Yellow in Horror – A Review of Backrooms

Chapter 19

Anyone who has ever spent workdays surrounded by the banality of office buildings knows how endless they can feel. The stark lighting. The replaceable carpet tiles. The seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all furniture. The feeling that you’re losing yourself during your workday as you stare at your computer. That the version of you who is HR coded is not the same person who lives in the reality that is outside the building. A copy misremembered by the office world.

How terrifying would it be to be stuck in that purgatory alone? Only the rooms are wrong in such a way you can’t quite put your finger on and the furniture distorted and the lights flicker. A labyrinth of all the things you were glad to be rid of at the end of the workday now become your worst fear – a transitional state of the space you once knew and something is trying to hurt you. And you are all alone.

That is the feeling Backrooms is trying to portray in it’s yellow wallpapered network of office space. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a struggling furniture store owner whose wife has kicked him out of his own house. His therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) tries to get him through it but is dealing with her own issues. Her mother was a shut-in during her childhood and she has flashbacks. Clark unwittingly falls through the wall of his basement into the backrooms. This is something that occurs in video games – a liminal transition where the protagonist falls through a wall into an area that feels out of space or time.

When Mary doesn’t believe Clark when he tells her about these backrooms but begins to fear for his mental stability, she goes to his store and finds where he has marked the wall that allows him to access the backrooms. Mary’s first experience in the backrooms is far more terrifying for she cannot find her way out and is eventually chased by the copy version of Clark – a backrooms version that misremembered him as the one legged pirate he played in his store’s commercials and not actual Clark. Honestly, I might have nightmares about that pirate.

Clark even tries to get the assistance of his two employees in helping him discover the secrets of the backrooms. The sequence, which goes full on found footage, is truly terrifying as one of them is pulled from below by a rope. Screams are heard in the distance. Something is trying to kill them in those eerie yet banal office-like rooms. The yellow fluorescent lighting and wallpaper create an eerie atmosphere. A place that is sick, mentally misremembering details of the real world. The furniture is never quite right. The people it misremembers are terrifying versions of who they were when the real person entered the backrooms. And one of them is killing anyone it finds. Collecting their clothing in piles hidden in the yellowed shadows of the darker rooms. The deeper you go, the scarier it gets.

Much like the yellow color, the settings themselves are intentionally meant to be disturbing. They look like they could be the real world, but they are not. Doors end up in floors and ceilings. One wall has a mirror on one side and is opaque on the other causing Clark and his assistant manager to yell through it trying to find a way out. The backrooms even remember where the assistant manager lives, but the yellow picnic tables outside her home are misremembered into disturbing tables that even children couldn’t sit at.

And then there are the men in the yellow hazmat suites moving through the backrooms with a mission. Even when their intentions in the backrooms are realized by Mary, it still leaves her with more questions than they are willing to answer. These men are just as off putting as the yellow wallpaper and blinking fluorescents. And the final image of Mary’s misremembered copy sitting in the yellow room of the backrooms was probably my favorite shot of the entire movie. For me, it showed that you leave a part of yourself behind wherever you go. That image only exists by the people who remember it and that version will never be the real you. It’ll just be how they remember you which could be terrifying depending on the situation.

I didn’t love this film, but I do like what it represents. Our existential fear of how we are remembered by those we leave behind and that of the purgatory we often feel in our jobs is often what drives us to change. To either grow as human beings or descend into some form of ourselves that becomes unrecognizable. What if we can’t escape? What if it won’t change? What if we are alone forever? That is the fear that this film possesses, at least for me. It’s a bit slow in spots, but some of the imagery in this film is pretty terrifying so it gets bonus points for that.

3.5 out of 5 stars.