Bad Vibrations
The vibes-based horror of Backrooms
Greetings from Vista!
Nuvia returned from her travels to China and Hawaii last weekend just in time for another work trip in Vista, California, so I’m tagging along for the ride. Where is Vista? Well, we’re staying at a hotel called TownePlace Suites by Marriott San Diego Carlsbad/Vista. I wish I was kidding. I think that’s a sign that your name generator is broken when that’s the best you can do for your property. I think it speaks to the reality that Marriott owns too many damn hotels. This, apparently, is their system so that people from say, Korea, have a shot at making it to the right place when they find themselves in a no-place like Vista, California.
Vista is inland from Oceanside, north of Carlsbad, which is a little less than an hour north of where we live in San Diego, but it’s easily twice that in rush hour traffic, which is why we’re staying in Vista this week. It’s been a great place to get work done because there aren’t any distractions at this abominably named hotel. In the middle of the day I roam the empty corridors and common areas. My suspicion is this hotel gets by on contracts from insurance companies and construction conglomerates. I’m also fairly certain the breakfast room is haunted by an elderly couple and their incontinent dog and the pattern in the high-traffic carpet is trying to tell me something. I keep the doors locked and a rope I’ve made out of pool towels coiled by the window in case I need to make a break for it.
Backrooms and the uncommon cold
Last week I came down with a cold that started off mild (Gee, I hope I’m not getting sick) and then hit me like a bad acid trip (Woe betides me) and then all but disappeared with a few lingering symptoms to remind me that it wasn’t all a dream. I slept a lot, drank a ton of water, and hit the Theraflu like it was a happy hour mojito in a Bermuda brothel.
In between phase one and two of this sickness I went to see Backrooms and loved it. I tried not to read anything about it because my internal anti-hype machine that’s hardwired into my Gen X brain was telling me it can’t possibly be any good if this many people like it. So I went in cold and I liked it. I liked it a lot even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Backrooms is about the disruption of senses, the realization that the apparatus you use to make sense of the world no longer works. It’s not unlike the negotiations you make with yourself when you are sick.
Backrooms is also a lot of fun. It’s rich in textures dating back to the 1990s. Video screens with jagged edges. Rounded wooden furniture that wants to be soft. Carpets that yearn to be lawns. Drop ceilings so hideous the brain refuses to acknowledge them at all.
When I go to the movies, I pay close attention to the story. The who and the what and why things are happening are all important, especially in a horror movie. All that information we get in the first act serves as clues for understanding the uncanny. Backrooms doesn’t operate that way. It presents itself like a video game. Certain actions trigger certain outcomes but if you linger in the lobby, so to speak, the adventure stalls. You have to go in.
The protagonist is a guy named Clark with a background in architecture who runs a furniture store. He has a showroom so massive that he can sleep there at night without anyone noticing. When he discovers an entrance to a mazelike series of freaky backrooms in the basement of his furniture store, he takes it upon himself to explore them. He makes a map in an effort to figure out what he’s seeing, but he needs more than a map. He needs a whole new way of seeing.
This reminded me of the old Infocom text adventure games I used to play as a teenager: Zork, Starcross, Suspended. The text holds clues as to what’s in the room and what it might be used for but without a map you have to read the room each time you move through it. The game doesn’t come with these maps.1 You have to make them yourself. They are essential for making sense of the space you are inhabiting.
Without the experience of playing these games and making these maps I don’t think I would have enjoyed Backrooms as much as I did. (I suspect the Minecraft generation feels much the same way.) Because the first thing I realized about the movie is that the story was going to be secondary to how these characters navigate lostness, and the sooner I gave myself over to being lost with them, the more I would get out of the experience.
Was it scary? Not really. Was it unsettling? 100%. Everything about the space is unsettling because the space itself is unsettled. The sound design of the movie is exquisite. It does an excellent job of communicating that the backrooms are real and that you are not alone in them/it. Echoey footfalls. Banks of buzzing florescent lights. The low-end hum of institutional spaces designed to hold large groups of people yet are almost, but not quite, empty.
Since seeing the movie I’ve made the mistake of reading about it, which I will try to avoid until I have a better idea of what I think about it, because I don’t know what to think, but I liked how it made me feel. It’s a deliciously weird movie to get lost in. A high concept horror that holds to none of the tropes we use to navigate the genre, like using silly string in a game of tug-of-war: it just doesn’t work that way.
The next time I write fiction that falls under the umbrella of horror, it will be an interesting exercise to think less about what the words are doing on the page in terms of story, setting, character, etc. and more on how they make the reader feel. I already do this, I think, but I want to see what happens when I lean into it. Or maybe that’s the cough medicine talking. Hold on, I hear someone coming down the hallway…
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with some suggestions on some books to read and places you can go to hear people talk about them. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales. Since you’ve read this far, you might as well go ahead and pre-order my new novel now…
In Zork a map was called a Movement Assistance Planner, which at age 13 I thought was the absolute peak of cleverness.
I still get anxiety remembering standing in front of an impenetrable wall in one of the Zorks and having no idea what to do about it
Worth the wait!