Within the pop-cultural context, the common parlance term backrooms references what has been referred to as liminal spaces.
The concept has turned into a styled cottage industry spawning fan fiction, videos, movies, etc.
It all started, as far as anyone knows, with one person posting one photo and imaginations ran wild.
Backroom refers to places that were designed to be inhabited but aren’t: example, unoccupied office bldgs. It’s like a shell without life, a body without a soul, something that isn’t fulfilling its intended purpose, a waste of space, it’s like staring into the eyes of a mannequin, it’s a simulacrum of life.
These are examples via photos I took:
Backrooms tales tend to be in the horror genre—perhaps sci-fi-horror—in that they tend to depict things that should not be, horrific things, corruptions of reality. In fact, the tales go beyond being empty places if for no other reason that people enter into the backrooms and therein they encounter distortions of life, decrepit living things, decaying things, abstracts of reality.
Liminal tends to refer to the in-between portion of a transition. Now, there are those backrooms tales that aren’t liminal if, that is, the person who entered it never makes it out and/or encounters people/beings who are stuck therein.
Yet, the concept includes existential crisis as a person enters, suffers existential angst, and comes back to reality changed by the experience. Thus, liminal backroom tales can be quite spiritually alchemical in terms of causing a fundamental change in a person.
Backroom tales tend to feature distorted architecture and even violated laws of physics such as artist MC Escher’s impossible architecture that require, for example, the breaking of the law of gravity to traverse.
The 2026 movie Backrooms, written by Will Soodik and directed by Kane Parsons, depicts, or so it seems to me, noetic backrooms in terms of the mind, mental activity. It features a failing furniture store owner who’s life as a whole is falling apart and his therapist.
The furniture store owner ends up living in the store since he can’t handle the financial responsibility of owning or renting a place to live. He walks right through the wall of the store and enters the backroom which is filled with discarded furniture, some of which is impossibly half embedded into the floor, etc. His store features a mascot in the form of a pirate and in the backroom, he encounters a giant distorted corrupted version of it which menaces him.
It’s fairly evident that he’s experiencing one or more forms of psycho-emotional disorders due to the stress of his whole life, and relationships, falling apart. The backroom is a depiction of his inner world, the inner working of his malfunctioning mind. He’s wrestling with his failing useless stock of furniture, his failing mascot that no longer attracts much needed attention and is now sucking the life out of him, etc.
This becomes all the more evident due to that once his therapist enters that backroom, she comes face-to-face with illustrative depictions of his mania, his delusions, his struggles, his pathology. Yet, furthermore, once the focus is on her, the backroom becomes hers, her mind, as it becomes white, clean, clinical, her context: the mind of a clinician with issues of her own.
Themes of the mind being depicted as spaces, rooms, house, worlds have been in many stories such as the House movie series (1985 to 1992) which makes it clear that a house peppered with monsters depicts the troubled mind of a soldier suffering from disorders such as PTSD.
From my perspective as a Christian, I noted that The World is a Liminal Backroom in terms of that it’s a distortion of God’s original created order. In God’s created order architecture has to be built a certain way to function in a certain way due to law of nature, physics, thermodynamics, gravity, etc. that dictate that certain things must be done in certain ways.
Biblical teaching is that God created an orderly creation and that it underwent a fall. Thus, ever since the fall the world has been a backroom: corrupted, distorted, disjointed, malfunctioning, etc.
It’s been stated that everything that Satan does is a copy but corrupt version of what God does: he takes God’s created order and turns it inside out, upside down, and backward.
Even the most militant Atheist complains about the world, they recognize that things aren’t as they should be—but against what are they judging that?
Genesis 6 denotes a time in human history that was so terrible in part due to that of humans it’s said, “the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” so due to the fall, there was an effect upon the mind.
Biblically, The World is a Liminal Backroom due to that its transitionary nature, the in-between place between our creation and ultimate destination. Herein we deal with disordered pathologies and corruptions of all sorts, we discern such is what they are, we know something is wrong, we seek the other: the frontroom (which I suppose I just contextually coined), a return to order, to the real reality that was original meant.
The frontroom is ultimately the eternal state in the new heavens and new earth for those who found the right way out in Jesus. For those who don’t, the backroom is their eternal state.
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