I’ll never forget when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and I was on contract to The RAND Corporation. Many staff members were sent home, and I stayed behind to complete my contract. Costs had to be cut since operations in-house were suspended, so all the vending machines and coffee makers were shut down. Shortly thereafter the two top floors were closed down, and those departments were sent home.
Out of morbid curiosity I went up to those floors and walked around. The lights were turned off, and previously occupied desks and offices were now abandoned, relegated to complete darkness and silence. I was possessed by the apocalyptic eeriness of my environment. (I didn’t steal anything LOL, I have religious guilt).
For the past year I’ve enjoyed the surreal horror of liminal space videos and vaporwave music, so I couldn’t resist running to the cinema to catch Backrooms and wasn’t disappointed. Backrooms is an extraordinary film, but it’s been the topping of several years of liminal space horror videos making the rounds on You Tube.
Around the same time that liminal space videos were posted a new series of videos of abandoned and decaying malls went viral, as well. Shuttered shopping malls of elephantine proportions across Middle America were explored and filmed for Tik Tok and the ubiquitous You Tube. Their cheerful video arcades and food courts were now dead like a long-abandoned corpse. The creepiness was downright surreal, and I imagine if J.G. Ballard were still alive his eyes would be glistening.
Getting back to Backrooms, several of the Backrooms series videos date as far back as 2022, some even in 2021. These dates struck me as significant in that this was the era of COVID-19 enforced lockdown. Liminal space horror was created to show a desolate world evacuated by a biological pandemic. You can almost make a case that these horror videos pose political commentary on the destruction of commercialism by social neglect.
I’ll decline from discussing the film, I’ll just recommend that you see it, especially if you like brain twisting surrealism from artists like M.C. Escher or Rene Magritte. I'd also like to point out that liminal space as a horror device in the cinema has its precedents, especially in the films of Antonioni, ie. the park in Blow Up, the last ten minutes in L'Eclisse, and parts of Red Desert.
I also recommend that you check out the Poolrooms videos, which are similar to Backrooms, but you’re stuck in an indoor swimming pool world, complete with fifty-foot-tall rubber duckies, gigantic Greco-Roman statues and endless towers constructed of bleached white tile. Aquaphobes need not apply.
I’ll also drop recommendations for Vaporwave music, which provide the soundtrack for both Backrooms and Poolrooms videos. It can either emulate innocuous shopping mall muzak, or provide dark ambient sounds, like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports series with a more sinister edge.
My favorite Dark Ambient artist is Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker, and assorted labels Geometric Lullaby and Dreamcorp Records Inc. on Bandcamp are dedicated to this wild genre of music. Admittedly, everything listed here is an acquired taste, not for everyone, but if you like your surrealism on a horrorshow level, you’ve come to the right place.
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