I watched the movie Backrooms [ 2026 | IMDB | Wikipedia ]. The reason I was drawn to it from the first trailer may be shared by others, or may be individual and manifest through vague personal emotions, or may be a genuine generational gestalt. I’ve had dreams of being in empty-not-abandoned hotel conference rooms. Large, vacuumed, beige-paneled spaces. I’ve always tied it to loose memories of being in hotel spaces where my father was giving presentations. (The in-the-moment creepiness about that is that it’s been a memory for so long that I don’t know when or where it happened). He did sales on housing construction. So I’m certain that those moments existed?
Lisa told me that the movie director is 20. This movie couldn’t have been made without having grown up with creepypasta. That’s maybe a bit exaggerated but what was “Twilight Zone”-y mid 20th-century became “creepypasta” in the 20-teens. Characteristics are: a particular feeling of disassociation paired with the suspicion that there’s an arbitrary cause, environmental, existential.
One of the first aspects of the story is that of a failed company. Empty office buildings are the haunted cabins of our current economic existence but even a comparison to haunted houses doesn’t express the horror vacui of seeing a cube farm without walls, desks, chairs. Such empty spaces conjure the ghosts of those who had been there.
A bunch of drunk friends and I were leaving an event at a hotel in downtown Atlanta. While still in the hotel, we wandered some back paths and hallways hoping to find a shortcut to where we could exit to find public transportation. I was feeling particularly sassy and pushed open a random door that took us into a large, dark, scaffolded room. The path wasn’t clear but when you’ve had drink… whatever. We wandered a bit, there was a silence in a vast, empty room. The first door we opened to the outside was directly across the street from our train.
Updated 28 Jun 2026
Several works I saw at The Whitney Biennial back in May 2024 evoke/anticipated those feeling of being in “no space”, both from the 1950s. (I was in NYC for a day to see Carmen Consoli in concert and tried to pack in as much as I could.) These seem to be of a kind with Edward Hopper’s works from the 40s and 50s and de Chirico‘s works depicting de-peopled public spaces.
The dreamlike atmosphere of his compositions results from irrational perspective, the lack of a unified light source, the elongation of shadows, and a hallucinatory focus on objects. Italian piazzas bounded by arcades or classical façades are transformed into ominously silent and vacant settings for invisible dramas. The absence of event provokes a nostalgic or melancholy mood as if one senses the wake of a momentous incident; if one feels the imminence of an act, a feeling of anxiety ensues.
from The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation