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Now Playing: ‘Backrooms’ finds fear in the oddest places
By: Gordon Briggs
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As a young boy, I was in and out of hospitals a lot due to my asthma.
I remember late one night, while I was recovering from a nasty asthma attack, I quietly roamed around the empty halls of the hospital. I will never forget how eerie the feeling of being in that empty building was. I wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything in particular; it was the feeling of being forgotten about in this empty place that really frightened young Gordon.
That feeling of being trapped in a forgotten place is part of the appeal of Backrooms, a mostly effective horror film about being stuck in between spaces.
As he travels through the complicated network of rooms and passageways, he quickly realizes someone or something is in this place with him.
What makes the Backrooms visually unnerving isn’t what is there, but what isn’t.
The complete lack of furniture, personal belongings, or signs of life transforms an empty hallway into something far creepier. Rather than giving us the usual haunted-house set with black, shadowy brooms and cobweb-covered corners, the film employs a monochromatic, washed-out look. The color feels sterile and deeply uninviting.
Part of what’s effective here isn’t just this unusual space, but also how the film visually navigates it. Backrooms is a mix of a haunted-house story and a found-footage film. We explore this other dimension through both our P.O.V. and the handheld camera’s subjective P.O.V.
This creates a different kind of viewing experience because I found myself actually shifting in my theater seat trying to see what was around the corner. More specifically, manipulating ordinary spatial cues like windows, doors, and furniture short-circuits our brain’s natural ability to gauge distance, creating a movie in which “where” feels more threatening than “what”.
This is the latest example of liminal horror, an emerging subgenre of horror fiction that deals with the uncanny dread of transitional, empty, ordinary spaces.
Like many other liminal horror stories, Backrooms explores the idea of personal trauma through depictions of unsettling architecture, distorted time, and crushing isolation. Much like The Shining, this is a movie where the architectural and the psychological work hand in hand.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that I feel this is a 1-hour story with a 1-hour 50-minute runtime. Without spoiling too much, Backrooms is a movie divided into two parts. The first part is definitely more interesting than the second, where the film actually reveals its questionable-looking boogeyman.
Still, while other filmmakers spend millions of dollars and countless machines only to achieve mediocrity, Backrooms manages to craft something genuinely scary with a fraction of the resources. ★★★