Discussion of the film “The Backrooms”
2025 (110 mins)
Director: Kane Parsons

After a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him. 

Friday, October 30, 2026
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm ET
Via Zoom
*Film must be viewed before event

Discussant: Alex Smith, PsyD

Presentation: Horror cinema’s infatuation with the motif of the “liminal space” reflects our personal
experience of the self at the precipice of disintegration, the sense that the “I” is
impossible to define in the modern sociocultural void. The deistic Algorithm functions as
a mirror. Whether through rage-baiting vignettes, or advertisements for a raincoat that
you don’t need, (but could kind of imagine yourself wearing), the Algorithm provokes
worship, just as it induces dissonance. If the mirror is imperfect, how imperfect is our
grasp of ourselves, and the world?

When the physical world is subjected to this same procedural generation, it creates a
liminal void- a monochromatically yellow office space running copy-paste routines of
reality. This is the liminal space that Backrooms threatens. The self—and, by extension,
the world—is never fully ordered. It is fragmented patchwork in constant transition,
resisting ever being fully known. Parsons’ Backrooms depicts the “liminal space” and
the “I” as they approach a superposition. In here is a boundaried “me”. Out there is an
imperfect copy waiting to engulf the “me.” As the backrooms iterate and metastasize,
our broken selves will leak into the transitory, undefinable, liminal field. Ultimately, these
simulacra—reflections of self, culture, dream—may replace reality.
As a genre, horror functions as a fantastical iteration of universal human experience.
The unthinkable and the unfeelable are depicted as just far enough into the woods (or
deep enough into the basement) to belong to the other. At this distance, we are free to
examine these thoughts and feelings, but never fully inhabit them. Together, we will
consider Backrooms, the function of the liminal space, and their explanatory power in
understanding the self in transition and in resistance, as well as the universal fantasy of
the self and the world as orderly, or at least once-orderly, paradigms.