Backrooms, released in May, immediately became a surprise hit among young people. 86% of opening-weekend viewers were under the age of 35, and 44% were under the age of 21.

In the movie, a failed architect turned furniture-store owner discovers a portal to the Backrooms, an extradimensional labyrinth of yellow, office-like rooms lit by buzzing fluorescent lights, each slightly different from the last. 

Old furniture, clothing, personal belongings, Christmas decorations, and other miscellaneous objects are scattered throughout. Many of the rooms are iterations of familiar-feeling places—waiting rooms, hotel rooms, offices, swimming pools—but are empty and unnervingly “off.” It’s as if American society was vacated at some point in the late 20th century, with the physical remnants left to silently decay. 

The exact nature and origins of the Backrooms are never fully explained, but the viewer eventually learns that it tends to reflect the distorted memories and trauma of those who enter it.

This atmosphere has captured the minds of Gen Z moviegoers at a time when viewership at theaters has hit record lows. Much has been said about Backrooms as a horror film for the age of the internet, and there is clearly truth to that. 

The original inspiration for the movie was an image popularized by a 2019 4chan thread, and the 21-year-old director, Kane Parsons, is very openly a child of the internet. Depending on who you ask, the Backrooms as depicted in the film can evoke the claustrophobia of the Covid-era lockdowns or the algorithmic repetition of the internet in the age of AI slop.

But the movie seems to tap into something more deeply rooted in Gen Z’s collective consciousness than those relatively recent experiences. A morbid fascination with so-called “liminal spaces” and the aesthetics of a decaying America predates them. 

A decade ago, YouTube videos of “dead malls” and other vestiges of 1980s and 1990s Americana captivated certain corners of the internet. Nostalgia has been a central theme of internet pop culture for some time. 

In the decades following World War II, American capitalist society appeared exceedingly stable, reliable, and permanent. The idea that every succeeding generation would have it better than the one that preceded it seemed true. 

Those of us who grew up in the early 2000s may have caught the last glimpse of that world before the 2008 crisis and its aftermath put an end to the era of confidence in the future. 

What remains are hazy, early childhood memories and occasional physical artifacts from that world of stability, which Backrooms presents as both an object of horror and fascination. Perhaps this is another reason why young audiences have found it so compelling.