Renate Reinsve in a scene from Backrooms.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Most Canadians have encountered a liminal space without even knowing it. Think empty airport lounges, hallways in windowless buildings, abandoned strip malls. Now filmmaker Kane Parsons‘s debut film, Backrooms, brings these creepy spaces to the big screen.
The idea of “liminality” comes from anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909. He used it to describe the awkwardness and uncertainty someone feels in the middle of a rite of passage. It’s the off-kilter feeling of being at the threshold of transition – a limbo between two states of life.
Fast forward to 2019: Users on online bulletin board 4chan posted photos of what they called liminal spaces, such as rooms or buildings used to transition from one area to the next, that appear eerie and unsettling when abandoned.
An anonymous 4chan user took the concept a step further, proposing a theoretical reality where liminal spaces went on forever. They called this fictional space “the Backrooms.”
In 2022, 16-year-old Parsons used 3D animation software to create a YouTube video called “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” in which a teenage boy falls out of reality, landing with his handheld camera in an endless labyrinth of liminal spaces inhabited by a violent monster. The video has 78 million views to date, and it’s the first in a series where scientists explore and try to research the Backrooms without getting lost themselves.
Kane Parsons, left, and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of Backrooms.Asterios Moutsokapas/The Associated Press
Parsons is now the director behind Backrooms, a theatrical adaptation produced by A24 in which British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor braves his own labyrinth of liminal spaces.
This isn’t the first time a horror story birthed online has grown into a Hollywood production. Slender Man, a lanky, faceless humanoid in a suit, who kidnaps children, was created in 2009 by Eric Knudsen on the Something Awful forum and later used in the viral Marble Hornets YouTube series. The character was the basis for the 2018 Slender Man film, which grossed US$51.7-million at the global box office.
Savvy production companies have started adapting these online stories because they come with built-in audiences, said Jeffrey Tolbert, a Penn State Harrisburg associate professor of American studies and folklore.
“The Slender Man film is an example of that. Here is a pre-existing, rich narrative tradition that was created for free by countless, semi-anonymous internet users,” Dr. Tolbert said.
Backrooms film review: A buzzy thriller that goes from freaky to sleepy
While online horror stories like Slender Man are based on “boogeymen,” the Backrooms is unique because it focuses on what Natalie Underberg-Goode – a University of Central Florida professor who’s written about liminal spaces – jokingly calls a “boogeyspace.”
“These spaces are not just empty, but they’re almost screaming that there should be people there,” Dr. Underberg-Goode said. The loneliness and endlessness of the Backrooms might scare some people because “there is no arrival,” she added.
The Backrooms, like Slender Man, is part of an online form of horror storytelling where social media or forum users, often those who grew up with the internet, develop complex worlds and folk tales collaboratively, she said. “Participating in these online spaces can be meaningful for people,” she said. “You’re part of a group that helped to create something.”
The concept of liminal spaces may have become popular during pandemic lockdowns because “we didn’t know when we would escape” from our own homes, she added.
The outdated technology used in media with liminal spaces – such as VHS tapes and handheld camcorder effects – also “obfuscates your understanding of time,” said Julio Ginter-Agreda, who researched the topic for his University of British Columbia master of architecture thesis. This effect can also be seen in the Apple TV+ drama Severance, where the main characters are kept in a secluded underground office with disorienting, endless hallways and futuristic security systems, yet they work on boxy computers with trackballs, send video messages to people using VHS players, and dance to music played on vinyl records.
Ginter-Agreda said this use of older technology can turn stories with liminal spaces into metaphors about change, such as how people view corporate life. He noted stories with liminal spaces often use “generic” and recognizable details from office architecture: soundproof carpets, wallpaper, fluorescent lighting and drop ceiling tiles.
Because of this, the Backrooms have “struck a massive chord for the newer generations” concerned about work-life balance in a tense job market, he said: “You could see yourself being trapped in spaces like these your whole life. Office culture is no longer glorified like it was back then when you heard it from your parents.”
Dr. Tolbert sees Backrooms as a significant moment for the future of online stories adapted into horror films.
And since Parsons is directing, Ginter-Agreda has “full confidence” that he will do justice to the Backrooms and portraying liminal spaces.
“With the success of shows like Severance and the critical acclaim that that has received, I think it provides a really good model of how to succeed. How to really hone in on that uncanniness, and to not be afraid to let the space be the monster,” he said.