"She's a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print"

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

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.

The backrooms are generative AI trying to capture something real but only achieving a malformed, mindless imitation.

The backrooms are stagnation, an unwillingness to step into the new and uncomfortable effort of changing, instead running through the same old routine even as it starts to fall in on itself.