The Mindape gifts us his historically-informed thoughts on The Backrooms through the lens of a certified and certifiable Canadian™ surrealist.
"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." -Karl Marx
Many people speak about The Backrooms as if it is an active and contemporary curse, an ongoing phenomenon. However, I think it was imperative to set the film in the past and focus on banal objects from the 80s-90s in particular. Horror as emphasis on the wrongness of persistent carpeting everywhere? The bulky overstuffed and gold-trimmed heaviness of post-cold war material excess? In that sense, The Backrooms is almost classical horror. A film in which we are haunted by the material culture of the previous generation.
In Marxist terms, this means being choked by the aging leftovers of an obsolete mode of production, and the legacy of pain and suffering underlying the hidden social relations beneath the surface. The Surrealist Group of Madrid referred to this phenomenon as the “New Industrial Gothic,” although I think with the Backrooms it has moved out of the factories and into the abject world of '90s knowledge work.
In Gothic horror proper, the budding bourgeois capitalist age of the 18th-19th centuries was haunted by the rotting remnants of the feudal era: medieval castles, mouldering rural churches and cemeteries, which the popular imagination filled with vampires and devils.
Likewise in the “New Industrial Gothic,” the abandoned factories of the era of heavy manufacturing littered across the American Rust Belt became the site of a new kind of horror of the disenfranchised worker. Suddenly, we had a trove of warehouses and industrial settings filled with injured beings like the Cenobites (Hellraiser) or Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elmstreet).
In this vein, The Backrooms is a traditional horror gesture, almost touching in its fidelity to the genre’s root mechanic. Carpeted floors, bulky woodgrain, lush maximalizing couches in mouldering, palpably offline furniture warehouses… Analog Horror is just the next iteration of the same compulsion, the same knee-jerk reaction to a psycho-economic breakdown of a way of living and working.
And of course, you come to Canada to film something like this because we’re basically the backrooms of the US. It makes a lot of sense that they had to scour the backlots of Vancouver prop storage, furniture warehouses, and lighting fixtures to populate the set. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan frequently highlighted the fact that as half-participants in and half sidelined observers of American culture, Canadians were better suited to catch some of the structural nuances of media formations than our fully embedded American neighbours. I think this fully extends beyond just our media position and into our material culture as well. As William Gibson says, Canada is what American movies look like—not just because they film a lot of movies here, but because we had a subconscious economic and psychological drive to mimic (in some monstrous distorted way) our southern dominators.
The Mindape's parents have Dr. Kline's exact bedroom set.
As the film underscores, the entity which tries to recreate a dog from a mere description, having never seen one, is undertaking a cursed exercise. This describes the Canadian material and psychic landscape perfectly during the NAFTA era. One striking personal detail in the film occurred in the bedroom of Dr. Mary Kline. I was immediately shocked by her 1980s bedroom set—the headboard, the bedside cabinets etc. were the exact model my parents have (and still partially have!) What’s even more surprising is that my partner AC said the exact same thing, she remembers it vividly from her household as well. It must have been a prevalent design in Canada somehow, but it has gained a kind of shocking hauntological weight in both our minds in a way that we never would have otherwise thought about.
P.S. Anyone interested in the specifically materialist exploration and theory of some of the topics here might enjoy some of the relatively recent surrealist efforts in this area, specifically the Surrealist Group of Madrid’s 2012 book, The Exteriority Crisis, as well as texts by the Surrealist Group in Stockholm, especially Mattias Forshage and Erik Bohman's, “towards the solidification and revitalisation of atops theory.”
