By J. Simpson

Kane Parson’’s Backrooms functions as a layered critique of late modernity, which is perhaps one of the reasons for its mass crossover appeal. On its surface, the backrooms function like any other labyrinth, in horror or otherwise, complete with its own minotaur. A second level is specific to the space itself as well as its occupants, speaking to the uncanny eeriness of liminal spaces in-and-of-themselves as well as the often hostile infrastructure of modern living, adding a poignant undertow of alienation, isolation, and estrangement to the space’s soft yellow malevolence. The backrooms would be creepy, unsettling, and even a little sad even if they didn’t exist in their own pocket dimension. Lastly, the third layer considers the backrooms, in all of their sprawling disorientation, as a visualization of the malaise underpinning modern life as a psychological or even a spiritual realm, a late-capitalist hell from which there is no escape. They somehow manage to convey both the cynicism and unease of modern living – everything being replaced by “cheap pasteboard crap” as Clark puts it – and the sneaking sense that perhaps we had it better than we thought. Yes, the budget department stores, big box chains and local malls may have killed Main Street while being tacky and gauche, but they were better than nothing.

With their associations with depths, darkness, and unseen dangers, labyrinths seem to be inherently linked to fear, anxiety, and even dread. As a psychiatrist told T.S. Eliot To speak, is to speak of darkness, of labyrinths, Minotaurs, and of terror.” (Attali 73) At best, they can represent the primal panic of getting lost; first, as a symbol of the childhood anxiety around individuation and, then, later as a reminder of the need for sheer survival. Considering that we’ll die without water within three days, a month without food, and that herd animals separated from the pack are soon to perish, it’s little surprise that getting lost is mentioned in the first stanza of Dante’s Inferno, arguably one of the first horror novels. To Dante, being lost in the woods served as a metaphor for aimlessness, confusion, loss of faith and purpose. It was, quite literally, the first step towards Hell.

That’s speaking solely of the dangers of the structure of the labyrinth itself, which is anxiety-inducing even with a goal in mind and the promise of a prize. That anxiety becomes existential when there’s no end in sight, as mentioned by Medievalist Penelope Doob in a footnote of her classic analytical text The idea of the labyrinth from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages. “One cannot take centers for granted in the labyrinths of our own century: perhaps the fear that there is no center after all is part of the terror of the maze. Indeed, the absence of a center may be even more threatening than the presence of a minotaur, for reasons that Jacques Derrida explores: “The function of a center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements ‘inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself” (Doob 55). When anywhere can be the center, the Minotaur can be anywhere.

This invocation of Derrida positions the backrooms as what film theorist Jerold J. Abrams describes as an example of the “rhizomatic labyrinth” in his essay “From Sherlock Holmes to the Hard-Boiled Detective in Film Noir,” citing the other two wings of the unholy trinity of postmodernism, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. As Abrams notes, “As a labyrinth, the rhizome has no center; it has no perimeter; and, worst of all, it has no way out. Here, the Minotaur is still the form of the labyrinth itself (as in the mannerist maze), but now there is no escaping him with reason (or faith, or any combination of the two). For every Ariadne’s string only ever leads further into the labyrinth.” (Abrams 72)

The backrooms’ rhizomatic labyrinth also speaks to Michel Foucault’s invocation of the Panopticon, a circular prison where inmates are constantly under supervision. While discussing Anthony Vidler’s theory of the architectural uncanny, Rafael Dernbach uses the glass walls of modern architecture to symbolize the voyeurism and performativity of life under the surveillance state, subjecting everyday experiences to a series of “financial gazes,” resulting in vast stretches of modern life being rendered unhomely, the English translation of Freud’s concept of unheimlich or “uncanny.” Like the prisoners in Bentham’s prison, anyone who enters the backrooms is under constant supervision, both from the monstrous figure stalking the labyrinth as well as the shadowy organization monitoring the sprawling complex. To make matters worse, the backrooms seem to see all, drawing out the individual unlucky enough to find themselves among its catacomb’s most painful traumas

With its repetitive, despatialized interior design, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining is perhaps the closest association for the backrooms, further reinforcing the labyrinth metaphor. Even The Overlook Hotel, in all of its unhomely, unwholesome malevolence, is still rooted in a single place, however. As Stephen King himself notes in his structural analysis, Danse Macabre, the Overlook Hotel is still merely a Bad Place – a common archetype in the haunted house genre, often visualized as a building “with the weedy lawn, the broken windows, and the moldering FOR SALE sign.” (King) A Bad Place often looks bad, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. It often has an unsavory history, as well, but that, too, is optional. King goes on to speculate for some possible reasons for the existence of Bad Places, from unspeakable tragedies to some places being more porous than others to some places being outright cursed. However terrifying The Overlook Hotel and its inhabitants might be, at least it’s confined to one place. No such luck with the backrooms, which seem more like a structural layer underpinning all of modernity with no escape and no hope of reprieve.

With its impossible physics and accompanying monomania, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is probably an even closer and more apt comparison. At least the Navidson’s house had the decency to only have one entrance to its nether dimension and to look at least a little like one of the circles of Dante’s Hell. Despite its more innocuous appearance – or perhaps because of it – Kane Parson’s vision of eternity as a kind of endless dark K-Mart of the soul is even more depressing – and infinitely more dangerous.

The backrooms’ occupants – both animate and inanimate – further reinforce the themes of alienation, estrangement, and dread that characterize life in late modernity. Chairs and tables are divorced from their intended functions and their inevitable users. Stop signs appear as mirror images of themselves. The signifiers have become entirely divorced from the signifying, casting the wanderer into the forest of signs, as Charles Baudelaire put it, setting them forever adrift in the rhizomatic labyrinth, with nowhere for Ariadne’s thread to even lead them to. It’s the end-stage of the triumph of form over function (as also observed by fellow NightTide Magazine author Peyton Mills) in “Form Doesn’t Follow Function“); of style over substance, as chairs become cheap, chintzy plywood sculptures instead of a place to sit and talk with loved ones or rest after a hard day’s work. It’s the culmination of what Anthony Vidler calls “the architectural uncanny,” citing works of architectural theorists like Coop Himmelblau, known for their nonsensical postmodernist scribblings of theoretical architecture; the “dysfunction and dissociation” of Bernard Tschumi’s follies from Parc de la Villette to the grotesqueries of Diller Scofidio and Renfro – perhaps the closest visual analog to Parsons’ Backrooms. It’s the final, inevitable result of hostile architecture and design, where park benches are studded with spikes and sharp edges to discourage rest and buildings, and signage disorients, hypnotizes, and confuses instead of directing and clarifying.

With their eerie, desolate repetition and almost complete lack of recognizable life, the backrooms are most commonly associated with what have come to be collectively referred to as “liminal spaces,” creepy places devoid of context and living things, often rooted in nostalgia or childhood memories. They may even more precisely be described as a visualization of what theorist Marc Auge refers to as “non-places,” destinations with no rooting in time, space, or history, connecting nothing to nothing. To Auge, non-places are emblematic of a built environment increasingly abstracted from and possibly hostile to human life, possibly hostile to it. “A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel-·chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitue of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated for commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might be usefully be measured before we start wondering to what sort of gaze it may be amenable.” (Auge 78)

Even more precisely, the backspace could be seen as a spiritual manifestation of what architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas calls junkspace. According to Koolhaas, “junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.” (Koolhaas) They’re the tailings left over after modernity abandons even the pretense of the public good. At least the monumental architecture, public housing, and brutalist structures of the 20th Century had the decency to at least pretend to want what was best for the poor and disenfranchised while posturing as all-powerful and all-knowing. Instead, the backrooms are a visualization of capital triumphant, where the architects, builders, and moneylenders pretend there are no alternatives, leaving nothing but cubicles and empty, unused spaces stretching on to eternity, forever and ever amen. Worryingly, Pour’s movie seems to reinforce this conclusion, as every person unlucky enough to find themselves lost and wandering in the backrooms’ labyrinth becomes absorbed in their unknowable complexity. 

It’s a bleak vision of an even bleaker reality. This doesn’t have to be the case, however. The backrooms are as much a lo-res media artifact or video game environment as junkspace or non-place. As Hito Steyerl notes in “In Defense of the Poor Image,” poor-quality images are images in motion that have been “downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.” As architecture and physical space, the backrooms are terrifying. As a symbol and metaphor, there is a more emancipatory waiting to be unlocked, becoming what Steyerl calls “visual bonds,” citing The Man With the Movie Camera director Dziga Vertov. She compares poor-quality images to “The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams.” Instead of staying sequestered in the ivory tower, the backrooms, as a symbol, construct “a shared history.” The backrooms may represent much of what’s wrong with late modernity, but they could also hint at a way out. There may be an exit, but it will require a potent exorcism as well as a work of mass collective imagination – a vision of a better, fairer world and a floor plan for how to build it.

Works Cited:
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Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Translated by Richard Howard, David R.
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Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon Books, 2000.
Dante Alighieri. Inferno.
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Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1990.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre.
Koolhaas, Rem. Junkspace with Running Room. Notting Hill Editions, 2013.
Kubrick, Stanley, director. The Shining. Warner Bros., 1980.
Mills, Peyton. “Form Doesn’t Follow Function: How the Backrooms Update an Ancient
Existentialism for a Digital Audience.” NightTide Magazine, 29 July 2026,
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Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux Journal, no. 10, Nov. 2009,
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Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT