The Backrooms and House of Leaves

 Oddly, shortly after making a little more progress into House of Leaves, the trailer for A24's Backrooms was released.

I don't know much about the movie's pedigree, so this is kind of just raw reaction: It feels kind of odd for there to be a movie of this. The Backrooms is this weird product of the internet, among the most popular and potent bits of Creepypasta. It's tied to the also-popular genre of Liminal Spaces, in which people share photos of oddly-lit, seemingly abandoned places, usually indoors, that evoke a sense of discomfort and familiarity to those of a certain generation (I remember seeing a video in which someone assumed that these liminal spaces wouldn't have meaning to those born before 1995, which is funny because I'm surprised that they have meaning for those born after. I went to Discovery Zone as a kid. Believe me, I know what it's like to spend hours in a windowless building with brightly-colored play structures.)

Anyway, while the Backrooms began as just an image with a caption that suggested a sort of out-of-bounds area of reality, like going outside the level in a video game and discovering some early draft of an area that players were never meant to see, it's also taken on a kind of collaborative elaboration online, with many people contributing to the mythos of the Backrooms, adding monsters and regions and levels to it.

I don't want to crap on anyone's creativity, but that impulse to flesh something out when it's so unnervingly vague is one I don't really agree with. Then again, maybe it's fine if we all agree that there's no true "canon" to any of this, and we are free to disregard ideas that might take away from what makes the central conceit compelling.

And that, I think, is why I don't know if I like the idea that there's a movie about them coming out. It's arguable what even counts as mainstream media these days - is a feature film genuinely going to reach a wider audience than a strange internet meme? I genuinely cannot say. But I think that there's a weird way in which making a movie with its characters kind of tries to put a box around the idea that declares this version the definitive one.

It's honestly a problem with adaptation in the first place: for example, I love Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies (as of this post, the third one has not yet come out, but we have a brief trailer). Part of why I think I love them is that, to me, they look very much like how I pictured the story playing out in my head - the brutalist palace in Arakeen, the used-future dustiness. But I know that some had more fantastical versions of it in their head when they read it, imagining something more like the visual design of David Lynch's version, or perhaps the wild and over-the-top design of the never-produced Jodorowsky's version. When an adaptation is a big success, it can push other interpretations to the side.

But here's the odd thing that I realized looking at this trailer:

The premise might actually be something like House of Leaves.

First, just to manage expectations: House of Leaves is famed less for the premise of its innermost narrative - the terror encountered by the Navidson family and those who went to explore the impossible labyrinth accessible through the house on Ash Tree Lane - than it is for the way in which the layers of narrative, between Navidson's documentary, Zampano's treatise, and Johnny Truant's annotations, mix and overlap and confound the reader until the book itself starts to feel like a labyrinth in which you've gotten lost.

I think it would be very hard to pull off what Mark Z. Danielewski does in his book with a film (not impossible - but I think you'd need a genius like David Lynch, and not the younger Lynch who made the 1984 Dune movie, to pull it off).

Still, the Backrooms movie seems to have one of its main characters (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom I tend to really like) discover this seam in reality in the back of an old furniture store and become obsessed with exploring the space beyond, bringing in the other characters much as Navidson does with his companions in House of Leaves.

House of Leaves came out in 2000, and was written over the course of ten years, so it's at least a little distant from the internet culture that gave rise to the Backrooms (despite what Gen Zers might mistakenly think, the internet did exist before 2000, but social media, at least in its current form, didn't).

Still, it's remarkable, thinking of these two premises, how similar they are. The labyrinth in House of Leaves isn't reminiscent of mid-century blandness, and is instead a kind of primordial, ancient grey stone (if I recall correctly) and rather than being poorly lit with fluorescent lights, it's utterly dark except for what light you bring in with you.

But man, isn't it interesting how compelling the idea of an extra-spatial labyrinth is? That a doorway might open and bring you into a place that shouldn't be able to fit where it does?

It makes me think of a few other horror classics: in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (speaking of adaptations that eclipsed the original work, and in doing so changed the consensus interpretation of the story's characters) there are shots in which young Danny Torrance is riding around the hotel on his Big Wheel, and we see him go around walls where there are hotel doors that cannot possibly lead into actual rooms because we've seen the other side of those walls, which ought to go out into a grand lobby.

There's also the Hounds of Tindalos, created by Frank Belknap Long Jr. in his 1929 short story of the same name, and then incorporated into the broader Cthulhu Mythos. The Hounds are "creatures of angles" whereas we and other natural things we're familiar with are "of curves." The Hounds of Tindalos can enter our reality through any sharp corners.

This is actually really interesting to me, because corners are places where 3D-rendering as you might see in a video game can sometimes expose seams that let you see through what are meant to be solid objects. The original Backrooms caption uses video game terminology, saying that if you "noclip out of reality" you'll wind up there. Noclip, as I understand it, is a essentially a command that allows something to pass through a 3D virtual environment without any collision, and thus able to pass through objects and walls that are meant to be solid.

The term "liminal space" comes from the study of mythology and folklore. Humans tend to place a great importance on in-between spaces, like meeting the Devil at a Crossroads. In Greek myth, the border between this world and the world of the dead is the River Styx, and there's a ritual of crossing that must be observed, paying Charon his toll of Obols (coins placed on the eyes of the dead as a funeral practice).

I find it interesting that the way that the term is used in the internet meme sense isn't quite the same: a poorly-lit indoor water park isn't necessarily a place of transition like a bridge or a subway station. I suppose instead, the liminality of the space is the uncanny border between the familiar and the strange. Like deja vu, there's a dissonance in which we feel both like we have been to this place, but no specific memory arrives.

I'm realizing it's 2 am as I write this sentence, and I probably ought to think about more comfortable things before I go to bed. Also, I don't know that I've really made a point here. But I just had some thoughts kicking around.