Backrooms

What if the world doesn’t make sense

My review of Backrooms:

The film terrifies because it asks what happens when man rejects God, keeps his guilt, and wanders through a world he can no longer understand.

from my article at The Blaze:

“Backrooms” came out of internet lore to take down “The Mandalorian.” Perhaps audiences are turning on Disney. The film is now a smash hit theatrical release, but its story began online, where it grew from a 2019 4chan image and creepypasta into one of the most recognizable examples of liminal horror: familiar spaces that somehow make no sense.

The idea began on 4chan’s paranormal board, where a discussion about “disquieting spaces that just feel off” led to a user defining the Backrooms as spaces where you “noclip” out of reality. The term comes from video games, where a player slips outside the designed bounds of the game into unintended space. The Backrooms are marked by yellow wallpaper, buzzing lights, and seemingly infinite rooms.

‘Backrooms’ asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

These spaces are liminal, meaning they should function as transitions. Hallways, corridors, and waiting rooms are meant to have an entry point and a destination. What makes the Backrooms terrifying is that they do not go anywhere. The hallway has no destination. That is not merely inconvenient. It is a picture of purpose removed.

The movement, then, runs from liminal horror to cosmic horror. Liminal horror unsettles us because a familiar space no longer performs its purpose. Cosmic horror goes further. It asks whether all of reality is like that. The terror is not merely that something bad may happen inside reality. The terror is that reality itself may not make sense.

On the surface, life seems familiar and coherent. But as we move through it, life often becomes stranger and harder to explain. It does not turn out as we hoped. Our efforts fail. Our goals recede. Our explanations collapse. That is the fear beneath the fluorescent lights: not monsters, but meaninglessness.

We assume reality can be understood. When failure comes, we think we need more information, more self-help, more discipline, or a better method. Then we try again. We expect success. But we fail again. The failures accumulate. And life gets shorter.

Read the rest here:

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/backrooms-is-horror-for-a-self-justifying-age