When the Building Is the Monster: A24's Backrooms and the Horror of Everyday Space
Horror movies have given us killers with knives, creatures from the deep, and demons lurking in attic shadows. But A24's highly anticipated psychological thriller Backrooms takes a radically different approach: the villain is architecture itself. Specifically, it is the kind of soul-crushing, purposeless, endlessly replicating space that philosopher and architect Rem Koolhaas once famously called "junkspace" — aging carpeted corridors, humming fluorescent lights, and vacant office rooms that seem to go on forever without reason or destination.
Based on the viral internet mythology popularized by Kane Pixels' found-footage YouTube series, A24's Backrooms adaptation promises to bring one of the internet's most haunting urban legends to the big screen — and its production design team has leaned fully into what makes the concept so psychologically disturbing in the first place.
What Are the Backrooms? Understanding the Mythology
For those unfamiliar, the Backrooms began as a simple creepypasta: an image of an empty, yellow-wallpapered office corridor posted online with the caption suggesting that if you "noclip" out of reality, you might find yourself here — in the infinite expanse of empty rooms just behind the walls of the world we know. The image resonated because it captured something universally unsettling: the feeling of being in a space that is not quite meant for human habitation, a place technically built by people but somehow deeply inhospitable to human presence.
Kane Pixels transformed this internet legend into a found-footage horror masterpiece on YouTube, earning millions of views and the attention of A24, the studio behind prestige horror films like Hereditary, Midsommar, and Talk to Me. Now, the concept is getting a full theatrical treatment — and the production design decisions at the heart of the film are already generating significant buzz.
Junkspace: The Architectural Theory That Explains Why the Backrooms Are Scary
To understand why the Backrooms work as horror, it helps to understand Rem Koolhaas's concept of junkspace. First articulated in his 2002 essay of the same name, junkspace refers to the residue that modernization leaves behind — the endless, undifferentiated interiors of shopping malls, airport terminals, office parks, and hotel hallways that exist not to be experienced but simply to be passed through. Junkspace is architecture stripped of meaning, space that accumulates without intent, expands without purpose, and persists without memory.
The Backrooms, at their core, are junkspace taken to its logical and terrifying extreme. They are the office park that never ends. They are the corridor that loops back on itself. They are every liminal space — those transitional, in-between environments like empty swimming pools, school hallways at midnight, or shopping centers just before closing — amplified into an infinite, inescapable labyrinth.
A24's Production Design: Building Dread from the Ground Up
What separates A24's Backrooms from a simple jump-scare horror film is the deliberate, meticulous attention paid to making the architecture feel authentically wrong. In interviews, the production design team described sourcing real elements from aging office buildings: stained drop ceilings, industrial carpet in that particular shade of mustard yellow, flickering fluorescent tube lighting, and walls painted in colors that suggest function without ever quite achieving it.
The goal, according to the filmmakers, was never to build something that looked like a horror movie set. It was to build something that looked like a real place — a real place that had been forgotten, drained of life, and left to quietly decay at the edge of human consciousness. The horror does not come from anything jumping out at the audience. It comes from the sustained, creeping recognition that something is fundamentally, irrevocably wrong about the space itself.
- Authentic material sourcing: The production team used real office furniture, carpeting, and lighting fixtures pulled from actual decommissioned office buildings to ensure the spaces felt genuinely inhabited — and then genuinely abandoned.
- Deliberate spatial disorientation: Corridors were designed to subtly violate architectural logic, with proportions slightly off, sight lines that don't resolve, and layouts that resist mental mapping.
- Sound design as architecture: The omnipresent hum of fluorescent lights and the distant, sourceless buzz of HVAC systems were layered into the environment to make the space feel alive in the most uncomfortable possible way.
- Color psychology: The yellow-green palette of the Backrooms was chosen for its association with institutional environments — schools, hospitals, government offices — places where humans spend time under obligation rather than by choice.
Liminal Spaces and the Internet's Collective Anxiety
The cultural resonance of the Backrooms speaks to something much broader than a horror film trend. The explosion of the liminal spaces aesthetic online — entire Reddit communities dedicated to photographs of empty malls, deserted airports, and abandoned swimming pools — reflects a collective anxiety about the built environment and our relationship to it. These spaces feel haunted not because of ghosts but because of absence: the absence of the people who were supposed to fill them, the routines that were supposed to animate them, the purpose that was supposed to justify their existence.
In this sense, A24's Backrooms arrives at a culturally precise moment. In the aftermath of the pandemic, which transformed once-bustling offices and public spaces into eerie, vacant interiors almost overnight, the psychological vocabulary of liminal space has become part of everyday experience. Millions of people understand, viscerally, what it feels like to move through a space that should be full of life and isn't.
Why A24 Is the Right Studio for This Story
A24 has built its reputation on horror films that function simultaneously as genre exercises and as explorations of genuine psychological depth. Where mainstream horror studios might have turned the Backrooms concept into a straightforward monster movie, A24 appears committed to preserving what makes the source material genuinely disturbing: not the creature lurking in the dark, but the space itself.
This is a film where the architecture is not a backdrop for the horror — it is the horror. The endless corridors, the humming lights, the carpeted floors soaked in decades of artificial existence: these are not settings. They are characters. And in A24's hands, they may turn out to be the most terrifying antagonists the studio has ever put on screen.
What to Expect: A New Kind of Psychological Thriller
As anticipation builds for the film's release, it is clear that A24's Backrooms is positioning itself as something genuinely new in the landscape of psychological horror. By grounding its terror in architectural theory, liminal space aesthetics, and the lived human experience of junkspace, the film challenges audiences to confront not a fictional monster but a very real unease — the unease of spaces that exist without meaning, corridors that lead nowhere, and rooms that remember nothing.
Whether you discovered the Backrooms through a creepypasta post, a Kane Pixels video, or a late-night Reddit scroll through photos of empty swimming pools, the film promises to render that free-floating dread into something vivid, cinematic, and impossible to shake. When the building is the villain, there is no escaping it. You are always already inside.