A24 and Atomic Monster have recently confirmed a movie adaptation of The Backrooms, a Youtube short horror film (expanded to a series) created by 17-year-old director and VFX artist Kane Parsons.
Based on the namesake creepypasta, The Backrooms is set in a seemingly infinite labyrinth of yellow-tinted, carpeted office spaces, bathed in fluorescent indoor lighting, like an abandoned building, in 1996. Its kitsch corporate aesthetic is reinforced by the imitation of the VHS tape recording style that allows Parsons to hide imperfections (or avoid an uncanny valley effect) of a simple 3D scenario created in Blender and edited in Adobe After Effects during the post-production stage.
Furthermore, the video set of The Backrooms recreates an image originally posted on a 4Chan board devoted to “disquieting images that just feel off” back in May 2019. What the original eerie image and most of the thread’s responses had in common was a sense of liminal space and Parsons took the unsettling stories that users started creating around these spaces to the next level.
After the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, the anthropologist Victor Turner referred to liminal entities as "neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned" in his book 'The Ritual Process' published in 1969. Later, the concept was used by psychologists and architects to define a transition between two other locations, or states of being—psychological and physical, respectively. Nowadays, liminal space as a concept has evolved into an aesthetic in itself: empty paths, hallways, waiting rooms, lobbies, or even abandoned malls caring an “eerie and unsettling vibe”.
As Stewart Hicks explained, architects and anthropologists have explored the in-between spaces over the last decades, attributing their existence to the consequence of Modernism. For example, in 1992 French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term ‘non-place’ to refer to "spaces formed in relation to certain ends", like highways, service stations, or hotel chains, where human beings remain in solitude despite how crowded non-places can be and what they do or experience is predefined by their alleged role—like the role we play as passengers or drivers when traveling on a highway.
In 1995 Spanish architect and philosopher Ignasi de Solà-Morales brought the concept of terrain vague to define those obsolete and unproductive urban spaces left out of productive structures. Unlike Augés’ concept, a terrain vague is emptied of activities, an “inner island” with imprecise limits instead.
While in 2002, Rem Koolhaas published the essay Junkspace, a neologism, the founder of OMA extensively provided definitions about it, like describing it as “what remains after modernization has run its course”. Junkspace typologies are able to deploy a rational, endless program by the “infrastructure of seamlessness”, namely escalators, air-conditioning, sprinklers, fire shutters, and hot-air curtains.
Junkspace, non-places, and terrain vague are not places to be remembered, and neither are expected to be creepy or fearful. What liminal aesthetics have achieved is making in-between space images uneasy by subverting their nature.
Drawing on Augé again, non-places are defined partly by their instructions for use (Exit, No Smoking, Meeting rooms←, Lobby→, Return Route). Thus, when instructional signs are not present in transitional locations, as it happens in liminal spaces images, those places lose their sense of existence. Despite how crowded a hotel’s dining room can be during breakfast time, guests seldom run into others when walking along the empty, silent corridors later in the day. Therefore, a hotel pathway without instructions disorients users as they are left to navigate it alone without guidance.
Without instructions for use, it just feels off.
At the other end, The Backrooms hyperbolizes instructions: signs are everywhere but are erratic, contradictory, or simply useless. In a particular scene, an abyss keeps the protagonist away from a gigantic facade filled with endless pavilions featuring the same green running-man instruction above: "Exit". If signs in a non-place fool you, then you will not know how to use them.
The short film directed by Parsons also recalls features discovered in Koolhaas’ essay: junkspaces are always rendered as interior spaces and “promotes disorientation by any means”. In fact, the main character wanders through identical yellow rooms that look like corridors or corridors that look like rooms, where the absence of office partitions or useful furniture reinforces the confusion about where he is. In junkspaces such as shopping malls and airports, limits are intentionally hidden while disorientation is a consequence of well-tuned consumer behavior strategies, security measures, and sophisticated workflows where people are treated just like any other good—that’s why airports are designed like phone cases for already optimized workflows.
In The Backrooms, this sense of disorientation while wandering in an endless interior space is intensified by the script (and original creepypasta): the protagonist is literally hurled from the ground into the yellow environment, which means he unintentionally noclipped—a term borrowed from videogames—, so not only it is claustrophobic to find the exit but the starting point as well.
Unlike ruin porn, images of liminal spaces may convey a certain level of deterioration, anonymity, or simply bad taste, but there are details that demonstrate that they are functioning still. For example, the fluorescent lights of The Backrooms, the plant at the Sassoon Docks Art Project in India, or the illuminated rooms in a real picture of the Holiday Inn Express London Heathrow T4 in London. These images' details trigger something eerie in us because they unveil that people have been there, but we are not sure if they are still present, or if they have been replaced by odd creatures.
Therefore, we can recognize these places, but at the same time, we can’t.
