I found a place': how Backrooms captures the horror of sinister architecture

Clark, a furniture store owner, discovers a portal in his showroom basement leading to a mysterious realm of backrooms. He tries to explain the experience to his therapist, Dr Mary Kline. The film uses liminal spaces such as offices and dead malls to create horror in places that feel neither fully here nor there. The backrooms concept is tied to non-places that lack relational, historical, and identity meaning, and to junkspace produced by modernism’s leftovers. The visuals and conceptual framework come from a prior Blender and After Effects YouTube series, expanding a fictional fandom image of early-2000s dead malls into a feature-length thriller.

"When architect turned furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds a portal to a mysterious realm of backrooms in the basement of his showroom, he struggles to explain it to his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). I found a place This otherwise innocuous phrase becomes a chilling summary of the architectural horror conjured in Backrooms, the latest A24 thriller that takes us into the liminal spaces of offices, dead malls and other eerie places that exist neither here nor there."

"Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director the youngest ever to work with the studio produced a series of YouTube shorts titled Backrooms using just the free 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects. The series has now been turned into a feature-length film, although it retains its visual language and conceptual framework. Liminal spaces are those places that seem to be in-between other places, or have been left behind by the world."

"They are what philosopher Mark Auge called non-places, a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity. Architect Rem Koolhaas called them Junkspace. They are the leftovers produced by advanced modernism, where everything looked the same, and there was a dissolution of place, in favor of neutral, meaningless places such as airports and department stores."

"As the preeminent liminal space, backrooms, including Parsons's YouTube series, are a fictional fandom expansion pack of the dead malls of the early 2000s. In fact, the first image to bring liminal spaces into online conversation, posted in 2003, was from the renovation of a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. With the emptying of the big box store, there is the liminal."

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