“Backrooms,” the No. 1 movie in the country currently, is a horror movie that takes place in a seemingly endless liminal space that articulates itself as generic strip mall or office spaces. One of the unsettling horrors of these eponymous spaces is how generic they are: we’ve all seen and been in an office complex like this, with tile ceilings, harsh fluorescent lighting, cheap carpets and particle board furnishings. They’re ubiquitous across the Western world — an architectural infection spurred by capitalism’ need for generic efficiency borne of economies of scale. That’s partly what makes the movie unsettling: the backroom aesthetic is unsettlingly generic, a space that exists everywhere and yet nowhere.
For a movie defined by this nowhereness, it’s all the more telling that the filmmakers took pains to let us know exactly where we are. Throughout the film, the audience is reminded repeatedly that the furniture store where this all starts is at the corner of Capitol and McKee, in San Jose, California, in fall 1990. The corner of Capitol and McKee is a very real intersection, with two very real strip malls bordering it on either side, that look very similar to the strip mall with Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire as tenants. (Though it takes place in San Jose, the film wasn’t actually shot there; the producers used exteriors and sound stages in British Columbia, a common shooting location due to tax incentives.)
For a movie defined by this nowhereness, it’s all the more telling that the filmmakers took pains to let us know exactly where we are.
After “Backrooms” had an astonishing (and record-breaking) $80 million debut weekend, the mediaverse is beset with hot takes about what this cryptic horror movie, the debut from 20-year-old auteur Kane Parsons, is really about. Maybe screenwriter Will Soodik is trying to tell us this is a movie about psychology? After all, the movie opens with a scene from Clark in his therapist’s office. Or wait, maybe it’s just “about memory — and bastardized versions of memory,” as Brianna Zigler writes in Entertainment Weekly. Or is it simply about “trauma and the mysterious workings of the unconscious,” as New York Times critic Beatrice Loayza says? Or, as one Redditor argues, maybe “the backrooms are a representation of all the different paths in life we could take.”
But after repeat viewings, I don’t think “Backrooms” is really about any of these — or at least, not entirely. There are clues in the film that suggest that at its core, Backrooms is a story about the tech industry — and a cautionary one, too.
The “Backrooms” universe may not exist in our plane, but its entrance is in San Jose, California. The film revels in languid establishing shots of the Santa Clara Valley, with the hilly Diablo Range in the background. Down in the backrooms twilight zone, there’s a glitchy-looking wall splashed over with distorted “McKee Road” signs. While the ad for the in-universe furniture store Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire plays, a phone number with a South Bay area code flashes in a supertitle. (You can try calling — it turns out to be a fax machine line that’s connected to the film’s marketing campaign.) The film’s Silicon Valley setting is clearly a very deliberate choice by the filmmakers – and something they remind us of, repeatedly, through such cues.
(A24) Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Backrooms”
But it’s not just that the movie takes place in Silicon Valley (or, at least its exterior — the backrooms themselves exist in null space). It’s the time and the place that the movie occurs, too: fall 1990, an auspicious moment in tech history. At this point in history, ARPANET – the precursor to the internet — was largely a communications tool for universities, research institutes, and government-funded laboratories. About eight months later, in August 1991, the World Wide Web was formally announced, and by 1993, it became massive and public.
The internet is a “faulty copy of reality.”
But even before the modern internet came to be, techies and sci-fi writers were already imagining what the web was going to look like. “Neuromancer,” one of the defining cyberpunk novels, was published in 1988; that book imagines an interconnected, virtual reality world you can traverse by “jacking in.” Indeed, well before the internet formally came to be, writers like William Gibson imagined that cyberspace would be something three dimensional and navigable, with a certain internal architecture to it — albeit a distorted one compared to the real world.
In other words, the internet is a “faulty copy of reality.” That’s not my quote — that’s exactly what protagonist Clark says of the backrooms, though he might as well have been speaking of the internet: it’s a place that feels like a human creation, but which has been mutated by bots, AI and the demands of capital. In 2009, Christine Smallwood wrote an article for The Baffler in which she pontificated as to what the internet would look like, if it were made physical.
I wish the internet looked like Matt Damon, or like lines of light written by an invisible hand in the night sky. I wish it sounded like tinkling bells and xylophones. I would be sad if it sounded like techno, but I’d get used to it. It turns out, though, that it looks like a warehouse of space junk, and it sounds like an industrial-strength air-conditioning system. Beyond the screen, the internet looks like everything else. It looks like money.
Smallwood’s prediction prefigured what the backrooms look like: A warehouse of junk with an HVAC system, that looks like every other cynically, expedient commercial building that looks more as though it were printed than designed.
Perhaps you can see how the metaphors between the backrooms and the internet itself multiply from here: Like the backrooms, one can lose oneself forever in the internet. Like the backrooms, one can find faithful representations of human behavior, and unfaithful representations. One can, on the internet, even encounter trolls akin to the golem versions of real people that we see in the film.
Likewise, it’s telling that the backrooms mythos originated on the website 4chan, the shadowy anonymous image board that has multifariously spawned incel and alt-right culture, the QAnon conspiracy, and a $90,000 objet d’art.
There’s one other big clue that this is all just a huge metaphor for the internet, and that has to do with the company in the film, Async. Phil, the dorky and faintly sinister middle-aged employee of Async, explains to Mary that his company used to make MRI machines. But now, the company has devoted itself to studying the backrooms — which, he explains, might be the biggest discovery in human history.
That hyperbole is similar to how Silicon Valley’s techno-optimists talk about their industry. At various points in history, tech scions like Zuckerberg, Musk, Jobs, or Altman have variously claimed that AI, or the internet, or the metaverse, or crypto, or whatever’s the tech du jour, is the biggest thing ever. From the 1980s to the 1990s, plenty of technical companies (like Async) were pivoting towards computing and away from whatever it was they did before. Nintendo was a playing card company that switched to video games. Nokia manufactured rubber products like galoshes until pivoting to telecommunications. Samsung originally sold dried fish and groceries. The fictional Async is merely following the same trajectory.
If the backrooms are a metaphor for the internet, it’s certainly an unsettling one. Protagonist Clark loses himself in it, transforming into an unapologetic narcissist surrounded only by facile representations of humanity. That’s pretty accurate to what the internet is doing to a lot of us these days.
