Ian Haig
Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms emerged on the internet. The creepy pasta backstory of the film is well known: like a piece of haunted media within the network, it began as a mysterious still image posted on 4chan, and later a short film on YouTube with over 60 million views, and now a Hollywood movie. What’s striking about the recent film, The Backrooms, is the way viral marketing has spread across the internet, the algorithm suggesting more and yet more stories, interviews with cast and characters and various analyses of the film, amplifying the idea of the film being a product born out of the internet and the algorithmic culture of social media from where it originally emerged.
Extending this technological narrative into The Backrooms is the film’s premise and constitutes its relationship to AI. The Backrooms themselves function as a hidden space of the unconscious where trauma, repressed emotions and the uncanny reside. The Backrooms as a metaphor for AI training data embody where histories are remixed and reconstituted, coming back to haunt us. This is most prevalent in the later dinner scene, where characters — like early Midjourney prompts from 2022 — reveal deformed flesh, extra fingers, multiple eyes and distorted faces half digested in the training data. These early versions of AI learning what the body was produced grotesque iterations of the body in the process. Early AI models, which were undertrained on the body, seemed to make things up that they couldn’t understand. AI and The Backrooms are the collective residue of human culture in all its confronting iterations and forgotten leftovers. AI operates like the Jungian collective unconscious and like the film itself, represents the shadow, the unseen version of oneself.
The distorted bodies of Backrooms
Clearly at work here is the uncanny, the unpleasant experience of an object perceived as simultaneously familiar and strange, something slightly off, which occurs in both the film and as an aesthetic register of AI. The film’s existential dread resonates with the anxieties around AI, as reality and unreality collapse.
The film lends itself to the idea of being trapped within an information system of endless navigations and representations of reality rather than reality itself. Backrooms present to the viewer a kind of in-between space, a digital limbo. The endless corridors and hidden rooms of The Backrooms are like the infinite and limitless generations of AI.
Indeed, The Backrooms can be viewed as a metaphor for a world increasingly mediated by machine-generated representations—a place constructed from copies of copies, where authenticity becomes difficult to locate. In that sense, the horror is not necessarily that AI becomes conscious. It is that humans find themselves wandering through a reality increasingly composed of synthetic echoes of themselves. The line of dialogue in the film by Clark describing The Backrooms as “every place that ever was” recalls AI trained on all human-recorded media, and like The Backrooms, AI is only about the past, never the future, past emotions, and trauma revisited in a never-ending recurrence. Here, The Backrooms connects to AI and the notion of hauntology, the past endlessly reconstituted and remixed into different forms; this is a future that never happened, that failed to materialise.
The endless yellow rooms and corridors of Backrooms
The sameness of The Backrooms creepy yellow mustard interiors and wallpaper presents a generic space like the middle ground of AI training data of corporate inputs and the median, banal stock images and the never-ending averaging of AI outputs so common these days. This, for me, is the real horror in the film: the bland office-like spaces that collapse in on themselves, blandness and blankness multiplied, which is what AI delivers – the average, the median. The sheer banality of AI as liminal horror. The endless wandering of corridors like endless corporate networked spaces, AI, and the algorithm feeding us the idea of variations, but ultimately, all outputs are the same; it all leads to the same result, the same generic training data that goes nowhere of never-ending corporate capitalism which frames our contemporary infosphere.
Extending the notion of The Backrooms as a liminal non space is the fact that the film is set in the early 1990s, with camcorders and VHS video noise and deserted 90s strip mall atmospheres. A period that operates as nostalgia for a time that never existed for the young filmmaker, which also strangely predates the original still image of The Backrooms on 4chan from 2002. This glitch in timeframes adds to the reading of the film as being born from elsewhere and, like AI, unable to escape the clutches of the past.
Much has been said about the liminal spaces of The Backrooms. But for me, its liminality is best understood through the internet and game space. The film taps into the web and social media as an in-between zone: suspended between the flesh version of our lives and our online personas, where existence is validated through likes, visibility and algorithmic feeds. It also draws heavily on game space, particularly the logic of multiplayer online worlds: levels, portals, hidden zones, remote players, glitches, endless interiors and environments that seem both inhabited and empty. In this sense, The Backrooms is not just about strange architecture, but about the spaces we already occupy daily: digital spaces where presence, identity and reality are unstable.
Various social media posts about The Backrooms have appeared, including prompts to generate your own backrooms, e.g., “Prompt one backrooms room in Midjourney — mono-yellow walls, drop ceiling, that fluorescent hum.” A feedback loop emerges: internet-generated content, feature film, user-generated AI content for individual backrooms, AI content shared on social media, repeat.
There is an entirely internet nerd fanbase here at work, too, tapping into its extensive internet forums of The Backrooms lore, mythology and history. This nerd/fan aspect of the film, has clearly contributed to the ready-made audience for the film with its considerable fanbase. This, along with the banal viral internet marketing and coverage, with a focus on the young director and the profits the film has generated, shape an equally banal metric to measure the ‘success’ of the film, overshadowing some of the more compelling and highly inventive aspects of the film: that of its AI horror and the horror of the generic corporate spaces that form the information landscape of our lives; that of our unseen tech overlords shaping our very existence through engagement metrics; and that of its exploration of the edges of the training data and haunted spectres of bodies, with their fascinating links to ideas of both hauntology and haunted media.
Ian Haig works across media, from video, technology based media, mutant AI and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last thirty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror, transhumanism gone bad, and the defamiliarisation and confrontation of the human body. You can find his online horror on insta @ian_haig2.0
Check out our review by Diego Ramirez of Ian Haig’s film, The Foaming Node (65min, 2018).
