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Experiencing the film Backrooms feels like unlocking a new kind of terror. We’ve all heard of haunted houses. But what about haunted commercial buildings? Or, more specifically, haunted office spaces?
Something is unsettling about a large, well-lit space that goes on forever, room after room. In Backrooms, we see desks with no people, chairs stacked in odd ways, hallways slanting steeply downward. The effect is eerie. And what is that sound we hear? Is there somebody—or some thing—down here?
One of the most unsettling parts of this film—and there are many—is how this space seems like such a personal hell for a character named Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor). Clark discovers the back rooms in the basement of his furniture store while he is fixing a breaker box late one night.
A little background on Clark. He’s a struggling, middle-aged entrepreneur on a slow downward spiral. His wife has left him. His business is not doing well. He drinks too much. He is down to sleeping in his own store. Clark complains about his life to his therapist, but he does not seem to accept any personal responsibility for his problems. Now he is watching his life evaporate inside his empty shop. Bankruptcy may be on the way.
Under his store, he discovers the backrooms. It is an apparently endless space that resembles an empty, windowless office building. The one obvious level of horror is the strange, tall creature lumbering around inside. But the deeper horror is the space itself. It seems to be a manifestation of Clark’s personal failings and desperation.
Back in the 1800s, a philosopher-poet-handyman named Henry David Thoreau felt a similar sort of desperation. He set about distancing himself from society. He constructed a small cabin next to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and lived alone for nearly two years. Granted, Thoreau saw lots of people and often walked into town, but he pointedly spent much of his time steering clear of modernizing, industrializing New England.
Among the insights Thoreau shared in his famous book about his experience, titled Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, is that we are so concerned with making it that we seldom calculate the real cost. We are so obsessed with our jobs—or, as Thoreau puts it, the “superfluously coarse labors of life”—that we have “no time to be anything but a machine.” The profoundly alienating experience of the endless workplace grind sent Thoreau into the woods. Here, he found a kind of peace.
The empty office building of Backrooms feels like a metaphor for any number of Thoreau’s worries. Will modern technology empty office buildings of workers? Will our jobs of the future be even more impersonal than they already are?
Psychological data offers some insights. One of our most common anxieties is job insecurity. As the shocking “booing” of commencement speakers who are positive about AI reveals, college graduates are fearful of what technology will do to their future. A 2024 Pew study indicated that 52 percent of people worry about how AI will affect their workplaces. What happens when machines replace us, or when we become simple servants to computerized algorithms?
Despite Thoreau’s warnings, studies show that productive employment is what most of us desire. This is a big part of the collective anxiety college grads are dealing with now. Summarizing the work of social psychologist Marie Jahoda, a journalist notes, “paid work supplies far more than money: it gives people a structure to the day, contact with others beyond the family, a sense of shared purpose, regular activity, and — most relevant here — status and identity; losing work damages well-being beyond what the drop in income alone can explain.”
In Backrooms, the loss of a meaningful livelihood opens an abyss for Clark — an endless, empty office space under his feet. Audiences react to this because it darkly reflects current concerns about the future of our workplace. Good horror should let us face our fears in the comfort of a cool movie theater.
Thoreau noted that most of us lead lives of “quiet desperation.” This is certainly Clark’s situation in Backrooms. But in a larger sense, Clark’s problem isn’t employment per se. It’s fulfillment. Clark is unfulfilled. Let’s use Clark’s quandary to think about what sort of workplace landscape we all want in the future.
