Backrooms

Mr. Pat

12 minutes ago

5 min read

Back when I enjoyed arguing with people online, I used to be a part of an Ohio high school message board called JJHuddle. I posted under the incredibly creative handle of Mr. Pat. Me, a St. Francis student, and a kid from the rival school, St. John's, had quite the back-and-forth going every week with him, routinely vanquished after being put in the Chilling Grip of Reason. It was just something I used to do to pass the time, and I got in about a month before they made you pay for membership! One time at a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, my friends and I made jerseys for ourselves, and I had Mr. Pat on the back of mine. I was getting a drink at a water fountain, and when I finished, there was a man waiting in line behind me. He then asked me, "Are you Mr. Pat from JJHuddle?"

I smiled and said yeah. He told me that he was a basketball coach from St. John's and was a big fan of my posts. I laughed, and we shook hands, and that memory occasionally pops in my head and makes me smile. I've published two horror books, run a page with more than 25-hundred people, but I've been recognized out in public more times for shit posting on a message board than anything else. Oh, what it felt like to have too much free time on my hands...

Alright, let's hop out of the distant past and talk about something a bit more recent, like...

Backrooms (2026)

I'm an older millennial and, like every aging person, all the new stuff is weird to me. I will give Gen Z some credit; I enjoy the absurdity of its pop culture. Unlike most people my age, I was tickled by 6-7 and some of the other goofiness that generation has created. I think part of the reason their sense of humor is so out there is that we're living in absolutely ridiculous times, and for many, the most important years of their lives were spent stuck at home behind a computer screen. As a fan of history, I'm not going to say we're the most divided we've ever been, or that every election is "the most important election of our time," but you'd be lying if you can turn on the news (which you should always do!) and not say all of this isn't incredibly silly. With so much weird stuff, and all of it being readily available in their pockets at all times, it only makes sense that their pop culture is weird as hell.

Which brings me to Backrooms. A man is running a furniture store, and he's not doing well. He's a man who had big dreams, but life had other plans; now he's hocking, in his words, crappy furniture to nonexistent customers. His store has a pirate theme, and he's doing one of the used-carsalesman-commercials where he's dressed as a pirate. At the end, he sits on a throne and says, "Every sultan needs a throne," before it breaks under his weight.

While he's freaking out, the cameraman, one of his workers, asks him, "I'm confused. Are you a pirate or a sultan?" I don't know why, but that line made me laugh harder than it probably should have. The owner, Chris, is struggling financially and emotionally. His wife left him, and during his therapy session, you can see he's about one small thing away from flying over the edge. One night, while trying to figure out what's wrong with his store's electricity, he comes across a weird light in his wall. While investigating, he stumbles through the wall into a room that branches into endless corridors. Not only that, but there's something off about each room. Like there's a random stop sign, but the word "STOP" is backwards; there are chairs sticking out of the floor and other weird things. Chris later describes it as, "You explain to a person what a dog is to someone who's never seen one, and then you tell them to draw it."

It's a perfect way to describe it, because there's so much wrong with each room, but a lot of times it's small, and the deeper you go, the weirder it gets. The rest of the movie involves Chris and others exploring the rooms, hoping to finally get some answers as to what it is. You can sum up this movie in a single sentence: "It's about a place with endless corridors." But there's so much else about it that you're doing a disservice to yourself if you brush it off. It's like the tagline for the game Othello, "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master."

I liked this movie a lot. There's so much mystery, and I loved the exploration aspect where things get so much weirder the deeper you go. It's hard to explain why a single chair in a room can be so off-putting, but it is. For the longest time, there's nothing dangerous except for the possibility of getting lost, but there's an opening scene that showed that there is something in there that can and will kill. While we know there's something lurking, our heroes don't. So while they're exploring, we're just waiting for it to show up. When it does finally make its debut, it's extremely effective, although I'm not entirely sure how it managed to snag its helpless victim.

This is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but I need to talk about it because it surprised me big time. The ending itself isn't shocking; what's shocking about it is how I felt about it. If you've read my stuff for any length of time, you'd know it bugs me when movies leave you nothing but questions. For some reason, Backrooms is an exception. This movie gives you less than nothing, and I think the film wouldn't have been as good if we got answers. The movie involves characters that are obsessed with finding answers, and it works out for absolutely none of them. Curiosity does kill the cat, as they say. Most of them die in the pursuit of answers, so I was genuinely impressed that the movie looks you in the eyes and says, "You want answers? Lol, nah!" and then ends.

Another thing I will give Gen Z props on is their ability to make things happen when it comes to content. I'm not talking about influencers or angry white men yelling about politics into their phone, but people that actually create. There was Iron Lung, where a YouTuber just up and decided to finance his own movie; Obsession was written, directed and edited by a YouTuber, and then there's Backrooms, which started as a Creepypasta on 4chan. It was originally a picture that someone renovating a furniture store took, and people built an entire lore behind it. Eventually, a young man named Kane Parsons made a viral short film that expanded into a 25-episode web series, bringing it into the mainstream. Not only all that, but he also somehow managed to get A24 to allow him to direct this movie. Another thing I'll give Gen Z credit for is proving you don't need to have famous parents or degrees up the ass to succeed in Hollywood. Sometimes it just takes weirdness and confidence.