Gen Z Horror: The Backrooms

Hollywood Didn't Make This - We All Did

The Backrooms have long been a place of horror for anyone who has worked retail.

Not the backroom itself. The closest thing to horror back there is Miguel eating his Doritos with his mouth open as usual.

The horror comes from the customer, “Can’t you please just look in the backroom? I know it’s gotta be back there.”

A couple years ago… (sigh)... Okay, a couple decades ago, I wrote about my 1980s version of this phenomenon on the Something Awful forums.* The Karens seemed to think the backroom was this infinite closed loop dimension where any and all merchandise could be found in every configuration, color, and size. Why was I, the lowly clerk, too lazy to go back there and just find it?

Whenever I was ready to be fired I’d say, “Because past a certain point the lights start flickering ominously, shadows move in the wrong way, and we hear the distant movement of … things. We’ve all heard stories about mall clerks that went too far into the backrooms and never found their way back to Babbages. Sometimes you would see cruel simulacra – an empty husk of them behind the counter at Orange Julius, but you knew it wasn’t really them… Not anymore… And that was a fate too horrible to imagine. No Ma’am, it isn’t worth it for me to go back there. Maybe Space Quest will be here Tuesday.“

No, I am not claiming I invented the Backrooms. Truthfully, no one did.

Like most internet-born ideas, the Backrooms emerged from countless anonymous contributions scattered across old image boards, creepypasta sites, and forums. The concept existed in fragments for years before the famous 2019 post gave it a name and a mythology.

What made that post remarkable wasn’t its originality. It was that millions of people instantly understood it. It was something we all knew about but this collective legend was finally given a name. We looked at a photograph of a bland yellow office space and immediately felt uneasy. We recognized the place despite never having been there.

Yet, for Gen Z it was something more.

Gen Z Horror is Participatory

To understand why The Backrooms works, and why Hollywood keeps failing to understand films like it, you need to grok something about how horror has functioned differently for each generation that consumed it.

For Boomers, horror was something you watched. It happened on a screen to fictional characters, in a theater. There was safety in numbers. Christopher Lee’s Dracula could not reach you. The shark was not in your pool. There was distance. The pleasure was vicarious, it was a delightful but safe shiver.

For Gen X, horror was something you rented. You watched it home. You invited the horror into your safest space. We had a ritual of acquisition connected to it. The video store, the cover art, the dare involved in choosing it and bringing it home became part of the experience. But we were still watching, although more intimately.

For Millennials, horror was something you discussed. The internet turned horror into conversation. You argued about the mythology of The Ring and was the original (Ringu) better - yes, it was (banned for racism). You theorized about the mechanics of 28 Days Later. You posted your analysis of these things and the engagement deepened, but it was still downstream of a finished product someone else had made.

For Gen Z, horror is something you *enter.*

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of the actual mechanics of how this generation engages with horror as a cultural form. They grew up in games, in livestreams, in Discord servers, in collaborative fiction wikis, in roleplay communities, and with AI chatbots. Their instinct when encountering a horror premise is not to ask *what happens next.* It is to ask *what would happen if I were there.*

The Backrooms, Iron Lung, Obsession, and FNAF are not separate horror franchises that happen to be popular with the same generation. They are different expressions of the same horror story. There is a contract with the audience that every one of those properties was built to honor and that older Hollywood keeps trying to renegotiate into something more familiar and less interesting - witness Alien: Romulus (a movie that was actually good for the first 20 minutes).

Many Doors Into the Same Room

All Gen Z horror is built inside a liminal space.

FNAF – Five Nights at Freddy’s – built its horror not on gameplay but on mystery the audience was explicitly invited to solve. Scott Cawthon fragmented the lore across minigames, books, and fan wikis, and then stepped back. The audience convened. The audience theorized. The audience built a shared interpretation that became, functionally, the canon. The horror was the process of discovery.

The Participatory Element: The participation *was* the product. The guard shack wasn’t the setting at all, it was a meeting room in the liminal space of a disused would-be Rainforest Cafe-light animatronic restaurant.

Iron Lung does it through enforced helplessness. Before it was a film it was a game, and not just any game, but one that millions of people had watched Markiplier play in real time, sending superchats, sharing in the dread, participating parasocially in someone else’s inescapable doom.

The Participatory Element: By the time the film arrived, the audience had already been inside that submarine. They had already felt the gauges, operated the x-ray camera, and heard whatever was outside the hull deciding whether it was interested in them enough today to crack open the thin shell. The film was a reunion with a shared experience, not an introduction to a new one. And that shared experience had already been, for its audience, deeply, structurally participatory, because you do not send a superchat to a streamer and remain a passive observer. You are in the room. You are part of what is happening.

Obsession is about as yandere as you can freaking get, and that particular deep dark rabbit hole deserves an article of its own.

The yandere trope has evolved from a passive anime archetype into a major engine of interactive horror. Originally, a yandere was simply a character you watched in an anime, such as Yuno Gasai from Future Diary. For Gen Z, however, the horror has become participatory. It is no longer happening to an onscreen protagonist. It is happening directly to you. Yandere ASMR roleplays on YouTube and TikTok place the listener at the center of the story. AI chatbot platforms such as Character.ai and JanitorAI take it a step further, allowing users to carry on extended conversations with characters designed to become possessive, obsessive, or unstable. The audience is not merely consuming the horror. They are collaborating in its creation.

The Participatory Element: The user is the protagonist. Whether through headphones, chat windows, or roleplay, the horror exists only because the audience chooses to enter it and interact with it. The story is not being watched. It is being experienced.

The Backrooms does it at the mythological level. The community built the world first. The film arrives as a distillation of collective authorship, not as a primary creative act. When the audience sits in the theater and recognizes a level, an entity, a rule they helped name that is not a shallow “I recognize that!” dopamine hit. That is a co-author attending the adaptation of their own work. That is a genuinely unusual cultural transaction, and it generates a kind of emotional investment that no amount of franchise world-building can manufacture from scratch, because it was not manufactured. It was *accumulated.*

The Backrooms, unlike Iron Lung, also draws more explicitly from the SCP Foundation, the collaborative fiction wiki built around a secret organization that classifies anomalous entities in institutional documentation. Object class: Keter. Containment procedures as follows. The numbered levels, the entity classifications, the field reports, it is SCP’s architecture applied to a single location. But where SCP diffuses its horror across thousands of entries, the Backrooms concentrate it to one place, one fluorescent hum, one question: how far back does it go?

The Participatory Element: You already were participating, you just didn’t see it.

Darkling: Dude, is the movie any good?

Dark Herald: Oh, that. Yeah it’s worth a watch if you think you’ll enjoy Gen Z horror.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, delivers as a man who is being swamped by failures. Somewhere inside he knows he’s responsible for some but not all of them. Maybe if a couple of breaks had come his way, things could have been different. Most people don’t understand just how important the right hand-up is in the life of a very successful man, and for most people that hand-up just never comes along. Almost no one really makes it big on their own. Clark (who doesn’t have a last name) never got that hand-up.

When he finds a glitch in reality that lets him enter the Backrooms, he’s finding his retreat from reality. His psycho-therapist, who has deep issues of her own follows him in trying to help him but she is having trouble helping herself.

Director Kane Parsons shoots the Backrooms the way it needs to be shot: kind of wrong. The geometry is slightly off. The light sources are visible but sourceless. Spaces that should connect, do not. He has clearly absorbed the visual grammar of liminal Gen-Z horror, the VHS degradation, the accidental framing, the sense of footage that was supposed to be taped over with an episode of Babylon 5 and he applies it with a discipline that belies his 20 years of age.

The sound design deserves particular mention. Where Andrew Hulshult’s score for Iron Lung was overbearing by design a universe announcing its indifference with maximum volume the Backrooms deploys something closer to architectural unease. The hum is always there. It is not music. It is the sound of a space that is too large and too empty and too lit, and simply does not stop. You do not get used to it because you can’t get used to it.

The performances are grounded in a way that earns the absurdity of the premise. Nobody is doing horror-movie acting. They are doing the acting of people who have stopped being surprised by wrongness, which is considerably more disturbing. When a character encounters something that should be impossible, the response is not a scream. It is the quiet recalibration of someone updating their model of what reality permits. That is, functionally, the correct response to SCP-tier horror, and it is the right call here.

What the film does not do is explain. There is no scientist who tells you what the Backrooms are. There is no mythology dump. There is no resolution that closes the mystery. This will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. That viewer is not the audience this film is for, and the film knows it.

Darklings: So it’s a mystery box.

Dark Herald: Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Take Pulp Fiction for instance. So long as the story stays limited in scope it will work just fine. It’s when you expand the scope and start adding more and more mystery boxes that it falls apart. It would be fine if there weren’t any sequels. Sadly, it’s made approximately twenty times its budget, which means the endless sequels are inevitable.

VERDICT

The Backrooms succeeds because it understands something Hollywood still struggles to grasp: Gen Z horror is not built around monsters. It is built around participation. The audience does not merely watch the story. They enter it, discuss it, theorize about it, expand it, and in some cases help create it.

Kane Parsons has delivered a film that respects that relationship instead of trying to overwrite it. The result is not a perfect movie. Some viewers will find its refusal to explain itself frustrating, and the inevitable sequels will almost certainly test the limits of a concept that works best when it remains mysterious. But as both a horror film and a cultural artifact, The Backrooms works remarkably well.

If you understand what Gen Z horror is trying to do, you’ll probably enjoy the trip.

If you don’t, this may be the best place to learn.

The Dark Herald Recommends with Confidence (4/5)

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*I think it was Something Awful, it’s been 20 years at this point.