Best Movie This Year Yet
The coolest 4chan feature is anonymity, which implies a lack of authorship by default. I believe such a lack of authorship became quintessential to the development of The Backrooms universe and the liminal trend across the Internet. As nobody fully owned the Backrooms, everyone felt free to reshape them imaginatively. Liminality becomes universal precisely when it loses a clear identity, suspended between meanings; and in that suspension, it becomes archetypal. And that’s what, in my opinion, sparked the whole phenomenon.
The Backrooms are therefore not simply a fictional location, but a collective psychological space for internet users. They represent emptiness, memory, nostalgia, and artificiality all at once. This is why I find the adaptation of the Backrooms into cinema so culturally important. Where most movies require structure, plot, characters, and explanation, the original Backrooms concept was cool af because it resisted explanation.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the movie's author was to create enough canon for the Backrooms to function as a universe (further explained on his YouTube), without destroying the ambiguity that made them meaningful in the first place. Yet, at the same time, it reflects how traditional diffusion platforms, such as cinema, have had to adapt to more horizontal thematics, such as liminality, in order to keep relevance.
Liminal art works because it is unified not by authorship, but rather by the lack of it. In this sense, the Backrooms show how internet culture creates mythology today. It comes from anonymous posting, image circulation, and the socialization of meaning. They are not solely owned by one creator, but rather expanded by many.