When I was a child, the nightmares that terrified me the most seldom involved ghosts, killers, demons, or any other entity desperate for screentime during my dream time. It almost always involved just a place.

This was always a familiar place, yet somehow uncanny. It often felt oddly serene, but had a malice of some sort that seemed woven into the space itself. There was something off about it that triggered a fear so primal that I’d often wake up in a cold sweat. Sometimes that dread would take shape as some vague, menacing thing pursuing me with unspecified intent and relentless determination. Most of the time though, the place itself was enough. But to know it, you must first have dreamt it.

So you can imagine my mounting horror when Kane Parsons’ feature-film adaptation of the internet age’s most infamous liminal space rendered that feeling with such astonishing fidelity. Even if the mere idea that an entire generation raised on internet lore might have somehow excavated the same corner of the collective subconscious is just as provocative to ponder, this was an archaeological reconstruction of a childhood anxiety so specific that it feels insane to witness materialise outside my subconcious. 

The case of Kane Parsons is a curious one. He belongs to the first generation of filmmakers whose artistic education involved internet culture, videogame lore, analogue horror, and the endless well of knowledge at the end of a satisfying YouTube rabbit-hole. Yet his imagination keeps circling ideas that predate the internet by decades, pointing towards more fundamental concerns involving space, memory or dreams, which enchanted and inspired cult genre voices like David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick.

The 20-year-old filmmaker behind the eponymous viral YouTube series built his reputation creating found-footage horror shorts through Blender and Adobe After Effects while still in high school. Those videos transformed a creepypasta inspired by a 2019 4chan image of an empty yellow room into one of the most defining horror mythologies of the internet. His feature adaptation for A24 follows Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect who now manages Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture showroom in California, in 1990. While investigating strange electrical faults in the store’s basement, he discovers a porous wall that leads into an endless uncanny-valley labyrinth of liminal rooms.

What follows is one of the most persuasive acts of spatial horror I can remember seeing in years. Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette conceive the notoriously inconceivable Backrooms as a world assembled from half-remembered instructions about reality. The ingenious set design finds countless ways to visualise the original mythology’s notion of “noclipping” from reality, scattering glitched furniture and half-submerged domestic detritus throughout the maze, while the winding geometry often evokes an Alice in Wonderland-style descent into ever deeper layers of spatial absurdity. Piss-yellow lighting against the dull, lifeless officecore purgatory notwithstanding, Jeremy Cox’s marvellous found-footage cinematography compounds the unease through compositions that constantly deny any semblance of spatial certainty.

Even though I have yet to read House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel exerts such enormous influence over the r/liminalspace subreddit that its mythic presence feels like an unavoidable comparison to draw here. It’s a useful allegory nonetheless, considering both liminal horrors are two of the most distinctly postmodern descendants of the Labyrinth of Daedalus, exacerbating the ancient terror of becoming physically lost with the far more contemporary anxiety of becoming epistemologically lost. It also feels surprisingly close to the anime concept of an isekai, a genre built around ordinary people crossing a threshold into another world governed by unfamiliar laws (the crucial difference, of course, being that this particular isekai offers no improbably devoted entourage of anime girls waiting to validate your existence).

Quite the opposite, in fact. Parsons populates the Backrooms with a profound and almost suffocating loneliness. Clark initially approaches his discovery with the curiosity of an architect stumbling upon the greatest structural anomaly in human history, painstakingly sketching maps of and excitedly recounting his findings to his therapist, Renate Reinsve’s Dr. Mary Kline. Ejiofor plays these early scenes with manic enthusiasm that gradually curdles into obsession as every expedition yields fresh impossibilities. The more time Clark spends attempting to understand the Backrooms, the less interested he becomes in maintaining a life outside them. 

In the final act, when Mary eventually ventures into the Backrooms in search of the missing Clark, Parsons attempts some potent, if slightly clunky, commentary about trauma and the subconscious mind. As Mary’s own reckoning with the labyrinth forces her to confront memories involving her childhood home and her emotionally troubled mother, one striking sequence — involving a static shot descending through successive layers of the same house, each iteration growing progressively more abstract and detached from reality — felt telling. Here, Parsons nudges at the idea that the Backrooms are a sprawling manifestation of buried memories and psychic debris.

So is this Parson’s critique of American excess and consumerist accumulation? Or a Synecdoche, New York-style metaphor for a mind slowly disappearing into itself? Both readings have enough evidence to sustain them, which is why I find them less interesting than the experience of inhabiting the film. There is a particular kind of art that resists intellectual dissection yet communicates with remarkable clarity on an emotional level, and the film does lose some of its potency whenever screenwriter Will Soodik attempts to convert sensation into explanation.

But what made Backrooms register so viscerally for me was how nostalgic portions of it felt. Parsons understands the peculiar, wistful wavelength of early-2000s dreamcore so intuitively that many of the images carry the strange sensation of remembering something you never actually experienced. Many of those visions are also supplemented by the woozy, retro-digital synth score he co-composed with Edo Van Breemen, which evoked the melancholy of Minecraft in many ways. And that atmosphere suspended my disbelief entirely and immersed me so completely in Parsons’ uncanny imagination that solving the riddle of the Backrooms became secondary to simply existing inside this glitching mausoleum for late-capitalist interiors. 

This may seem like an awful lot of analysis for a film whose lineage can ultimately be traced back to a photograph of an empty room, but the undeniably distinct hypnotic expansiveness of the complete Backrooms Experience™ hopefully justifies my indulgence. Horror periodically reinvents itself whenever a new generation discovers fresh visual vocabularies for old anxieties, and Parsons possesses a rare ability to translate the absurd and deeply unsettling mythology of the online world into a cinematic language that feels entirely his own. The internet, as it turns out, is a terrifying place. Even more so for unsupervised and unsuspecting teenagers intoxicated by its endless wonders, to accidentally no-clip into oblivion. 

Backrooms releases in Indian theatres this Friday