The Backrooms, Liminal Space, and the Rooms Inside Us

This spring A24 released Backrooms, Kane Parsons’s feature debut, and it has done something unusual for a horror film: it has given a lot of people a shared vocabulary for a feeling they already knew from the inside.

The premise, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is this. Clark, a furniture store owner and failed architect, finds a glowing seam in the wall of his basement. On the other side is a place that shouldn’t exist: endless rooms of dull yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights that never turn off, corridors that open onto more corridors, furniture that is slightly wrong, floors that don’t quite line up. Nobody in the film can say exactly what the place is, and the film is wise enough not to explain it.

But watch what Clark does with it. He doesn’t go to the police or a physicist. He brings his therapist, Mary, down there with him.

The obvious reading is that he wants proof, that he needs someone to confirm the place is real and he isn’t losing his mind. That reading is too small. The better question is why a man would bring the one person whose job is to understand him into a place no one else has seen. And once you ask it that way, the film stops being about an extradimensional glitch and starts being about something every therapist recognizes.

What the Backrooms actually is

The place under Clark’s basement is not a copy of the world. It is the world as it exists inside him. It is made of his own materials: the buildings he failed to build, the rooms he has lived and worked in, the things he has lost and the things he has pushed out of sight, all of it assembled by some logic that isn’t conscious and can’t be reasoned with from the surface. It is vast, it is unlit, it goes on past where he can see, and it has been down there the whole time, right under the place where he sells sofas.

That is the unconscious. Not a metaphor for it. A pretty literal rendering of it. Freud called it another scene; Parsons built it as a set. What makes the Backrooms frightening is not mainly the creatures, though there are creatures. It is the scale of the place, the sense that it goes on forever, that it was built out of you, and that you are in it alone. The fear is the fear of vastness without a witness.

Liminal space, revisited

A while back we wrote about liminality in psychotherapy, the state of being “betwixt and between.” Liminal spaces are transitional. They are the periods when a person has left one way of being but hasn’t yet arrived at the next, and they tend to feel ambiguous and disorienting. Our view then, and now, is that these in-between stretches are not obstacles to be hurried through. They are where the deep work happens, and part of what a therapist does is create a container sturdy enough that a person can stay in the uncertainty long enough for something new to take shape.

The Backrooms is a liminal space taken to its limit. A hallway is by definition a place between places, somewhere you pass through on the way to a room. The Backrooms is nothing but hallways. It is the between with no arrival. And it is worth noticing that this is the image a generation has reached for to describe dread. Not a haunted house, not a monster, but an empty corridor that never ends.

The inner world is bigger than we would like

Therapy, at least the kind we practice, is the exploration of a person’s inner psychic world. Not the correction of it or the tidying of it. The exploration of it. Below the version of ourselves we present in a meeting or at a dinner table there is a much larger place: old attachments, feelings we never had words for, wishes we would be embarrassed to say out loud, grief that never got its turn, anger at people we also love. Rooms and rooms of it.

Most people have some sense this place exists. What they tend not to have is any wish to go there. And that reluctance is not foolishness. It is a reasonable response to the same thing that makes the Backrooms unsettling. The inner world is vast, it is not well lit, and it can feel as though there is no exit once you are in. A feeling arrives and seems as though it might not stop. A memory opens onto another memory. You take a step toward something painful and cannot see the far wall.

So we stay in the front rooms. We keep the conversation on the schedule, the symptoms, the plan. We say “I’m fine” and mean “I would rather not look.” Often that works, until it doesn’t.

Why he brings her down

This is what the film understands. Clark does not go down alone, and he does not bring just anyone. He brings the person he has been sitting across from, the person who has already been listening to the surface of him for however long, and he takes her by the hand into the part he could never say out loud. He brings her because that is what therapy is, when it is working. It is not a therapist standing at the top of the basement stairs taking notes on what the client reports seeing. It is two people going down together.

That is what clinicians mean by intersubjectivity. A mind is not a sealed building one person walks around inside. It is built, from the very beginning, between people. An infant does not learn what it feels by looking inward; it learns by being looked at, held, responded to, misunderstood and then understood again. The feelings we can bear are, to a surprising degree, the feelings someone else once helped us bear. The rooms that stay dark are often the ones no one ever entered with us.

So experience is not simply “in” one person. It takes shape in the space between two people, and it changes depending on who is in that space and what they can tolerate. The same feeling that is unbearable alone can become merely difficult in the presence of someone who is not frightened by it. The Backrooms, in the film’s own logic, reshapes itself around whoever is in it. The inner world works the same way. It is not the same place with a witness as it was without one.

What actually happens in the room

When someone comes into our office worried that if they start feeling things they will fall through the floor and never find their way back, we take that seriously. It is a real fear of something real. The inner world really is that big.

What we can offer is not a map. Nobody has a map of another person’s inner world, and anyone who claims to should be treated with some suspicion. What we can offer is company. Two minds go in instead of one. The space is no longer empty, and because it is no longer empty it is no longer the same space. Something that looked like an endless corridor from the doorway turns out, once you are standing in it with someone, to be a room with a shape, a history, and, often, a way through.

That is the work. Not fixing the rooms. Not pretending they aren’t there. Entering them together, at a pace the two of you can stand, and discovering that the vastness was always more survivable with a witness than it looked from outside.

Clark brought his therapist into the Backrooms. Every person who comes to therapy is, in some quieter way, asking to do the same thing.