My Backrooms Theory Before The Movie Comes Out
Liminal spaces are in-between spaces that feel familiar but something isn’t quite right. The Backrooms embody this perfectly, and I think it has to do with how we construct our memories.
The original Backrooms photo was of an empty furniture store. We’ve all been to furniture stores, we all know what they look like, but we are never encouraged to remember exact details about them. We just have a general outline.
Furniture stores are a great example of a liminal space because of how familiar they are to us, but we probably haven’t been to a furniture store that looked quite like the Backrooms since we were little. Modern furniture stores look just that–modern. The Backrroms are old-looking and nostalgic.
Now, imagine you’re trapped in the Backrooms and being stalked by a black creature. What is that thing? Kane Parsons insinuated it was bacteria, but is that meant to be taken literally? I don’t think so.
The black creature is the part of your memories you either forget or block out, which is why each time you remember something, the less accurate your memory is to what actually happened. The black creature stalks those who fall into the Backrooms, and they are forced to either confront those parts of their memories that are blocked or do what most characters do–run away.
The creature spreads like a bacteria, haunting all of your memories. You keep forgetting the small details. Things aren’t quite right, and you get an uncanny feeling from your own memories you used to find so comforting.
Then, finally, the black creature grabs hold of you and, if what I’m saying is correct, forces you to remember the long forgotten details of your memories that your brain chose to leave out to save energy. But the creature doesn’t care about saving energy, it cares about preservation.
The Backrooms, from Kane’s POV, is about the value memories hold. We try to hold on to our memories as much as we can, but we end up losing them anyway due to the passage of time. We can try to cling to those memories, but we end up in the Backrooms and are forced to confront the parts of our memories we forgot.
Or rather, the black creature represents all of the forgotten parts of your memories that you get sucked into if you push too far. In the Backrooms, the bacteria overtakes people who fall in and die, as shown in Kane’s “Backrooms - Autopsy Report” video. The real cause of death of the subject in the video was “likely malnutrition.”
The bacteria, reported as something similar to a mutated strain of hay bacillus, stopped the decomposition process in its tracks in some parts of the subject’s body. The video shows the subject’s lungs are completely black, so the bacteria overtook those, but the digestive tract was mostly untouched. But why? Is this bacteria merely trapped in the Backrooms, looking for a host, or is it a metaphorical disease waiting to spread?
Perhaps the bacteria and fungus represents what happens to our minds over time. Upkeep of any building (Backrooms) is necessary, and when it goes untouched, mold (nature) overtakes.
This is precisely what happens to our memories–we don’t think of something for a while, then remember it over time, and each time we think of a memory, we forget little details that “decompose” while other parts of the memory are preserved, but hazy, which is represented by the fungus growth. Soon, memories are completely overtaken by nature. All we remember is that something happened, but the details aren’t there anymore.
Memory is the main theme throughout Kane’s other works, The Oldest View and People Still Live Here. It’s all tied into how we perceive things and how memory fades no matter how badly we want to see our memories clearly.
I’m beginning to think that we are all the Backrooms. It is a manifestation of our collective memories lost to time. The reason why things look “off” is because it is a combination of all of our memories from the past. The bacteria creature represents the desire to remember, but we bury that desire and tell ourselves to “move on.”
Liminal space images are set in the 1980s - early 2000s, which is when millennials and gen Z are nostalgic for because this is when we grew up. Therefore, it is our memories (and lack of accurate, objective memories) that transforms the Backrooms into the horrific landscape that it is today. Put simply, the Backrooms are the collection of our perception of our memories, which were similar enough to be familiar but different enough to feel something is off when we see them all mashed together as a collection.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think in the world of KanePixels’ Backrooms, they are a real place and not metaphorical. People still fall in, die, and are overtaken by bacteria and mold, but in our world, it is a story that is meant to reveal something about memory.
You may return to the past, but no one is there anymore.