Backrooms are positively terrifying. A primal scream in our culture

A small seemingly insignificant grain of salt that is dropped into a saturated salt solution, can unleash a cascade of events that creates a profound change in the whole structure.

And this is exactly what a small post on the social media 4Chan back in 2019, is currently creating. Not in a saturated salt solution, but in our collective human cultural blood stream, where what was added was - not a grain of salt - but an image of an empty office space.

Yes, an empty office.

The picture inspired one comment to begin with, and then another .. and then the snowball started rolling, and on May 29th 2026 the movie Backrooms premiered in theaters worldwide. There will be ..

spoilers.

Movies that pass through the narrow gate and make it to the big screen, will first have to face the dinosaurs in the movie industri. A meeting that as a rule of thumb flattens the cultural primal scream that is found at the core of any good movie. Nutrition is sucked out and the product is thrown in the theaters as a treat for the masses.

The big stage that cinemas worldwide are, exerts a considerable influence on our collective human psyche. So whats on the menu for all the people attending? Is it flattened, nutrition-less, repetition of something already seen and therefor not a threat? Is it another toothless well-polished piece of furniture placed in the exhibition among the others, for people to sit comfortably in and get up afterwards equally gullible as when they sat down?

Or is it a movie that has teeth? Reaches into our veins and marrow and shake us to the core? Do we have the courage to be shaken, or are we comfortable with repetition of something already seen?

Backrooms made it through the eye of the needle and to the big screen, and the director of the movie - Kane Parsons - looks like he avoided the subtle regulation of behaviour that so many others are the victim of in the process: To compromise with the deeper nerve in his art and allow strategies for profit to exert influence. Always a bad idea.

Kane Parsons is 20 years old, 19 when the recordings for the movie began. The film producers placed him in the directors seat. And out came a movie made from a small budget that kicks ass compared to the bigger and much more expensive movies.

Something is going on. Something is ripe in our collective blood stream, and it is very exciting, a little (or very) spooky, and much more than that. Here we will try to dive a bit deeper to see what emerge from the shadows ..

Mary, the therapist in the movie, says:

"*As you walk through life the untrained mind accumulates loops habits behaviors that keep you drifting in circles, creating the same problems, reaching for the same solutions, over and over again, neural pathways of least resistance. "*

She talks about the untrained mind as a magnet for residues from the past. Whoever is in the claws of the untrained mind, lives in the shadows of who they remembered themselves to be. Thats also referred to as a ghost. And these creatures prefers the backrooms, likes it in the shadows. Still lives as they are referred to in the language from the movie, because they are not alive but imitates what is alive.

The regulation of behaviour that this ghost exerts is very subtle: The shift from the atmosphere being primary to a certain narrative as the primary.

From spirit to dogma.

From nature to culture.

From the wordless to words.

Kane Parsons allowed for the atmosphere to guide all the way through. And a spectacular movie is the result, where the main message is that yes, the untrained mind is caught by residues from the past, by loops. Caught in the backrooms. But there is a caveat to that tale: The trained mind can pass through walls that seemed pretty solid. The trained mind has the ability to change the construct, instead of being conditioned by it. And in this way a brand new perspective opens up.

Who would have thought hope of that caliber would come from a horror movie!?!

Joyful will,

Johan Tino

The original comment to the post of the empty office:

*"If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in*

*God help you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure to hell has heard you”*