I had to tell my therapist about Backrooms. That’s the highest praise I can ever give a piece of fiction.

Happy Halloween! Or, Halloween Eve. Whatever, we only have two more days of spooky season to soak up. I am trying to fit in as much scary fun as possible into the next 48 hours.

I mean, I love a good spooky story anytime. But this is when there’s so much readily available content! All the good horror movies come out. Or, in the case of the movie we’re talking about today, they come out on streaming so I can finally watch them.

Today, we are talking about the film Backrooms.

As soon as I heard this movie was coming out, I was apprehensive. I’m sure you already know this, but the Backrooms is a whole thing on social media. Ever since the original video by Kane Parsons graced the internet, we’ve all been a little obsessed with the backrooms and liminal spaces. Everyone wants to expand on the world, be part of the story, and add to the lore. Some people are better at doing that than others. But it felt very much like one massive game of Round Robin that everyone was in on.

And no one killed anybody over it, so that was a step above Slenderman.

With this being such a beloved online story, I was very much worried that Hollywood wouldn’t do it justice. But then I found out that Parsons was co-writing it. That made me feel more optimistic.

Thankfully, my optimism was well placed. The movie was scary, dark, and quite well done. So today, let’s talk about why Backrooms worked.

It didn’t try to do everything.

As I mentioned earlier, and as you were probably already quite aware, there is a lot of Backrooms lore. Most of it’s written by anonymous users online. And I could very easily see the movie trying to shove references to every single popular Backrooms story or theory in there. That would have ruined the film, I think.

The story is simple. Our main character, Clark, goes in out of curiosity. His therapist, Mary, goes in to save him. Both get lost, in more ways than one. It’s simple, but this allows the eeriness of the place to penetrate through the story. Much like the backrooms themselves, it’s not cluttered. It’s so empty it echoes.

It respected the audience’s intelligence.

There is very little in this movie that’s outright explained. I think Mary’s motivations are a great example. We know that she lost her mother. We know that her mother had a mental illness that darkened Mary’s childhood.

We don’t know that Mary became a therapist to try to save people, like she couldn’t save her mother. But we can pretty much figure that out.

Not everything in a story needs to be spoonfed to the audience. You can just show what’s happening, and let them make their own conclusions. Backrooms seemed to understand this better than most movies I’ve seen.

We didn’t actually get answers, only assumptions.

Finally, I’m sure that some people watched Backrooms and were disappointed. This is true of every work of fiction; even Shakespeare had critics. But I imagine that some people are upset that their own pet theories about the backrooms have in some way been disproven.

If this is you, I have good news. This movie didn’t tell us anything definitive about the backrooms.

For some stories, that would be a huge problem. For this story, it’s kind of the whole point. The backrooms are not supposed to be understood. They’re supposed to be a mystery.

Yes, we do get an info dump from Clark. But he’s only telling Mary what he thinks is happening. He doesn’t have any facts to back up anything. We might think he’s right. We might think he’s wrong. But we know nothing.

I love this, because it’s the difference between telling a story and experiencing one. This allows the viewer to play along, turning a passive activity into a very active one. And when you’re active in the story, it becomes all the more impactful.

Have you seen Backrooms? Did I miss something important? Let us know in the comments. And I hope that you have a beautiful Halloween, Samhain, and anything else that you celebrate.

My book, Station 86 Volume One, is available now on Amazon! It’s got two dark sci-fi stories about murder and mayhem on the station of First Contact.