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Had a nightmare where Caine talked like ChatGPT. It was so terrifying that I woke up crying and panicking and started stabbing random people on the street.

Went to go see the movie bout some pretty amazing digging

this was my favourite part

Finished watching the Backrooms movie in theaters and I have walked out as a changed man. Lots of references and phycological horror. Personal 10/10. I will be explaining everything I noticed, and why I'm upset with the backlash.

I personally loved it, but I see people complaining about how it isn't "accurate". It wasn't based off the Wiki or the Wikidot, so many entities and levels like the Smilers wouldn't be there. It's based off of Kane Pixel's YouTube series, as he was the one directing the movie. I also saw people being upset Bacteria wasnt there, and was replaced by a "corny" entity.

Still Life Clark was meant to be the personification of Clarks worst traits, and how he's not able to let go of his past. In the end, it was what killed him. It then goes after Mary, who ends up escaping from Still Life Clark, symbolizing she learned she needed to let go of her past trauma to move on in life.

As for the ending where it shows a Still Life Mary in the warped interview room, that could mean that even if we move on in our lives, some part of us is still living in that moment. We don't fully know if she escaped the Backrooms, but I like to think she did.

The movie wasn't supposed to be a loud and scary "everyone is being chased all the time" kind of horror. It was meant to be something that unsettled you and made you uncomfortable while also telling a story. People complaining that Still Life Clark didn't look like a generic scary monster missed the point of the movie entirely.

Still Life Clark is a being created from a misremembered moment in time, not something made just to chase and kill people like how some people wanted it.

I wonder if the room with the big version of the chair Clark broke in the beginning was the place where cap’n Clark was created - like with the chair being that big and the parrot on the floor I wonder if he was “remembered” in the chair like Mary in the chair at the end???

Also thinking that room was referring to that whole scene of him filming the commercial and breaking the chair and the two pairs of shoes being Bobby and Kat? In a later scene I noticed kat was wearing the same flip flops that were in that room and the placement of the shoes was kinda like where they were standing when filming Clark.

The Backrooms film has ALSO been leaked?? Another Indie based production someone is attempting to ruin before it's premiere? Is anyone else more than a bit suspicious at this point?

It started with Iron Lung; major film corps HATED how well that movie did in theaters. Disney even attempted to block it by buying up as many cinemas as they could. Thankfully that failed them, but I have a feeling it only made the collective corporate greed of Hollywood worse.

Then you have Amazing Digital Circus, an Indie animated franchise daring to follow in Iron Lung's footsteps. Near selling out theaters the moment the finale tickets go on sale. Getting an unprecedented amount of international support. Another company not playing by Hollywood's rules, so what would be the best way to punch back? Attempting to stop success at the cinema before it even has a chance.

Now The Backrooms, something many have waited a LONG while to become a film, is being threatened in the same way. Because someone out there is Big Mad that there's creators not "playing by the rules" or "knowing their place" in the industry.

There's been too many leaks of several projects over the past six months. It's more than coincidental at this point. The question is, who's truly responsible for it all? Perhaps people who are determined to cling onto a status quo to line their shareholder's pockets and stifle the industry even more?

Something's up, y'all. My spidey senses are WICKED TINGLING.

This is the thumbnail of an interview with Kane Pixels about his backrooms movie, but it really does distill down everything I HATE about the community driven wiki version of the backrooms as a concept.

When any random person can just come along and “add” to the backrooms with no oversight or rhyme or reason, it just becomes a bloated meme filled mess of nonsense and arbitrary moon logic rules.

That’s not liminal horror, that’s a discord server.

The reason Kane’s version of the Backrooms works is because it’s COHERENT. There’s a guiding storyline that has a beginning, a middle, and an end in mind. Everything in his series works to explain and showcase elements of a singular story that follows a core group of people across multiple videos. It’s minimal, it’s contemplative, and it spends more time getting you anxious than giving you jump scares.

In short: it’s REFINED.

The backrooms movie x animal crossing crossover! I already posted this to my tiktok but i figured since i have it ill post it here aswell

Mary is such a tragic figure; borne from a subconscious desire to save her mother, she went into psychology to help others and ultimately unlock those answers. “The Window Within” is such an amazing choice for her book name, referencing the window she’d try to look through as a child and was subsequently torn away from by her mom at the worst moments of her illness; she wants to see the world outside her trauma and help others do the same.

In many ways, Mary’s life is as empty as Clark’s; we see that, despite some minor success as a psychologist with her books and tapes, she has nothing else really going for her. House parties can’t fill that void, since when she saw a mother and child interacting, she quickly left to be alone (literally in her “back room”) to take anxiety medication in the midst of an episode.

She spends late nights on her couch eating dinner and staring at a TV playing her infomercial ad (and I believe her house doubles as a her office, so she, too, literally sleeps where she works), the same as Clarke in a bed inside his furniture store. Neither of them can escape their trauma (Clark’s drinking habits and Mary’s concrete handprint from her mother) or their workplace.

The difference with Mary is that she’s put herself in a position to help others, and needs to keep that facade up at all times. She’s unable to speak her true thoughts because that’s not what psychologists do; they’re supposed to guide others to find their own way out. But she herself is lost, like the blind leading the blind, and when she’s told by Clark that he “found his window”, it sets off alarms but it must’ve also piqued her curiosity; what answer did he find in those weird, endless rooms he was talking about?

Then she discovers that his answer, in fact, was to double down on his worst aspects, to embrace the trauma that’s trapped him. “I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” The kitchen facade of his Backrooms home, the Still Lifes he’s gathered around him, the fact that one of them is (heavily implied to be) a distorted version of his ex-wife; wallowing and ruminating on one’s trauma wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

The psychological exercise, the roleplay of Clark’s fateful night, is repeated. The first time they did this was on her terms, in the sterility of her office; safe and divorced from emotion, she spoke her lines and allowed Clark to express his misgivings, then commented neutrally. “How does this make you feel?” She can’t make her own feelings known on the situation, she is acting as a platform to give Clark a voice to his emotions.

Now, this roleplay is on Clark’s terms; trapped and restrained and forced to play the role of the wife wearing the scalp of his ex-wife’s Still Life (she cannot see them as he does, as husks of misremembered people, she sees the act as horrifying and deranged), she initially goes along with it, telling him what he wants to hear (fawning is one of the forms of survival response), until she can no longer remain passive. She breaks her typical routine and give Clark her honest opinion, something that could’ve reached him if only she’d been allowed to (Clark calling out her terrible poker face was illuminating, how long has he seen through her?):

He whines, he refuses to take responsibility for his own actions, he displaces blame on others, he copes with this through drinking, he refuses to be wrong. His response? “Are you saying this is my fault?” And she reaffirms this. Then, she tells him, “I can’t save you!” [only saw the film once, I’m probably forgetting stuff]

And through verbalizing this, she stares in shock, more so at herself; she found her answer. The truth at the heart of her trauma. She couldn’t save her mother. In fact, it wasn’t her job to save her mother; she was just a child. In that situation, her mother could only have saved herself and had an obligation to not let Mary be trapped in it.

Then Clark goes, “But I don’t think I want to change.” And she replies, “Then don’t. But let me go.” She speaks to her captor, both Clark and, subconsciously, her mother. She wants to move forward from her childhood trauma, she found her window and wishes to go through it. Clark, delighted at her permission to remain in his self-destruction, frees her.

Then, Pirate Clark walks in. It’s the manifestation of his trauma and anger and his worst aspects given form, the monster that’s been chasing him and the others through the backrooms, and we see how the other Still Life’s react to him. His ex-wife proxy tries to flee, runs to the corner screaming and ramming herself into the walls; the other two similarly flip out. Clark, with his new understanding of himself, and the revelation he received from Mary, tries to reason with Pirate Clark. “She said we don’t have to change! It’s okay!” He thinks he can have a life here, in the Backrooms, and tries to placate his own trauma.

But Pirate Clark, I believe, is not just his worst traits and trauma, but the innate desire to change and seek help. The look on his face is one of anguish and helplessness, he reflects Clark’s desire to find a way out. So when Pirate Clark is confronted with Clark’s decision, to stay the same, to stagnate, Pirate Clark consumes him, symbolizing Clark letting his trauma consume and kill him.

But Mary wants to escape, she found her window, now she needs to go through it. After a long chase and confrontation, she finds her salvation; she runs into Async and they extract her from the Backrooms.

What’s so interesting about the end scene is that in many ways, despite breaking the chains of her trauma (the concrete piece she used against Pirate Clark), she found herself back at the beginning; trapped in a room, looking at the windows like when she was a child. It reflects her last moments with her mom, who was committed to a psychiatric hospital and strapped to a chair with a dead stare on her face. She knows she won’t be free after what she went through. The scientists will scrutinize and interrogate her, with an unknown fate in the future. She couldn’t escape her childhood after all. These fears and this new trauma manifests in the Backrooms. Her demolished house, her neighborhood, and even the very room she’s in, appears, and with it her very own Still Life: a woman trapped in a chair.

i think mary is a bad therapist 😱😱😱 im sorry but i think perhaps her previous childhood experiences with her mother’s mental illness could be affecting how she views her own clients, I think perhaps she may have some deep subconscious resentment towards people who seek help from her, and I’ll tell you why I think that. From the beginning we see her take a bit of a simplistic look towards mental illnesses like depression, “if you just opened the window you could pass through it, its not locked, the latch isn’t broken, just open it.” However repeatedly during the movie we see characters encounter windows that they can not pass through or even see, one of the very last shots of the movie is Phil looking at an extremely tinted window, people on the other side are watching him to see what he does and what Mary does but its not like he can see them, and its definitely not a window that can just be opened. Clark depicts himself(?) falling from a window into the hands of a horrible version of himself, perhaps he sees Mary’s main philosophy as more of a trap than freedom, just the fact that Mary is so obsessed with windows is proof that she’s not over her own childhood trauma and is not seeking help for it (therapists can see therapists its true.) Then we have the scene where she breaks from the therapist role and is her most authentic self and it shows she kind of hates Clark because he blames everyone but himself for his problems (which isn’t necessarily untrue) but then she says the line, “you are your fucking brain,” which is the problem with her as a therapist. I don’t know if you know this, but therapists aren’t supposed to fucking say that, mostly because of people who struggle with intrusive thoughts and anxiety and shit like that, because if someone with issues like this were to believe that, they may kill themselves! Which, interestingly, by some interpretations, is exactly what happens right after Mary tells Clark this.

The scene where Clark (most likely) dies is very interesting to me. Because, as I’ve already said, it could be a metaphor for suicide, Capt. Clark kills Clark, he kills himself in a way. It could also be a metaphor for if you give in to your mental illness, if you let it rule your life then you will be eaten alive by it, which is a very literal interpretation but whatevah. Or that if you giving up on changing for the better all that will be left, or all people will remember you as, is a half-baked caricature of what you truly are, I don’t know.

Clark is intriguing as a character because it’s unclear what he wants from therapy, he misses his wife but still has this distain for her trying to become a lawyer stemming from his own failures to succeed as an architect; he doesn’t seem to want to learn to cope with his failures though. Therapy has done nothing to stop or slow his drinking, perhaps he just needs someone to talk to, someone who will take his side or listen to him when he has no one in his life who he would call a friend. In the scene where he’s having “dinner” with Mary he asks her how to stop, how to stop messing up his own life, and Mary says, “I have no fucking idea,” so another win for team ‘Bad Therapist Mary’ haha just kidding but it seems he wants his life to be better. He wants to be happier he wants to stop doing bad things, that’s probably what he wants from therapy, but there is not cure-all answer there, while Mary says, “that’s just how you’re wired,” I do think that could be partially true but that’s an overly simplistic and not a very therapist way of thinking. I believe positive change is always possible, while your wiring may be done kind of poorly and you have three switches on your breaker box unconnected to the others, if the circumstances allow for it, you can improve, that’s what I think. Clark mentions his childhood in a way that sounds like it was very difficult for him, but Mary never talks about it, it’s unclear if she even knows what it was like. Clark also keeps bringing up money when talking about troubles with his wife, if law school didn’t cost so much, if the home he bought for them didn’t cost so much, perhaps he wouldn’t feel so trapped in his own life if everything didn’t cost so fucking much. But, it’s also possible I’m projecting my gripes with money onto da movie. But, that interpretation is very true to life, it’s not uncommon for people’s circumstances to lead to problems with mental health that feel inescapable. its like that post i cant remember where it came from that says “money cant buy happiness but its more comfortable to cry in a lamborghini than on a bicycle” or smthn, AND THEYRE RIGHT. THEYRE RIGHT! shit sucks if ur poor and everyday is the same if ur poor so no wonder its so difficult to get out of a loop when the bills just keep fucking adding up. I think the backrooms are a metaphor for mental illness and i’d bet my bottom dollar u agree. I like it a lot as a depiction of that, because Clark is “normal,” and Mary is “normal,” but they still struggle through incomplete memories and looping through the same nightmares over and over in a place nobody can see. It’s not the popular depiction of struggles within your own mind, it’s not under-researched view of PTSD and/or hallucinations it’s a person who is outwardly “normal” who is troubled immensely in a place that hardly anyone can see and seems inescapable. Even if they DO see it, ppl might just observe you and LEAVE YOU THERE??? (Rest in Peace Clark and fuck those MIR machines) Which is cool to me forgive me I think its cool, that’s a lot like how it is irl. The more common depictions have their place, but mental illness rarely looks the same, even if tv shows and movies would lead you to believe otherwise. The way the movie constantly depicts Mary in a windowless room even after Mary has destroyed the concrete from her home which was demolished shows it truly is nearly impossible to escape The Backrooms even if you do, there’s still a version of yourself half-remembered there, which makes me think that the movie has a better understanding of how tough your own mind can be to overcome than Mary does. (sorry if it seems like I hate her, i dont, but i do think she shouldnt be a therapist lowkey)

As for the overall message I think it may be that it’s very easy to get trapped within your own mind even if you’re what everyone else would consider a “normal” person. I made these interpretations from my own perspective, it’s possible that Mary is the “voice of reason” and that what the movie wants us to learn is what she tells us, I hope that is not the case frankly because it seems defeatist in a way I really dislike when it comes to those who struggle with mental illnesses/disorders. I think that Mary as the voice of reason is also unlikely due to how her honest words seemingly temporarily calm Clark but they also seem to lead to his death. I’m usually pretty bad at interpreting things, I won’t lie, I’m always too biased and I can’t deny that I want to see things from my own preferred perspective most of the time, but perhaps theres something of note here. Probably not enough to justify reading it all tho