Unlike the reverence for midcentury modernism that has been grounded in the belief that things were made better back then, today’s reminiscing of the 1990s by Gen Z youth is something else entirely. For those of us who lived through the era, watching the resurgence of low-rise jeans and babydoll tees has come with a shudder and a wince—after all, it’s not just a fashion but an atmosphere that we’re reliving. The ’90s in the U.S. were colored by a technology market boom that strengthened the middle class before its inevitable bust. It was a decade that dripped with the rise of corporate expansion and consumerism amidst Ronald Reagan’s pulsing afterglow. The growing commercial enthusiasm was built into our everyday details: Fluorescent-studded popcorn drop ceilings, seas of cubicles, overstuffed (or inflatable) furniture that tried to scream opulence while smothered in pastel florals; web-like shopping malls to trap every consumer imaginable. There was an aura of social collapse under a mountain of stuff we’d built and bought.

It’s the perfect setting, however, for Kane Parsons’s new A24 film, Backrooms. The horror flick is based on Parsons’s viral YouTube series that (borrowing an unauthored singular, awkward image of a strange empty room that made its way across the internet) uses “found footage” to tell a fractured story about an otherworldly dimension called “the backrooms.” Through 22 episodes, viewers encounter a maze-like wasteland that resembles an abandoned white collar workplace. Yellow wallpaper lines an endless clustering of rooms connected by doors and hallways; furniture and other artifacts seem to melt into the interior landscape that is lorded over by a malevolent creature.

Parsons, who was 16 years old when he released his first episode, garnered such a following from his online debut that A24 gave him the opportunity to turn the idea into a long-form story, one that fleshes out the throwback conglomerate aesthetics: We get a good dose of oversize shoulder pads, sure, but we’re also injected with a reminiscent shudder from the 1990s economic precarity and materialism. Rather than relying on a plot that spells out the era’s spirit, the film instead focuses intently on its scenic design to evoke a generational horror. Led by production designer Danny Vermette, Backrooms is as much a scary flick as it is a period piece set in the ambiguous late-’80s-early-’90s, rehashing the era not as a nostalgic time of millennial optimism or Gen X counterculture, but as a harbinger to the agonies of our present.

The movie follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an out-of-work architect, and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), the therapist who is guiding him through healing from his recent divorce. Through his recounting in therapy, we learn that Clark gave up architecture to support his now-ex wife’s education by managing a struggling furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, in a dying strip mall. One night while attempting to fix some unruly circuit breakers he discovers that the store’s basement contains an invisible passageway into the backrooms. We watch him transform from a curious architect, mapping out the strange dimension’s floor plans, to an obsessive explorer, drawing his therapist into a gruesome chase in the inescapable, maze-like space. Throughout the movie, the set and props play another character entirely: the backrooms seem to have a life (and memory) of their own.

When Vermette first read the script, he says he knew that the ’90s would play a significant role—not just in the story’s setting, but in its ethos—and wanted to create two distinct sets for the furniture store and the backrooms that would complement each other aesthetically. As Clark attempts to pilot his languishing furniture store, Vermette sought a palette that, he explains, would feel “desperate.” “We wanted to highlight that Clark isn’t doing so hot, but at the same time we wanted to make it beautiful; so how do we do that with the signage, with the color palette of the furniture, with the layout?” he says. The resulting interior features a variety of bulging La-Z-Boy recliners, maple bedroom and dining sets, and hand-painted signage reading “EVERYTHING MUST GO.” The store feels sparse and foreboding, with awkward columns and too-bright fluorescent lighting. But beneath it, through its yolk-colored basement wall, the backrooms echo Cap’n Clark’s subtle despondency.

Bringing the otherworldly backrooms to life involved building a 30,000-square-foot labyrinthian film set. Initially Parsons provided Vermette with a drawing of the layout that he created using Blender, an open source 3D-modeling software. The file was so large that his computer crashed, Vermette says. They carefully chose which spaces could be physically built, understanding that many of the scenes required creating something fantastical—long hallways in the backrooms become trompe l’oeils that lead to nearly impassable doors, Escher-like stairways mess with the viewer’s spatial reasoning. Some scenes trigger vertigo, while others elicit claustrophobia.

“Early on, it became apparent that we really wanted to convey a sense of verticality,” explains Vermette. “We didn’t want just flat, endless rooms, we wanted really awkward and interesting spaces for our actors to interact with, and to throw them into uncomfortable spaces, make them crawl through weird tunnels, and go up weird ramps.” Like Alice making her way through a sinister Wonderland, Clark and Mary squeeze, climb, and crawl through indiscernible passageways, pursued by the violent creature that resides there. But those moments of compression end with characters tumbling or emerging into large expansive spaces, wherein the jaundice wallpapered rooms host what seem to be remnants of civilization—piled furniture, a lit-up Christmas tree, a rotting swimming pool.

It’s almost as if Parsons and Vermette are recreating a real-life vision of architect Rem Koolhaas’s “Junkspace”—a term Koolhaas coined as part of his manifesto against the “litter” of modern life. “Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout,” Koolhaas wrote. These spaces aren’t memorable, but they are everywhere—airports, hotel ballrooms, office lobbies—and while empty they are also filled with accumulated stuff. (Koolhaas lamented the ubiquity of HVAC systems, fluorescent lights, escalators, and stainless steel.)

The backrooms seem to parody these junkspaces as viewers encounter odd infrastructure like mechanical remnants and lights that appear and disappear into walls—not unlike the defunct urban vestiges called Thomassons—and where furniture has no purpose other than to be amassed and arranged in delicate piles. In a conversation with filmmaker James Wan, Parsons expanded on the movie’s junkspace-esque hellscape, noting its roots in a flat corporate monoculture. “It’s the idea of spending all of existence in that place, in that nonspace, basically that industrial environment,” he explains.

Wan, in the conversation, calls it a “purgatory,” evoking the Backrooms mythology that has brought the original YouTube series to fame: Coming out of the Covid lockdown’s images of empty shopping centers and city streets, the internet became enraptured by other empty spaces—notably those in between (liminal) spaces like fire stairs, maintenance tunnels, connective hallways, and awkward empty rooms like that of the movie’s origins. Images of these places were shared ubiquitously online—copy/pasted enough times that they no longer had context or authorship, and took on a life of their own. It’s what one refers to as “creepypasta” and it was Vermette’s job to make internet lore appear real.

“These spaces don’t really exist, right?” Vermette says. "You’re trying to convey an almost seamless transition from the real world into something that is completely fabricated—other than a single photo that came from a creepypasta.” Shira Chess, associate professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia, believes that the rising popularity of liminality has birthed a new genre, complete with its own aesthetic. She calls it “Institutional Gothic.” In a recent MIT Press Reader story about Backrooms, Chess writes: “The Institutional Gothic occurs in winding or otherwise empty office spaces, consumed by machine-made mundanity and the unforgiving gaze of noisy overhead fluorescent lighting.” Like in previous Gothic horrors, she continues, the villain isn’t a monster but the creator of the monster; in an Institutional Gothic story, it’s the creator—the corporate overlords. Like the Apple TV+ show Severance, where the chilling ambiance is created by an omniscient corporate structure within a sterile, tangled office space, “the Institutional Gothic transforms a genre once fueled by phantasmal terror into the familiar, worldly dread of workplace alienation,” she writes.

Yet the Institutional Gothic isn’t limited to workplace institutions; at one point in Backrooms, Mary emerges from a frightening encounter with the resident creature, only to find herself locked in a suburban neighborhood enclosed by yellow wallpapered partitions. Here, even the longtime emblem for the American dream is a space for terror. Rehashing the mundane, banal horrors of a culture flattened by corporate glut isn’t exactly the feathered hair throwback to the ’80s and ’90s. Parsons smartly sets his film in an era that perhaps echoes our current day: In a deeply conservative environment with return-to-office mandates, a resurgence of nuclear family values, and the rising tide of a tech economy that runs the risk of flattening the middle class entirely, Backrooms’s early ’90s setting isn’t simply nostalgia for a bygone era. What if being ‘in between’ wasn’t just about fire stairs and maintenance tunnels, but a state of teetering between survival and collapse?

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