Do you know about the Hula Burger? There’s no reasonable way you would—a pineapple-and-cheese sandwich, the Hula Burger was a minor experiment conducted by McDonald’s in 1962, introduced alongside the Filet-O-Fish in an effort to appeal to Catholic customers practicing Lent. It was a complete failure, rightfully forgotten. (Pineapples AND cheese!) Yet the Hula Burger’s ghost still haunts us, thanks to accounts like Discontinued Foods!, which chronicles such flops with enthusiasm for thousands of followers. The people who know about the Hula Burger today far outnumber those that ever bought one.
The internet is full of accounts that do this—keep track of dead things. It’s a cottage industry, and a popular one online. Millions delight in a new video from Defunctland, “lost media” is an obsession on Reddit and beyond, and new art is continually compared to bygone practices. The internet is a morgue, and a generation has been raised in it. Now they’re making movies like Backrooms, and making their fears palpable.
A24’s runaway hit may be a confounding box office success, but its goals are straightforward; its origins and influences all in plain view. While Backrooms is an adaptation/expansion of an online hit, it’s also one steered by the same person who created it. Kane Parsons (or Kane Pixels, as he was known before his jump to Hollywood) has a digital paper trail, influences that are easily identifiable on his YouTube page. He grew up loving Attack On Titan anime and the Portal video games; he’s got more in common with gamers than film buffs, he regularly cites Mr. Robot—perhaps the best representation of modern tech alienation shot on camera—as a huge influence. His nomme de YouTube is as big a hint as anything: This is a creator that has fashioned himself out of the tiny pinpricks of light that comprise every screen you lose yourself in. And screens have their problems, but maybe they’re better than the alternative.
This is the root of Parsons’ brand of liminal horror, which is easy to make fun of but deeply sad to contemplate. Why would someone fear empty spaces? Maybe if they knew that they were once full, and will likely never be that way again. That they are surrounded by people just a few years older that knew what it was to congregate in public all the time, for mundane reasons, and now public interaction is just a source of constant low-grade irritation where everything is understaffed and every shelf is understocked and the most reliable jobs involve moving packages around for people who can’t be bothered to leave home and be among others.
Herein lies the nightmare of Backrooms, and a generation of people shunted out of the physical world and into the digital one: Even that space doesn’t fully belong to you. You are surrounded by the shambling corpses of beloved IP and foodstuff and technology resurrected by prior generations that have turned nostalgia into a drug. Midway through the big-screen Backrooms, one character posits that the space has a memory, that it is constantly sublimating the subconscious of everyone who explores it, recreating everything it can but never getting anything right.
Parsons describes the fear in simpler terms: “It’s being on the brink of being able to peer around the corner,” he said in a recent New York Times profile, “and there’s another corner that’s beyond it.”
The filmmaker is not done turning corners. Parsons has maintained that, even with a potential big-screen sequel, he will remain committed to building out the Backrooms on YouTube, where many mysteries remain to be deployed in the service of an endgame only known to himself. This inscrutable endgame is part of the appeal of being a YouTuber of Parsons’ ilk. Online creators rely on audience projection; most successful works of horror like The Backrooms connect not just because of craft but because of density. The audience delights in a collective effort to assemble timelines, lore, meaning. To build the proper, traditional narrative out of Parsons’ impressionistic, fractured one. To build a Backrooms of their own.
Parsons is building a mythology, because that is what meaning-making looks like online. The algorithm demands to be fed, and the only way to keep oneself from exhausting their limited resources is to make something compelling enough for others to make content about. Perhaps he has an end in mind, but the real validation is not in view counts, but content made by others. Explainers and video essays and fan theories. A Navidson Record for every potential Johnny Truant lurking on YouTube late at night.
This is the blank canvas that Parsons recognized in the original 4chan meme: liminal space, like everything on the internet, does not promise resolution. Nor does it offer distinction. Like the detritus strewn and glitched through the sets of Backrooms, annihilation is all that’s on offer, with the signifiers of previous generations forever taunting you with their Hula Burgers and decaying theme parks. In Parsons’ case, the answer is to turn your dispossession into a monument, and watch the wiki writers build a city around it.
There is a monster lurking in Backrooms, a grotesque and cartoonish distortion of its protagonist, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Or perhaps, as Clark succumbs to his insecurities and repressed rage, this monster is less a distortion than a reflection of his psyche, all garish proportions and appetites. The monster is divisive, an abrupt tonal shift that can be hard to adjust to, but one that’s arguably key to understanding one last, central anxiety at the heart of Backrooms. It’s a remarkably universal one, in contrast to the very specific generational concerns that are represented by Backrooms dingy hallways. The hardest thing for every generation to learn, even one as tragically dispossessed as this one: No matter where you are, lost in an impossible maze or a computer screen, you’re going to have to find a way to live with yourself.
