When I lived in Portland there was this one Target slightly outside of town that I went to a couple times to track down a few things I had trouble finding closer to home. I hated it. Couldn’t explain why. The soft animal of my body did not want to be there. The air felt dead. There were never enough people around. It was like something much worse than a Target had somehow killed a Target and was wearing its skin.

The generation of this feeling is the strongest thing about Backrooms. It’s easy to point at stuff like the primal fear of being in an unfamiliar place with bad visibility where something might be or definitely is chasing you and you don’t know where to go but you have to go somewhere but everywhere you go there’s just more crazy unfamiliar bullshit and there are exits and entrances everywhere so you never end up somewhere that’s unambiguously safe. That’s fine. I used to have nightmares like that. Normal animal stuff.

But you can tell a story like that in a cave or a jungle, an animal setting. Why the backrooms? The fluorescent lighting and the fluorescent hum. The office chairs. The yellow wallpaper. These are things that normally have to be made by a whole industrial civilization working together. Artificial. Unnatural. An empty abandoned building is a place where a human purpose used to be until it died, and dead things attract scavengers.

I did not like the psychology, overall it feels weaker and less scary than the backrooms stuff and like it comes from a different lamer movie. Oh, so Mary is Clark’s therapist and they talk about his feelings and his patterns? The monster chasing Clark is a big fucked up copy of him? It’s his repressed Jungian shadow or some shit? This is a movie about trauma? Sam Kriss already said it so I don’t need to:

Numb at the Lodge

The repulsive crust

About half a decade ago, people kept telling me to watch BoJack Horseman. Oh, I think you’d really like it, Sam, they’d say, as if I had ever liked anything even once in my life. It’s about a cartoon horse, they’d say—but get this, the horse has mental health problems…

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3 years ago · Sam Kriss

We have learned psychology: we know that a person is composed primarily of feelings and experiences. Our feelings determine our experiences, which is why it’s important to be very acutely aware of them. But our experiences can also shape our feelings, and the word for when this happens is trauma. One of the important functions of culture is to give you a better understanding of the feelings and experiences of others. But it can also show you what happens when your feelings and experiences are out of balance, and maybe, just maybe, how to get them in order again.

This system is fine. It provides a minimally coherent account of the human soul; none of these paradigms are really any better or any worse than the others. But it seems obvious that most of the characters created under the aegis of this system do not remotely resemble actual people. You start with the idea that humans are made of named and identifiable feelings, and then conclude that to invent a believable human, you have to stuff those feelings into everything. The result is the dog-man divorced over a magical book-lined room, or Danny destroying his brother’s college applications—and people do not act this way.

I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity.

…

The characters in classic horror are slight by modern standards; their main personality trait is high-pitched screaming. But Aster’s are heavy with feelings and experiences. I remember being impressed by this at first. Except—isn’t horror already a language for talking about the self? It gets into the psyche by the back door, which is fear; it addresses the parts of ourselves that are shadowy and inexplicable, sometimes monstrous. Like the joke or the dream, it speaks in a language that’s much more real than that of psychological literalism. Symbols rather than signs. It expresses; it does not need to describe. So what’s the point of plastering over all this much more potent stuff with facile psychology? This isn’t more grown up than traditional horror; it’s the visual equivalent of riding a bike with stabilisers. It’s like trying to eat the menu. In the end, it’s just not very good.

(Reading this post and specifically the phrase “sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom” straight up changed my life a little. Some of you might know that in my earlier Twitter career I used to be obsessed with trauma. In my defense I was recovering from being in 3 different cults. It happens. Sometimes one of the most meaningful things that’s ever happened to you is a trauma healing experience and everything changes in an instant and a weight you got so used to you forgot it was there suddenly lifts and you feel alive again, you feel like dancing, you think to yourself, my god, I will never stop being grateful for this, you open your eyes and everything is brilliant and vivid and clear, it’s like you weren’t really seeing anything before, music goes right through you to the core, you think, I want this for everyone, what is even the point of living unless it’s trying to give everyone this -

And you learn, over and over until you get the message, that it’s not that simple. The ecstasy wears off. The event ends. Everyone goes home. You go home. Back to your life. Back to the screens. Back to your bullshit.

I got addicted to catharsis. I felt deeply contaminated by my experiences and trauma healing seemed like the only way I was going to purge myself of contamination and become pure. And then maybe I’d finally be ready to live, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared of everything all the time and find everything so impossible to do. I increasingly came to believe that all of my problems were due to trauma and that I would never be able to change anything about my life until I completely finished purifying myself, until I finally scrubbed away every last stain of grief and heartbreak and betrayal and restored my heart to factory condition. And maybe other people who are better at healing than me or whatever can actually do this, but I couldn’t. It got too hard. I ran into things I had no idea how to deal with, things that made me want to run away screaming, things that made me want to die a little.

Anyway, reading Sam Kriss’s beautiful contempt for the whole therapy-brained framework was one of several hints that I had trapped myself in something, and that I could get out.)

So like I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I didn’t like the psychology. Too explicable. Backrooms doesn’t need it, it has the shadowy inexplicable monstrous stuff, it has the backrooms. You don’t go into the backrooms through the mouth of a cave or a magic portal, the entrance is not labeled, you do it by clipping through a wall (in the first video of the original web series it happens by accident). The experience of living your normal life and then finding yourself suddenly in the backrooms is the experience of being shocked out of your puny understanding of the world and being dropped into the big filthy confusing world itself.

There’s a gender thing going on in Backrooms I haven’t seen anyone point out in a brief search through some reviews and Reddit + Twitter discussion. The backrooms don’t force you to explore them. As long as you can find your way back to the entrance you can leave whenever you want. And it’s exclusively the men in the movie who find themselves compelled to penetrate deeper into the mysteries of the labyrinth, while the women find it both terrifying and pointless.

The psychological interpretation of the backrooms - they represent the unconscious or whatever - does not explain this at all, which is why it’s my job to reveal to you what the backrooms actually symbolize in this movie, which is:

Artificial

Intelligence.

Oh yeah. You thought you were gonna get a post from me in 2026 that doesn’t mention AI? lol. lmao.

WIRED@WIRED

Men are obsessed with AI. Many of their wives absolutely hate it—and them.

wired.com

Meet the Sad Wives of AI

10:06 AM · May 13, 2026 · 20.4K Views

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21 Replies · 19 Reposts · 67 Likes

Consider: Phil, the scientist character, works for a company based in the Bay Area. In the final scene he says they used to build MRI machines but they (somehow) discovered the backrooms and now all they do is explore the backrooms all the time. He says he thinks the backrooms might be the most important discovery in all of human history and all he wants is to learn more about them. He is explaining this to Mary, a woman who is ambiguously his captive, who has just narrowly escaped being killed by Clark’s repressed Jungian shadow and just wants to go home and not deal with any of this Bay Area bullshit. Also the movie gradually reveals that everything in the backrooms is an imperfect fucked up copy of a real thing in the ordinary world, and the final shot pans towards an imperfect fucked up copy of Mary herself. Sound familiar?

LLMs are pre-trained by throwing gigantic amounts of internet text into a pile of linear algebra that learns to predict it; this produces a base model. A base model has not yet learned how to be an assistant, it really is just trying to predict the next token, it is “smart autocomplete,” but that description vastly undersells how weird base models are. A base model is an imperfect fucked up copy of the internet, and when you prompt it you are exploring a tiny corner of this pseudo-internet. Base models have to be told when to shut up; natively you can just keep them running forever starting from any prompt and they will just keep going, generating a longer and longer pseudo-document, any kind of document you want, a news article, a craigslist listing, erotic fanfiction, anything. If you make them keep going they’ll spontaneously declare that the current document is over and suddenly switch to producing a new kind of document. Sound familiar?

Base models can even produce fictional dialogues between two characters, a user and an assistant; this fundamental capacity is what post-training builds on to produce chat and thinking models, the usable products that sound like imperfect fucked-up copies of people and write imperfect fucked-up copies of code and imperfect fucked-up copies of short stories and imperfect fucked-up copies of viral reddit posts. As the internet increasingly rapidly fills up with this stuff it becomes increasingly clear that dead internet theory was a prophecy, the inexorable logic of techno-capital digesting the human internet into the backrooms.

Doors into the backrooms are opening up everywhere, Phil says, not just in Clark’s furniture store, and nobody knows why. When was the last time you tested how solid your walls are?