Well Who knows

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

People (even in relatively liberal intellectual communities) often traffic in this truism that our culture is 'oversexualized' and that sexually explicit content is EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. It's inescapable, allegedly.

When in reality, every major social media website in existence is engaged in an all out war against the stuff. Credit card companies have attempted to refuse to process transactions based on people trying to purchase things like OnlyFans subscriptions. And SPEAKING OF ONLYFANS, that site recently went through a bunch of drama when it was considering trying to tamp down on the selling of sexually explicit content, when that is like minimum 90% of its total business.

While the MCU is a bit passe these days, it was once THEE global cultural juggernaut to end all juggernauts. And it is FAMOUSLY so aggressively devoid of any actual eroticism you'd be forgiven if you thought people in this universe are all created in science labs. (Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny, as the famous essay asserts)

Exact same with the Star Wars franchise. To such an extent that one of the most iconic and important characters in the whole thing (Anakin Skywalker) LITERALLY, canonically is a product of immaculate conception.

Capitalism is actually TERRIFIED of trying to sell us sex, and it shies away from it at almost all opportunities. (Why do you think Hollywood was so fucking blindsided by Heated Rivalry's unexpected success?) ALL the ads on porn sites are ads for other porn sites. Social media can't stop trying to free itself from the stuff completely. ALL THE MAINSTREAM AI COMPANIES (who are currently trying anything else they can think of to get people to use their products) ARE STAUNCHLY TRAINING THEIR MODELS OUT OF PROVIDING SEXUALLY EXPLICIT OUTPUTS (whether written or image-based).

Granted, you can of course still find plenty of sexually explicit content in internet and entertainment spaces if you intentionally seek it out. Plenty of it is out there, of course. But the notion that it permeates every corner of cultural world doesn't hold up to even a cursory level of scrutiny. Its ubiquity is radically overstated. You often have to navigate significant barriers to access sexually explicit content; it is often heavily targeted for censorship and, at minimum, it is often kept behind heavy structural partitioning.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

"How long do I have to wait?"

photographed by skye evelyn for I-D magazine

Every space is intentionally or unintentionally structured through decisions about circulation, hierarchy, thresholds, and spatial sequencing.

In other words, form follows function.

Even seemingly “empty” or mundane environments are composed to regulate movement, perception, and behavior, whether through comfort, efficiency, or control.

In that sense, Backrooms feels like a subversion of architectural logic itself where those same systems still exist but are stripped of legibility and purpose, producing a space that functions physically but no longer accommodates human cognitive orientation.

Basicallyyyy explains why Clark went crazy. Backrooms shows how architecture can override perception itself, turning space into a psychological system that destabilizes meaning and orientation.

As an architecture student, I was fascinated by how Backrooms turned architectural psychology into horror.

A lot of people say there wasn't enough horror because there wasn't a monster constantly chasing the characters and because there's no jumpscares, but I don't think they realize the monster was the architecture itself. And also, it's a psychological thriller and borderline horror. There's a difference. Grow up.

The film uses things we rely on to orient ourselves in space like landmarks, hierarchy, rhythm, daylight, scale, and spatial memory, then removes them or distorts them.

1. That's why Casino's don't have windows. It keeps you occupied and lose track of time. They literally distort your perception of time.

2. That's why shopping malls have looping layouts so you're forced to explore around. Like IKEA, you're psychologically “led” through a curated sequence, minimizing shortcuts and maximizing exposure to products.

3. That's why theme parks have carefully hidden service areas, controlled sightlines, immersive “world bubbles" to make you mentally stay inside a narrative environment where outside cues are eliminated.

But with Backrooms, it's manipulation of space and time and everything. All your senses are manipulated. Every room feels slightly familiar but never fully readable, so your brain keeps trying to build a mental map and failing.

What makes it scary isn't what is in the space, but what the space does to the mind. Humans constantly construct cognitive maps to understand where we are, but Backrooms breaks that process.

The circulation goes nowhere, the repetition erases reference points, and the environment sits in that unsettling zone between recognition and alienation. It creates disorientation, isolation, and paranoia without needing anything supernatural.

That is also why the concept went viral. Liminal spaces, dreamcore, whatever you call it. It feels endless, familiar yet unfamiliar, and deeply convincing in its emptiness. The suspense comes from thinking something else must be there with you, even when there is nothing. That uncertainty is the horror.

Adding paranormal elements often weakens it, because the original fear already comes from space itself, not from what might be inside it.

Hell, even the shot of Mary's "neighborhood" fucked me up because it looks exactly like the ones we see online and how it looks unoccupied.

Backrooms is really just architecture and human perception turned into a mechanism of fear.