to the dinner table. We quickly realize that we’re in the backrooms equivalent of Clark’s old house, sitting at his old dinner table. If it wasn’t already obvious who Clark really is, he literally starts cutting open the NPCs and eating them. I can’t think of a better visual metaphor for abuse than literally consuming the flesh of your unwilling victims.
A repeat of the argument from earlier breaks out; this time much more sinister, as Clark literally has Mary at knifepoint. The power dynamics are inverted; Clark is in control, and he seems to be relishing it. Eventually, Mary snaps at him. His problems are his own fault. His wife didn’t just up and leave him for no reason; it was because he was a terrible husband. He’s not stuck in a dead-end job because his wife didn’t help him, it’s because he’s a terrible architect. Even his own action aren’t his fault, in Clark’s view; he’s just wired that way.
This seems to trigger a revelation in Clark. It’s the ultimate absolution of his actions; nothing, and I mean nothing, is his fault. It’s at this point that the backrooms equivalent of Clark walks into the room; a tall, lurking caricature, wearing a pirate suit and a peg leg. Clark seems to be familiar with it, using words like “our therapist”, and tries to reason with it. Clearly, this entity is something that Clark is familiar with.
But when Clark tells the entity it’s just how they’re wired, it seems to trigger a change in the entity. Previously, it was holding back. Then, it immediately picks up Clark and bits into him. Then, goring him like a twinkie. In the end, even the abuser wasn’t safe from himself.
I found this to be an interesting and under-discussed aspect of the movie. It’s an unexpected level of narrative to see a protagonist turned inside-out like this. It’s a fairly potent metaphor, and maybe something that will resonate with viewers other than myself.
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There is a particularly inspired scene where Clark sets the camera down on a table, and then something far too tall to be human picks it up. We never see it, we can only tell that one of the other characters is terrified of it. ↩
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It’s unclear whether Clark owns the furniture store or simply manages it. This is one of the movie’s weaknesses. ↩