Backroom is our memories
Have you ever watched a good movie, and within the next 5 days you feel like it’s getting even better? Starting with a rating of 3/5, then gradually going up to 4/5, 5/5. The movie gets even better the more you read the theories and discourses online.
I did. And I just watched Backrooms, by Kane Parsons.
I’m not talking about the synopsis or whatsoever, I’m gonna talk about my kind of ‘backroom,’ based on the world Kane Pearson built in that movie.
You see, sometimes I wonder how we can remember a thousand memories. Buried or not, the memories will eventually come to our head without notice.
To me, Backroom isn’t about underground trauma or big event or happy memories. It’s an unimportant one, it just flashes in real life but somehow it grows inside my head. I don’t know how that will come to my thought, or why I suddenly recall that kind of memory.
The thing is, it’s the horror.
The horror isn’t the jumpscare. Isn’t the anomalies. Isn’t the mutants. Isn’t the trauma, isn’t the fake doll, or blood, or the attack.
It’s knowing nothing.
The scariest thing in Backroom is we don’t know shit. What happened, why this happened, and how this happened. The world already exists without history or announcement.
We can trace the trauma, we know where some of it came from. But this other kind of memory, it’s unsettling precisely because it has no origin story. It just exists somewhere in the head, the same way the backrooms exist without anyone explaining how they got there.
I can’t even imagine what my version of the backrooms would look like. Maybe it’s two dirty toilet stalls from my elementary school. Maybe it’s an abandoned ball pit in a mall that’s been closed for years. Maybe it’s a room in my old house.
And if I ever got trapped in my own backrooms, there wouldn’t need to be a mutant waiting for me. There wouldn’t need to be a monster shaped like my biggest trauma.
The confusion alone would be enough to break me.
Maybe that’s the real horror. It’s realizing that even your own mind has rooms you didn’t know you were keeping, and you have no idea how you ended up inside them.
Mary said explaining the backrooms is like describing what a dog looks like to someone who’s never seen one.
Memory’s kinda the same. You can never really walk in someone else’s shoes, because you can’t actually feel what they felt, or see what they saw in their head.
Someone tells you about a memory that randomly flashes in their mind, the version of the backrooms stuck somewhere inside them, and you’ll nod, you’ll get the words, but you’ll never actually be there.
You know what? You know nothing.
