Backrooms: The Broken Archive and the Horror of Remembering

 

I think of the mind as a gigantic archive. Sometimes I forget a name, I close my eyes, imagine searching for it inside, and within seconds it appears. For years now, I’ve deliberately practiced not memorizing certain common things, because I believe that archive has a limit and I’d rather not fill it with garbage.

There’s something that happens to all of us that almost no one names: memories deteriorate on their own. We no longer remember the details, the colors, the smells, the sounds. All that remains is something like a photograph that has faded over time. A place that is still ours, yes, but no longer exactly what we lived. It is what we "want" to remember. Every time we visit that place, a part of us stays there forever, wandering. And not even your therapist can pull you out of there.

Many people prefer to live there. To feed on those blurry memories as if they were the only food available. That is their safe place. That is the life they choose to hide in to escape reality. A life that wasn’t exactly like that, but that they need to remember that way in order to keep going. A life they recall in one form, not as it actually was. That is exactly what Backrooms opens up, and what makes the film so disturbing.

What I liked most about Backrooms is that it could very well be a film directed by David Lynch, written by Charlie Kaufman, and produced by J.J. Abrams. It’s not Mulholland Drive. It’s not Blue Velvet. It’s not Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, nor Being John Malkovich, nor Lost. Definitely not. But Kane Parsons, at an age that still amazes, has opened a portal to the nostalgic and unsettling universe of Twin Peaks, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, Vivarium, and Atlanta. That’s no small feat.

Backrooms is not a horror film in the same way as Obsession, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, or Weapons. It doesn’t terrify you like that. What it does is harder to shake off: it uses psychology as a weapon of war. It’s not a powerful drama in the conventional sense. It is the psychological dissection of loneliness and memory. Two things we all carry and that no one wants to look at too directly.

Lynch would be fascinated by this film. Parsons could well be the artistic son of Lynch and Kaufman, especially considering that Jennifer Chambers Lynch, David’s daughter, infused a similarly heavy atmosphere into the series Dahmer. There’s something in that creative lineage that knows exactly where it really hurts and aims right there.

Backrooms is the sonic equivalent of an album by Boards of Canada or Throbbing Gristle. An experience that demands to be felt before it is understood. A journey to the confines of a universal entity where memory becomes trapped, slowly degrades, and seems to invite some to inhabit it and lose themselves in it forever.

At his age, Parsons has already made his aesthetic and conceptual power clear. What comes next, when he digs deeper into himself, will be impossible to ignore. Elevated horror has moved on from powerful dramas to psychological dissections that are truly terrifying.