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(Deep Cuts) THE BACKROOMS Turns Internet Horror into a Maze of Trauma and Self-Destruction

By. Davalyn Baker 

 

The story of the Backrooms starts with a photograph. In 2019, on 4chan, a photo with yellow wallpaper and an empty, desolate office building became the popular creepy pasta entitled the “Backrooms.” Three years later, a 16-year-old Kane Parsons adapted this photo into a web series in Blender. From there, it blew up. Fast forward to 2026, 20-year-old Parsons is bringing the Backrooms from YouTube to the mainstream in his directorial debut.

In the film, we follow protagonist-turned-antagonist Clark as his life rapidly declines around him. To say that Clark is mentally unstable would be an understatement. He’s an alcoholic; he’s hanging on to the past of a failed architect career; his wife has kicked him out of the house (HIS house, that he constantly reminds his therapist and the audience), and he owns an unsuccessful furniture store. When Clark stumbles into the Backrooms, he wanders around like he’s Alice and this is his Wonderland. Only when he gets chased by an offscreen entity does it give him pause, but it does not stop him from continuing his exploration.

With each step Clark took, I found myself sinking lower into my seat. The dread was immediately there. The pale-yellow wallpaper, the emptiness, an uncanny representation of Clark’s memories – compiled of oddly organized furniture, piles of laundry, and still-life entities that represent relationships in Clark’s real life. After Clark’s discovery, he runs to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, informing her of the Backrooms. When she responds to his tale skeptically, he finds his store manager and her boyfriend to help prove his case. The scariest part of Clark’s story is how his isolation encompasses him, and because he refuses to do the work and takes full accountability for why he is so isolated, he pulls people into a literal vortex of despair with him.

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s acting as the man-child Clark is perfect. Watching Clark jump from 0 to 100 and right back to 0 unsettles you. You hate Clark, but you feel sorry for him, knowing that he will never get out of the Backrooms, because he will never understand that the true villain of his story is him. This is one of the first things you learn in therapy – if you’re willing to change. It may take shifting to the horror genre to acknowledge Ejiofor’s talent, so be it. He is a criminally underrated actor, and he shines the most in this film. I felt pity for Clark while also hating him, thanks to Ejiofor’s brilliant performance.

But Clark is not the only person in this film fighting demons. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, is a woman who has survived the trauma of being trapped in a home with her agoraphobic mother – who is later institutionalized. In a series of flashbacks and brief scenes, we see Dr. Kline still trying to make sense of what happened to her as a child. She holds on to her mother, grabbing a piece of demolished handprint from her childhood home. She is quite literally a therapist because she’s trying to fix the problems created by her mother. Concerned about Clark’s well-being after receiving a worrying voicemail, Dr. Kline soon finds the Backrooms after going to check on him. For Clark, he wanders around the Backrooms like a king, discovering new things about his kingdom. For Dr. Kline, a child who spent a life trapped in what felt like a never-ending loop of her mother’s crisis sees the Backrooms for what they really are: a prison.

THE BACKROOMS is hardly the first recent horror film to transform a maze into a psychological battleground. Check out our review of EXIT 8, another unsettling journey through an impossible space where survival depends on recognizing what is real and what is wrong.

In the Backrooms, you create a memory of your memories. But your memories may not always be honest. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus spoke about memory manipulation on the Speaking of Psychology podcast, stating that a person’s mental state can distort memory. If Clark, a man who feels like his life is falling apart fast, were to explore the rooms, the memories he creates would be beyond distorted. And Dr. Kline, a woman barely able to escape her childhood trauma, would have trouble finding her way through the Backrooms as well. Clark starts out as a broken man, hopeless about his life. His feelings, his true feelings, manifest a large, violent entity that resembles the Cap’n Clark mascot for Clark’s furniture store. Cap’n Clark kills his assistant manager Kat’s boyfriend Bobby, and it’s ambiguous whether Cap’n Clark or Clark-Clark kills Kat, but either way, this is what Clark wants and how Clark feels. Dr. Kline attempts to help Clark, but it results in Clark kidnapping her and trying to force her to reenact a previous role-play in which Dr. Kline again takes on the role of his wife. Dr. Kline finally admits aloud that she cannot save Clark, and if he wants to stay in the Backrooms, he’s more than welcome to do so. For Clark, this is wonderful. He doesn’t want to be met with opposition. He doesn’t want to be held accountable for the failures of his life. We finally see the Cap’n Clark manifestation, large and hulking.

Clark excitedly tells his entity, “It’s okay. This is our therapist. She says we don’t have to change.” What happens when you refuse to change or see your way out of a negative situation? What happens when you run from your problems instead of facing them?

It consumes you.

And so, Cap’n Clark takes a chunk out of Clark-Clark’s neck and shoulders, ultimately killing him. A chase follows, and Dr. Kline escapes one prison into another – researchers with Async have been studying the Backrooms for some time now. She asks if she’ll be able to leave but is not given an answer, and no answer is still an answer, even if it's no. The movie ends, but the story very clearly does not.

Although the ending is rushed and Dr. Kline’s story is almost treated as a throwaway as the film’s climax winds down, this is still a great film and best experienced on the large screen. In the end, the Backrooms are challenging you to either evolve or get lost in the maze of your life, constantly trying to figure out what went wrong. Dr. Kline realized she could not save her mother, and it helped her escape Clark’s manifestation. Kane Parsons’ film debut is an ambitious exploration of what happens when you cannot escape your demons. There’s also a brief focus on the dangers of capitalism that could have been given more emphasis in the story, but I believe that too many themes and “what it really means” would make the plot of this movie muddled and convoluted. The small plot revolving around the researchers with Async makes room for sequels, which I expect, given the film’s box-office success.

I look forward to seeing where he goes within his career, and I sincerely hope he doesn’t get stuck in the maze of stagnant creation with the Backrooms either.

If THE BACKROOMS asks what happens when a person refuses to confront their failures, OBSESSION explores the destructive consequences of fixation from a different angle. Read our review of the film and its examination of the stories people tell themselves to avoid uncomfortable truths.