I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though …

I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a mystery, the smaller it becomes.

The original Backrooms image is almost aggressively ordinary: yellow wallpaper, brown carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no obvious way out. Kay calls these “spaces without intention.” That phrase lodged in me. A haunted house has a story. Someone built it, someone died there, something wants you gone. The Backrooms are more disturbing because the corridors seem to have forgotten why they exist. There may be no mind behind the arrangement, no message waiting to be decoded, only more carpet and the electric hum overhead.

Then the human mind gets to work. We name the levels, catalogue the creatures, establish the rules, stock the maze with bottles of almond water and turn dread into a game mechanic. It’s an understandable reflex. Faced with the unknown, we build a wiki. A map is useful, but it’s also a reassurance: the territory will eventually submit to us. We can give the darkness edges.

Kay argues that the film begins by letting the Backrooms remain strange, then loses its nerve and gives us character psychology, a visible monster and a legible explanation. I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m carrying his verdict into the viewing as a question rather than an answer. Can a film built for a mass audience resist the pressure to explain itself? Can it leave the central thing alone long enough for the imagination to become afraid of losing itself?

That’s what I’ll be watching for this weekend: whether the Backrooms can survive being brought fully into the light, or whether the door closes as soon as we discover what’s behind it.