When Architecture Becomes the Monster: A24's Backrooms Explained
Horror cinema has given us countless villains — masked killers, demonic entities, supernatural forces lurking in the dark. But A24's highly anticipated Backrooms takes a radically different approach to fear. Here, the villain is not a person or a creature. It is a place. More specifically, it is the soul-crushing, fluorescent-lit, eternally empty corridors of what theorists and internet communities have come to call liminal space — and the film weaponizes that concept with extraordinary architectural precision.
Based on the viral internet myth that originated on 4chan in 2019 and later exploded into a vast creative mythology through Kane Pixels' found-footage YouTube series, the Backrooms concept describes a hidden layer of reality accessible only by "noclipping" through solid walls. What awaits on the other side is not darkness or fire — it is something far more psychologically corrosive: an infinite maze of yellowed wallpaper, humming fluorescent lights, stained carpet tiles, and the oppressive silence of spaces that were never meant to be inhabited.
What Is Junkspace and Why Does It Terrify Us?
To fully appreciate what A24's Backrooms is doing architecturally, it helps to understand the concept of junkspace — a term coined by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in his 2001 essay of the same name. Koolhaas used junkspace to describe the leftover, unconsidered, and spiritually hollow built environments that late capitalism produces in abundance: airport terminals, shopping mall corridors, office building lobbies, parking structures, and back-of-house service corridors that no architect ever truly designed with human dignity in mind.
These spaces exist everywhere. They are the maintenance hallways behind hotel ballrooms, the basement corridors of university buildings, the server rooms and supply closets that make modern commercial life function while remaining deliberately invisible. We pass through them without looking. We forget them almost immediately. And yet, when stripped of their context and presented in isolation — as the Backrooms mythology does — they become profoundly, inexplicably frightening.
The production design team behind A24's film clearly understood this dynamic. By recreating and amplifying the aesthetic hallmarks of junkspace — the drop ceilings, the institutional carpeting in faded geometrical patterns, the banks of flickering overhead tubes — they have constructed an environment that triggers a deep, almost pre-rational sense of wrongness in the viewer.
The Psychology of Liminal Spaces on Screen
The term liminal space refers, in architectural and psychological terms, to a transitional space — a place that exists between two destinations rather than as a destination itself. Hallways, stairwells, waiting rooms, empty parking lots at 3 a.m.: these are liminal spaces. They are designed to be passed through, not inhabited. When they are empty of people at the times we expect them to be populated, something in the human brain registers an instinctive alarm.
This reaction has a name in internet culture: the concept of wrongness without danger, or more colloquially, the feeling that something is deeply off even though nothing threatening is immediately visible. Psychologists have linked this sensation to evolutionary threat-detection systems. An empty space that should be occupied suggests that something may have caused all the people to leave — predator, disaster, or some other force we cannot yet identify.
A24's Backrooms exploits this psychology relentlessly. The film reportedly features extended sequences with no dialogue, no musical score, and no visible threat — just the protagonist moving through corridor after corridor of identical, decaying commercial space. This restraint is itself a form of sophisticated horror filmmaking, trusting the architecture to do the emotional heavy lifting.
Kane Pixels and the Found-Footage Mythology
The film's roots in the Kane Pixels YouTube series are essential context for understanding its visual language. Kane Pixels, the teenage filmmaker who created the series starting in 2022, established an aesthetic built on degraded VHS textures, handheld camera instability, and an almost documentary commitment to the mundane physicality of the spaces depicted. His videos went viral precisely because they felt real — not in the sense of believable supernatural events, but in the sense that the spaces themselves were photorealistic recreations of places everyone has seen and instinctively feared.
A24, the studio responsible for some of the most formally ambitious horror films of the past decade — including Hereditary, Midsommar, and Talk to Me — is well positioned to translate that aesthetic into a feature-length theatrical experience. The challenge, as the production design team has discussed in interviews, was scaling the lo-fi internet aesthetic into something that could sustain 90-plus minutes of cinematic tension without losing the essential ordinariness that makes the concept frightening in the first place.
Production Design as Psychological Instrument
What distinguishes the set design of Backrooms from conventional horror environments is the deliberate absence of conventional horror signifiers. There are no Gothic arches, no blood-stained walls, no dramatic shadows cast by a single swinging bulb. Instead, the design team has reportedly focused on:
- The precise recreation of 1980s and 1990s commercial interior palettes — the specific beige, taupe, and institutional green that defined a generation of office parks and shopping centers.
- Fluorescent lighting calibrated to emit a slightly incorrect color temperature, creating an almost imperceptible but deeply uncomfortable visual environment.
- The use of acoustic ceiling tiles and low drop ceilings to create a sense of compression and containment that subtly signals danger without announcing it.
- Strategic imperfections — water stains, peeling corner joints, a single displaced ceiling panel — that suggest long neglect without tipping into obvious decay.
Each of these choices is, on its own, almost invisible. Together, they produce an environment that accumulates psychological pressure with every scene.
Why This Film Matters for Horror and Architecture Criticism
A24's Backrooms arrives at a moment when cultural anxiety about the built environment is unusually high. Audiences worldwide have spent the past several years navigating pandemic-emptied offices, shuttered malls, and the ghostly corridors of institutions that seem to be failing. The film channels that ambient dread into something more focused and more honest than most horror cinema dares to attempt.
By making architecture the villain — not a metaphor for the villain, not a backdrop to the villain, but the actual source of the horror — the film raises genuinely interesting questions about how the spaces we design and inhabit shape our psychological states, our sense of safety, and our understanding of what it means to be somewhere rather than nowhere.
For fans of psychological horror, production design enthusiasts, and anyone who has ever felt a flicker of unexplained unease walking through an empty office hallway late at night, Backrooms promises to be one of the most formally rigorous and emotionally resonant horror films in recent memory. The monster has always been the building. A24 is finally letting it speak.