In 2019, a strange image began to circulate on social media. It showed an empty hallway aglow with sickly fluorescent light, calling to mind the rear corridor of a movie theater or the cavernous antechamber leading to a mall bathroom. It’s actually a photo of a Wisconsin furniture store under renovation. It was taken in 2003, which explains its blurry patina.

The image was originally posted anonymously in a thread on /x/, the paranormal board on the bulletin-board site 4chan, in response to the prompt “Post disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” One user dubbed the space “the Backrooms,” describing it as “six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” This exchange sparked an online phenomenon, popularizing the so-called “liminal space” Internet aesthetic.

The concept of the Backrooms has long fascinated me, more from the architectural side than the horror side. There is a generational element to it: Most of us who were children in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s logged many hours at vast malls waiting for our parents. It’s also rich both theoretically (being a postmodern concept par excellence) and architecturally (being a vernacular interior par excellence).

A 16-year-old visual-effects autodidact named Kane Parsons released a series of short YouTube films in 2022 that take place in and elaborate on the eerie realm of the Backrooms. The series caught the attention of the film-production powerhouse A24, which gave Parsons the budget and resources to realize a feature-length adaptation, released theatrically this past spring. It was a watershed moment: A Gen Z content creator had penetrated the traditional, institutional studio system, and his work was so high-grossing that it broke records. In an era of exhaustively rehashed IP, Backrooms was sourced from public-domain Internet content.

Although it was inspired by a static image, the film’s plot is sprawling. Clark, a failed architect relegated to running a discount-furniture store in a California strip mall, has been kicked out of his house by his wife and now sleeps at the store. Outrageous electricity bills and strange ambient noises prompt him to investigate the store’s basement, at which point he passes through a solid wall and into the apparently interminable Backrooms.

The Backrooms set is Parsons’s pièce de résistance. It’s a disorienting, labyrinthine series of largely soundless, yellow-hued rooms. It’s littered with inanimate objects that scan as wrong: items fused together, or misshapen, or inappropriately scaled. Stairs lead to nowhere. Walls morph into chutes. Space expands and contracts. It might be endless. Also, there’s some kind of monster element.

The B-plot concerns Clark’s therapist, Mary. She has her own demons, having been raised by an agoraphobic hoarder mother, and she’s resentful of her selfish and controlling patient. A cryptic message from Clark lures her to the Backrooms. Mary has a showdown not only with her intransigent patient but with (spoiler alert) his manifestation as a monster, a gnarled, unnatural version of himself. And this is Backrooms’ key gimmick: The monsters are, in fact, ourselves, our worst qualities, our most pernicious instincts.

Monster Clark ambushes his shrink, and the ensuing chase scene is the best part of the movie: It is dramatically shot, revealing the terrifying scope and sheer infinite modularity of the space. In one memorable moment, a deep chasm reveals the extent of the Backrooms, which replicate endlessly into the void. Also, the Backrooms are being monitored by a company called Async, which has been trying to investigate the space after unwittingly discovering it. When asked what this place is, Clark answers, “It’s every place that ever was.”

Parsons is trying to do a lot, perhaps too much, with Backrooms. The movie’s plot and underlying message are undercooked. (Are the Backrooms the unconscious? A secret government project? Something else?) His aesthetic choices, however, are interesting and convincing. The 21-year-old director is clearly a digital native. Though he plays with found-footage tropes, aping a lo-fi VHS look, his world operates under a resolutely digital, video-game-inspired spatial logic, in which characters “no clip,” or pass through impenetrable barriers such as walls.

Parsons’s work is postmodern in the original, architectural sense of the term: The Backrooms are simulacra, copies for which no original exists—they approximate recent pasts through pastiche. The malls of the 1990s, whose heyday Parsons is too young to have experienced, were usually themed, using referential architecture with elaborate, exaggerated set pieces (such as those displays of giant plastic fruit in a grocery store). Backrooms boasts distortions of these already distorted visuals.