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Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Jordan Stokes slip through a crack in reality and wind up in the Backrooms, which started out as a posting on 4Chan about “liminal spaces.” In 2022 a 16-year-old Youtuber with a freakish mastery of computer graphics produced a found footage video bringing the photo to life. And on the day the hosts recorded this podcast, indie movie studio du jour A24 debuted the first teaser for their feature-length adaptation.

This won’t be the first internet meme to get a movie; that distinction belongs to Slenderman from 2018. But the twist here is that the director is none other than that teenaged Youtuber, Kane Parsons, now given 15 million dollars to play with.

The hosts put on their screenwriting hats to wonder how you craft a narrative out of something that gets its power from its irrationality. The Backrooms fandom over the past five years has been divided into people (like Parsons) who feel that the offputting weirdness of the concept is what makes it powerful, and the people who imagine the Backrooms as a place that can be divided into levels, mapped, outsmarted, and ultimately conquered. Come to think of it, a lot of horror movies are balancing acts between something bizarre (a haunted videotape, for instance) and an explanation for where it came from and how to beat it (the life story of Samara Morgan). Audiences need SOME answers. But answer too many questions and the scary thing might not be quite as scary anymore.

Finally, we consider what made the Backrooms such a viral idea and potentially a box office hit. Perhaps serial killers and monsters are the threats of a previous generation. What’s scary to us today is the idea that our whole world might unravel, the rug pulled out from under us and replaced with yellow office carpeting. What’s scary is the idea that things might stop making sense for no clear reason, and we might not be able to find our way back.

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