Anxiously Excited for the Backrooms Movie
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Anxiously Excited for the Backrooms Movie
I am excited for the upcoming movie . As I explained to some friends graduation dinner party, the notion of the liminal space has stuck with me ever since it was first popularized on the Internet. But technically the fictive place known as the Backrooms actually builds on the more rudimentary notion of liminal spaces; it adds more “structure,” as a mathematician might say. The major distinction between the two is that the Backrooms augments every liminal space with a terrifying monster (or, rather, an “entity”), the most famous one (“the Lifeform”) starring in the original short film The Backrooms (Found Footage). It was the success of this short film that liminal spaces and entities occupying these nether realms became tightly coupled.
The expository commentary I’ve just provided hopefully does not suggest that I am discontent with this: I have cleared the entire Escape the Backrooms Steam game with my internet friends and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, both those of bathing in the liminal worlds and outcompeting the entities inhabiting them. I simply find this moment in media culture (if those are the right words) riveting. The concept of the liminal space will finally be thrown upon those who haven’t found it on the Internet yet in the form of a cinematic thriller. And I just wonder what people will think of the feeling of these places. “They go on and on,” as it is said in the trailer. Mostly, I wonder if they will walk away from the picture thinking about if they exist in the real world—because, for me, they do.
The liminal space permeates virtually every aspect of my life. And the broad universality of them—they can be indoors or outdoors, for example—means that I don’t have to look very far to know where they manifest; what’s an empty staircase in my office building for you is another world with a much different meaning for me.
When I discovered the Internet coinage of the phrase “liminal space,” I back-determined that it was precisely these uncanny environments that I felt so stranded in when I was younger. Vacant libraries, parking lots, empty office buildings, unattended construction sites… I spent hours wandering around, alone, in these places, trying to understand them and my feelings of being engulfed in them. For me, learning of this Internet neologism was similar to finally receiving a diagnosis. While I am careful to scrutinize the intuitive feeling of security offered by a confident label, it most certainly can help us point somewhere: “See! That’s what I was talking about.”
And I struggle to communicate to others what exactly a liminal space is and what it does to me. When I am by myself, my decision to take one path or another is often directly influenced by my relative location to a liminal space—and I am typically acutely aware of where they are located. Every so often, though being in a group of people frequently quenches these worries, I might say, “I’ll wait outside.” (It’s the most passive phrasal of “I can’t go in there” that I can currently come up with.) It is far too difficult to explain that I cannot enter this place because I have seen it under its nether illumination.
But a major source of agitation is that I grew up in the mouths of these liminal spaces: they nurtured me, comforted me, and got me used to being alone, with myself, in a suspension of all time and transience. There was a comfort in the uncanny. The rooms are not of the real world. As lonely and lost as I feel treading the silent hallways of a department of engineering… I know this place. I must add that it is not just in physical space that you can get lost in these spaces: if you played growing up (at least in its earlier stages), it is not unlikely you have caught yourself staring off into that voxeled sunset over the voxeled plains or desert as played softly in the background.
What I find myself thinking when I am captive in these places is nothing far beyond what one of the most magical scene in cinema depicts: in , Michael Shannon, driving his small, fast-asleep family home one dark and thunderous night, parks along the side of the road, gets out of the car, stares at the distant, ferocious lightning, and asks to nobody, “Is anybody seeing this?”
What worries me the most is that I will never be able to part with these feelings. I will not find a remedy that can untangle the sorrow sewn in my head as I stand at the base of an empty, cascading lecture hall that I once used to teach in, or gaze at an empty courtyard where I once hosted a musical-guessing game. These are the strings that are plucked by the ghosts that haunt me. And, yet, always inside of me will be an impulse to run off and pay worship to these tragic rooms. I need them, as devastating as they can be to me.
And that is the question I hope to get an answer to once this Backrooms film comes out: maybe, just maybe, some people will finally be seeing this.
Notes/References:
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The original short film that was the impetus for the feature-length movie: The Backrooms (Found Footage)
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An official trial Backrooms | Official Trailer HD | A24
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The scene from that I’ll never forget: Take Shelter - “Is anyone seeing this?” . The
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