THE BACKROOMS
- Director
- Kane Pixels
- Studio
- A24 / Atomic Monster
- Runtime
- 1h 44m
- Rating
- R
- Source
- Found-footage YouTube series, 2019
- Color palette
- Backrooms yellow, fluorescent cream, exit-sign red
Dossier · THE BACKROOMS · 03 · 13
The full dossier.
Everything you need to noclip out of the office on Friday and not get lost between elevators.
When & Where
- Date
- Friday, March 13
- Doors
- 9:15 PM
- Showtime
- 9:40 PM
- Theater
- Alamo Drafthouse — Hall 7
- Address
- 117 Mercer St, 7th level (rear elevators)
- Block
- Block 47 reserved — middle-back, aisle access
- Meet at
- Lobby of 2nd Floor by the popcorn machine, 9:00 PM sharp
The Liminal
Basement bar, four doors down. No windows. Strip lighting. The jukebox plays Boards of Canada and that one Stereolab record forever. Tab open until someone in Finance notices.
- Venue
- The Liminal
- Location
- 4 doors down, basement bar, ask for ‘Level 1’
- Last train
- 11:42 PM, Mercer/Spring
- Walk
- 2 mins from theater
- Capacity
- 32, comfortably
Carry-In
- — A jacket. Theaters are cold and basements colder.
- — Cash for tip. The bartender at The Liminal does not run cards.
- — A reasonable opinion about A24's recent output.
- — Tolerance for fluorescent buzz at 60Hz.
- — No phones during the film. Wren will photograph us under the marquee, that is plenty.
What Are The Backrooms?
In May 2019, an anonymous post on a 4chan thread asked for unsettling images. Someone replied with a low-resolution photograph of an empty office hallway: yellowed wallpaper, damp carpet, fluorescent lighting overhead. Underneath, a caption — that if you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in The Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.
The genre that grew from that one image is liminal-space horror — not jump scares, but the dread of an empty Office Depot at 4 AM, of a hotel pool decommissioned in 1996, of a corporate corridor that keeps repeating. Kane Pixels made YouTube videos of it. A24 and Atomic Monster made a feature of those videos. We are going to sit in a dark room together and watch the room around us refuse to end.