As much as I enjoyed Backrooms, it was an acquired taste. The film’s interpretation of the eponymous liminal hellscape didn’t match what I had (unknowingly) been expecting, and led to another Backrooms post, this one about liminal cosmic horror.

But even within the interpretation of the Backrooms presented by this film, something keeps bothering me: the plot.

More precisely, in how the film reveals the Backrooms to the audience, and with which character we’re supposed to attach ourselves to. I think it gave away too much too soon, and could have drawn us closer to it a better protagonist.

This is my attempt to reorder the plot to strengthen each concern, a kind of writing exercise similar to my rewrite of the final season of Stranger Things… but with a lot more love for Backrooms than I have for that show.

On a Quick Side-note

None of this is meant to talk down on the film as it stands, though. Considering its unique genesis— starting as an online animated web series made by a teenager based off a Creepypasta image, then funded by a premier film studio that put said teenager into the role of director—Backrooms is a very well made film. Harrowing, dark and smart, its simplicity allows it to comment on the broad range of problems in our society: capitalism, AI, toxic masculinity, and so much more. Kane Parsons didn’t write the screenplay (that was Will Soodik), and this exercise isn’t condemnation on either creator. Really, I’m looking forward to seeing more of Parsons’ work, here at what I hope is the start of a promising career.

I just have some thoughts about the plot.

So: spoilers for Backrooms.

What We Saw

Quick recap.

It’s 1990 and in the Backrooms, a group of researchers in hazmat suits are attacked by an unseen entity, which kills one of them.

Meanwhile Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect, alcoholic and the owner of a struggling furniture store, finds a portal in the basement that leads to the Backrooms: a seemingly endless labyrinth of bland yellow rooms and long hallways littered with furniture and other castoffs items, empty and still under buzzing fluorescents. Yet has he explores, the rooms grow increasingly deformed. And something feels off, an uncertainty that hovers throughout this entire place.

Unknown to Clark, he’s being watched by a man named Phil (Mark Duplass). As the story progresses, Phil is able to identify Clark, and we learn that he’s with the group of hazmat-clad researchers, employees of Async.

Clark tells his psychiatrist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about the Backrooms. Understandably, she doesn’t believe him. Mary herself is struggling with childhood trauma from her agoraphobic mother.

To get proof of the Backrooms, Clark pays his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to film an exploration with him. Like many parts of the film, this sequence is shot found-footage style, and leads to the discovery of a room on a lower level smells horrid… and is littered with discarded clothes. Something attacks the group, killing Bobby and Kat before approaching Clark and leaving his fate uncertain.

After receiving a strange message from Clark, Mary goes to the furniture store to check on him. She discovers the portal, and enters the Backrooms. After wandering around a little, she pretty quickly comes upon Clark… who proceeds to choke her out.

Mary wakes up tied to a chair at a dinner table (or the Backrooms version of a dinner table) in a room that tries to imitate a kitchen. Clark is there, with people who look as poorly constructed as the kitchen. He’s unwell, disturbed, and explains to Mary that the Backrooms interact with the mind of any human who enters them, trying to replicate their thoughts and memories. But the Backrooms can’t made a perfect copy; Clark says that it’s like asking someone who has never seen a dog before to draw a picture of one after you describe it to them. The architecture of the Backrooms, then, is a warped reflection of the architecture of the human mind.

(Which is scary enough on its own, right?)

The other people in the “kitchen” are copies made in the Backrooms, including one of Clark’s ex-wife. Clark wants Mary to help him, but she tells him the truth: that his refusal to accept responsibility for his actions (his failed marriage and career, his alcoholism) has led to his situation. Their argument is cut off, though, when another of the Backrooms’ copies arrives: Captain Clark. A monstrous, deformed version of Clark that is even more violent than him, this is what killed Kat and Bobby. It’s also been picking off the Async researchers. Despite Clark’s attempts to calm it, it kills him, and then goes after Mary.

Following a lengthy chase through the Backrooms, which takes Mary through multiple copied environments (some as elaborate as a residential street and even the furniture store), Mary is finally rescued by Async researchers, and Captain Clark is defeated.

She then learns from Phil that Async used to be an MRI research company, until they stumbled onto the Backrooms. Now they explore it, researching it… and they might not be allowed to let Mary go. In the final shot, we see that the Backrooms has copied Mary’s memories, and left a deformed version of her sitting alone, deep in the monotonous eternity of this place.

What We Could Have Seen

As it stands, the plot of Backrooms is split between two protagonists—Clark in the first half, and Mary in the second. ‘Protagonist’ meaning the character who moves the bulk of the story along, which isn’t always the same thing as the hero. In this case our hero, Mary, doesn’t assume the protagonist role until after Clark has descended fully into madness. Plenty of stories switch the role of the protagonist with success, but doing so in Backrooms runs into two key issues.

• Clark is too despicable, and media literacy too weak in our society right now, to rely on him this extensively.
• The Backrooms are revealed too early.

My solutions are:

• Make Mary the protagonist throughout the entire film.
• Reveal the Backrooms in the second half.

In this version, we don’t open with the Async researchers being attacked—this scene gave us the Backrooms way too early. Scrap it entirely.

Why am I so adamant about holding off on revealing the Backrooms? Delayed gratification. Going into this movie, the audience already knows what the Backrooms are—even if you’re not into creepypastas, the marketing would have shown you enough. But for those of use who watched the concept develop over the years, it creates far more anticipation (and tension) if we have to wait for it.

So, we wait for it.

Instead we open with Mary, with her childhood flashback sequences that show us the horror she endured living with her agoraphobic mother—potentially as a nightmare sequence from which she wakes up, then prepares for her day. She has a therapy session with a client, Clark, which is when we’re introduced to him, as well as to his issues (his failures and his refusal to take responsibility for his mistakes).

Then we follow Clark for a while. He discovers the portal in his store, but when he walks inside, we cut away… to when he returns back through it, baffled and uncertain, but fascinated. All we see is that he went somewhere else, and that it’s changed him.

Next, in another session with Mary (an emergency one, at his insistence) Clark tells her about everything he’s seen of the Backrooms—but this is the only exposure to it that we the audience are getting. We know it’s there, but we haven’t seen it yet… and we want to so, so badly.

When Mary doesn’t believe him, Clark then goes to Kat and Bobby and pays them to film an expedition with him. They enter through the portal with their cameras, and…

… we cut back to Mary.

A few days have passed, and she gets the strange message from Clark. Concerned for him, Mary goes to the store, finds the portal, and steps into the Backrooms. We enter with her, and finally get to see it.

Up until this point, the role of protagonist has still moved a bit. But instead of the first half of the film focusing on Clark, then giving us a jarring shift over to Mary, we instead start with Mary in the opening (which anchors her role as the real protagonist), cut to Clark for a while, then back to Mary, in a sort of point of view “sandwiching.” It replaces that jarring shift with the feeling of “return,” as in, returning to the protagonist who we started this off with.

Once Mary enters the Backrooms, the role of protagonist stays firmly with her, as do we. She goes on a lengthy exploration of this place, the same as what the real film does with Clark. In this way, we’re discovering the Backrooms alongside her. This avoids the problem of identification with the wrong character (the first concern) while creating delayed gratification over the reveal of the Backrooms (the second concern).

The character who we first enter the Backrooms with will gain a connection to the audience that no other character will have. During this lengthy initial exploration (the one that Clark has in the real film, and that I would have replaced with Mary), they’re the only human in this strange, frightening place. Even though you’re only watching, you’re still on edge, nervous, as if you’re stuck in there, too. But at least there’s someone else in here with you. But if that person is a violent narcissist?

In that case, it causes the audience to latch onto Clark in a way we don’t with Mary. And while many people are going to understand that Clark is a bad person, no enough of them do. It’s the same lack of media literacy that causes too many people to view Paul Atreides of Dune as a hero, or even (shudder) Bear from Obsession. In those examples, though, the risk of making a bad person the protagonist is outweighed by the themes of the story (how the allure of power attracts bad men, for instance).

I don’t think that risk is worth it with Backrooms, though. For one, this interpretation of the Backrooms is of a place warped by the subconscious, which makes Mary’s explorations as a psychiatrist far more interesting, and profound, than those of a violent narcissist. (Her navigation through it, and later flight from it, read as what a psychiatrist does: wades through the maze of their clients’ minds to help repair it.) But also, since the climax relies so heavily on Mary, we need to have a far stronger connection to her, so that we can be far more afraid for her.

So instead, the audience doesn’t get to enter the Backrooms until she does. And now, you’re trapped in here with a kindhearted psychiatrist, someone who you will very much want to see escape it.

In her exploration, Mary finds a bloody, battered handheld camera—the one that we saw Bobby carrying, earlier. She gets it to play, and we’re treated to the exact same found-footage sequence of his and Kat’s deaths by some unseen entity… as well as Clark’s ambiguous status once confronted by it.

This fits that found-footage sequence into the overall story far more strongly. As it currently stands, it’s an interesting change of pace (and an obvious carry-over from Parsons’ YouTube videos), but it’s still jarring—because why are we only really getting this style here, and at the beginning? Instead, let’s set it far more organically into the plot as a reveal, as footage that exists in this world.

And as something that scares the hell out of us, and Mary, once she’s finished watching it. Just as we only get to see the Backrooms once Mary does, we only first learn of the dangerous entity alongside her.

Trapped in here… something, she carries on.

The rest of the film would then stick to the same plot: Clark captures Mary, they have their Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque kitchen scene, Captain Clark kills his namesake and pursues Mary, who is then rescued by Async and told by Phil what’s been happening in here, and ending with the copy of Mary sitting alone in the Backrooms. But that chase, especially, would come across as far more harrowing because we’ve been emotionally latched onto Mary since entering the Backrooms, and it would feel like her escape is also ours—turning an already tense sequence into something even more fraught.

So, really I’m proposing that Mary should have been the protagonist (with a brief interlude at the beginning for Clark), and that the Backrooms should have been revealed in the second half of the film, through Mary’s point of view.

The biggest issue I can see with this version is that, since we only see the Backrooms once, we might lose some of the “expedition” feeling that is achieved by showing characters going in and out (Clark and Async). It’s a valid concern, since expeditions are an important component to the Backrooms lore. However, simply knowing that other characters are going in and out will help maintain that feeling.

Plus, it’s not like there won’t be a sequel. While not yet confirmed, the way the film ends, as well as its unprecedented box office success and its built-in audience ensures that. I imagine the sequel is going to involve Mary working with Async to continue exploring the Backrooms (which will allow Mark Duplass to have the larger role that he should have had in this first one). It makes sense for her, as a psychiatrist, to help explore a place that’s shaped by the turbulence and incongruities of the human mind. So the sequel to the actual Backrooms will probably strengthen that expedition component; as a sequel to my hypothetical Backrooms, it would give multiple, shorter entries into that place after having only given us one (longer) one in the first one, creating for the audience a growing familiarity with the Backrooms that would reflect Async’s increasing understanding of it.

Too bad that the sequel will be either AI slop, or used to train for it.

So, how did this rewrite hold up? Would it have been more emotional to follow Mary into the Backrooms, and scarier to only see it once? Or should it be left alone as is? Got a better version?

And will we even give a shit about Backrooms 2, since it’ll be probably written ChatGPT… a story written by something that has never seen a movie?

But the most important question: if you were stuck in the Backrooms, what monsters would it make out of your subconscious?

Cover photo credit: yahoo.com