The horror flick \u201cBackrooms\u201d originates from an unforgettable image: an endless maze of eerily abandoned, generic commercial spaces, punctuated by odd stacks of furniture, all wall-to-wall industrial carpet, drop-ceilings, buzzing yellow fluorescent lights, no windows, no way out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s soul-sucking office spaces denuded of cubicles and emptied of purpose. It\u2019s dead Kmarts or Sears department stores. The actual origins are viral riffing on 2002 renovation photos of a HobbyTown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s the feeling of rooms built out to the stupid specifics of retail, but now turned into cursed ghost towns. It\u2019s the feeling of major, century-old corporate edifices collapsing. It\u2019s the deeply unsettling feeling of something terribly wrong with America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of simplicity in the setup that preys on the anxiety people have around the stage of industrialization we\u2019re at,\u201d the film\u2019s 20-year-old director Kane Parsons recently told The New York Times<\/a>. \u201cThe world is becoming increasingly atomized and sort of lonely. We have so much available to us now\u2014at least in this part of the world\u2014yet it feels like all the stuff we have means less and less.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n