Backrooms’s Ending Subverts One of Horror’s Biggest Clichés

Spoilers follow for the plot and ending of Backrooms.

The cultural shift that turned horror cinema from a disreputable, rarely respected grind-house film genre into a billion-dollar-a-year mainstream business has done wonders for the genre’s overall quality. American horror movies from the ’60s to the ’80s in particular tended to suffer from the idiot-plot problem, relying heavily on the characters doing improbably dumb things like splitting up while being stalked by a serial killer or responding to creepy noises or unexplained blood trails by wandering into the dark alone. Filmmakers trying to rack up the bodies didn’t necessarily care whether the protagonists made believable decisions, as long as those decisions led toward sufficiently graphic kills.

These days, if horror fans feel an urge to yell, “Don’t go in there!” or “Why would you do that?” during a movie, the filmmakers were likely courting that response to goose audience tension. Backrooms, written by Ash Vs. Evil Dead’s Will Soodik and directed by 20-year-old YouTube phenomenon Kane Parsons (whose Backrooms videos have racked up tens of millions of hits), takes that consciously structured clash between horror-movie character behavior and relatable common sense a step further. They let audiences marinate in the protagonist’s discomfiting behavior for most of the movie before revealing why it all makes sense.

Early in the movie, failed architect and failing furniture-store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a portal into a seemingly endless, unpopulated liminal space filled with distorted reproductions of real-world rooms, objects, and even whole neighborhoods. These “Backrooms” are meant to be unnerving. They’re static and unforgivingly sterile. The architecture is unlikely and illogical. The fluorescent lighting blankets every scene with an insectile hum. It seems like Clark could easily get lost in this place, especially since it isn’t initially clear whether the Backrooms are static or a maze that might shift around him or close in on him. It isn’t even clear at first whether the Backrooms are Euclidean and whether retracing his steps will lead him back out. 

It also quickly becomes obvious that he’s sharing the place with a violent, destructive entity. But not only does Clark keep exploring, he brings in his employee Kat (Shrinking’s Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend, Bobby (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’s Finn Bennett), to help him document the place. Clark doesn’t seem particularly brave, and he lacks Bobby’s cocky, excitable cluelessness. Clark flinches when he hears distant roars and flees when the mysterious entity gets close. He knows something scary is happening. Still, he keeps returning, pushing deeper into this suspiciously empty new world as heedlessly as campers headed into the woods for some ill-advised nookie in a Friday the 13th movie. Why? We don’t find out until the movie’s climax.

Even before the portal opens, there’s something a bit off about Clark. He’s an alcoholic whose wife, Barbara, has kicked him out of the house because she’s tired of his late-night drunken binges and his belligerent lies about them. When his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) pretends to be Barbara in a role-play exercise inviting Clark to understand his wife’s perspective, he explodes with frightening rage, aimed not just at his wife but at anything and anyone that lets him deny all responsibility for what his life has become. 

When Clark disappears and Mary enters the Backrooms to look for him (in what initially seems like a Barbarian-style protagonist shift), it becomes clear why that repressed anger kept Clark coming back to this haunted landscape. Where most people in past Backrooms videos see these liminal spaces as threatening, oppressive, and alien, Clark finds them comfortingly undemanding. He’s already at odds with the real world, where he believes all his defeats are arbitrary or the results of other people failing him. Stepping into a new world lets him escape other people’s judgment and the mess he’s made of his life.

That escape also reveals the profound depths of his narcissism. Some of the things he says to Barbara or Mary earlier in the movie seem selfish or self-pitying, but discovering the Backrooms and claiming them as home lets him feel self-righteous as well. He knocks Mary out, hauls her down into a lair he’s made, ties her to a chair, and tries to force her into a do-over of their therapeutic role-playing session, seemingly so he can show “Barbara” how calm, collected, and happy he is without her. Like a cheesy, cliché supervillain, he’s ready to monologue about how misunderstood he’s been and how his behavior is all justified. His self-satisfaction, it turns out, helped him make peace with the destructive monster stalking the Backrooms: It’s a hideously distorted reflection of Clark, in the pirate costume Clark wears in commercials for his store. 

Clark has a lot in common with Sam Neill’s corrupted scientist in Event Horizon. They both enter a dark, alien world that in some way mirrors their worst desires. They both embrace predatory atrocities as a means of shaping and controlling that world. And they both take the way that world responds to them as moral justification for their worst behavior. “Pirate Clark,” as Parsons calls the entity, definitely killed Bobby and probably killed Kat. (Unless Clark did it. Either way, her head is in the fridge in his Backrooms hidey-hole.) Nonetheless, Clark feels complete kinship with his bulgy, bloody 12-foot doppelgänger. He accepts it, empathizes with it, and cossets it. Justifying its behaviors as rational and proper is just an extension of justifying his own choices — including kidnapping Mary, storing Kat’s severed head, and mutilating and eating other Backrooms entities.

Those other entities don’t appear to be sentient or to feel pain. Presumably they’re distorted reflections of other humans. Possibly they’re less responsive and interactive because those humans aren’t present and engaging with them. Possibly they’re less developed, because whatever impulses created them aren’t as powerful as the rage Clark sublimated into his monster double. We just don’t spend enough time with them to draw conclusions — though if Clark’s corner of the Backrooms does reflect his intentions and desires, his psychosis may be keeping the other entities quiescent. He’s living in a narcissist’s paradise, after all: a place where the only other “people” are silent, undemanding automatons who don’t even object when he casually harvests their bodies for props or food. (How exactly did he first learn they wouldn’t scream or bleed if he cut them open and that their polyfill-like innards were edible? Shudder.) 

Mary disrupts Clark’s equilibrium with the Backrooms by refusing to validate his excuses for his behavior, fully calling out his failings, his petty assholery, and his glib, solipsistic lies. He pretends she hasn’t shaken him — but Pirate Clark, the outward manifestation of his inner demons, responds by sinking its teeth into him and leaving him to bleed out. Is it acting on Clark’s buried self-hatred? Did an inkling of doubt let Pirate Clark slip his control? Is it reflecting Clark’s anger at Mary but lashing out at the first available target? As Parsons himself joked when I asked him about it in an interview, maybe Pirate Clark is just reflecting that Clark was “feeling especially hungry that day.”

Regardless, there’s a clear symbolism to Clark empathizing and embracing a bloated externalization of his own inchoate fury until someone with an outside perspective disturbs his peace, and that fury breaks loose and devours him. Exactly what this all says about the Backrooms’ nature is up to interpretation and inference: There’s no way of knowing yet how unique or specific the space’s reactions to individual people might be. We might learn more if Parsons gets to make the Backrooms sequels he’s planned out — including whether Mary’s awareness of the Backrooms’ behavior has an effect on her own doppelgänger, glimpsed in the movie’s final shot.

Or maybe the mystery will always be the point. One of the other creatures parked in Clark’s Backrooms nest is a diminutive entity in velvety red that strongly recalls a still, silent version of the Little Man From Another Place, a signature character from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. That’s another story where characters enter an enigmatic parallel dimension, described as “a place of almost unimaginable power, chock-full of dark forces and vicious secrets,” and face destructive parallel versions of themselves. Across two TV series and a movie, Lynch never fully explained Twin Peaks’s Black Lodge, and it remains one of the franchise’s richest unknowns.

Similarly, Parsons and Soodik may never entirely explain the Backrooms. Really, it’d be a shame if they did — the enigma is more enticing than a pile of rote exposition. But by the end of Backrooms, they’ve at least revealed everything we need to know about Clark’s motives. He may act like the blithe, oblivious, self-preservation-impaired protagonists in the shoddiest horror stories. But like the Backrooms themselves, Clark has a lot of hidden depths, and the coy, knowing, then startling ways Backrooms explores them is a large part of what makes it such a creepy, thrilling experience.