A couple weeks back, on an episode of the Vidjagame Apocalypse podcast, we were talking about the fact that black people love Sonic the Hedgehog. Once we all agreed on this, we then asked…why? What is it that black people see in Sonic, a character that is also loved by all kinds of other people? We decided this is because Sonic is the personification of “cool” to a certain, more pale section of American culture, and since Black people are often held up as the leaders of what’s “cool” in American culture, we find ourselves with a weird kinship with him. Then the question came up, what do I mean when I say Black people are often seen as “cool”.

Well, African Americans are some of the most historically abused people on earth. There are plenty of atrocities done to many people around the world, but American slavery and the legacy of evil its acceptance has left behind is one of the greatest modern sins in history. Yet, despite that being an obvious fact, we are to just sit and accept that slavery is still legal through technicality, and is effectively still used in prisons. We have to just continue to live our lives knowing that the institution we are supposed to rely on to protect us from crime was born from the Ku Klux Klan, and the biases of those origins have continued to bear down onto us. We have to try to find joy and live in a country, sometimes even a world, in which many inherently don’t see us as human, and it is seemingly on us to convince them that they are wrong. And yet, we still manage to be resilient. To white America, the fact that we dance the way we do, make the kinds of art we do, say the words we say in the ways we say them, and design our aesthetics the way we do despite all of the struggles of both the past and present weighing on our spirits, is a miracle. But it is one that can never be truly understood by anyone else but someone who has lived the contradiction of being an African American, and that distance that keeps non-Blacks from truly being a part of Black culture is precisely what makes it so fascinating to those on the other side of that gap.

Backrooms feels like a movie about that gap.

Backrooms isn’t a movie about cultural differences of really any kind, nor is it even a movie about anything systemic. It’s a movie about regular people attempting to make sense of something that can’t be made sense of. The attempt to do so can cause madness or even death, yet they continue to try anyway. But in this case, that unknowable entity feels like a stand in for something else.

On one hand, it feels like the Backrooms is meant to represent the perils of living in the past, or clinging too tightly to nostalgia. Not only is this a poignant concept considering this very film managed to beat a goddamn Star Wars movie at the box office, representing the fact that even audiences are sick of the nostalgia that corporate art seems to only believe we want to see. But it’s also poignant politically, as the crumbling of the American government and general trust has come about largely because folks were allured by a false promise to return to “how things used to be”. Look, as someone who damn near cried at the reveal of the first new Spyro game in nearly 20 years, I love wallowing in the past a bit myself. But I like to think I understand that living there rather than visiting can only corrupt your understanding of the present. Being present means you must lay that past to rest, but in a world where nothing new exists, just corrupted forms of the past instead, that task is much harder.

Another interpretation is that this film may be an indirect commentary on Artificial Intelligence. As a writer (by hobby rather than trade, for this very reason), I see AI as an existential evil force and a direct threat to the human spirit. I try to avoid all uses of it, despite its increased presence everywhere I go online. But at this point, I’ve conceded that the value of human creation isn’t something most normal people value. So, when someone shows me an AI generated meme at work, or talks about how much they love AI generated songs from a certain artist I myself almost got fooled by, I am careful to choose my battles. I’m black, I know a thing or two about swallowing the right thing to say just so I can keep the peace long enough to get home. These people just do not have it in them to see humanity as inherent in art, and while some are born this way, most have only been trained to lose that sight by a tech industry that would love more than anything for you to not question the personal motivations behind anything you see online.

Back when many of us first started seeing AI, it was defined by it’s fucked up, uncanny generated images and that one cursed video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. If art is meant to imitate life, then you only get creations like that if the creator has no frame of reference for what life is supposed to be. A computer program can’t create a mouth full of pasta if it has no idea what a mouth, pasta, or the concept of “full” is. In the Backrooms, architectural and biological versions of this exact breakdown in logic are on display all over, although these hallucinations are not attributed to flawed code designed by a flawed human race. These creations are scary, but not just because they are monstrous, but because of how close they actually are to being human. Some of these creatures almost seem to show expressions of human emotions. But as the film shows, these are not human emotions, because these are not humans; abominations like these are abominations precisely because they lack just that: humanity.

Ultimately however, I feel that the Backrooms isn’t about either of those things. I think the ultimate goal of the Backrooms is to be…well…unsatisfying. I’m early in my horror film journey, but I’ve long evaded the genre due to not wanting to see a bunch of people die horrific deaths. But in a way, death is kinda a relief, right? Sure, a character dies, and probably in a terrible way, but then it’s over, right? You may fear the bandaid taking a few strands of hair when it’s pulled, or the drop that starts the rollercoaster, but once the hairs have been plucked and the coaster has reached the bottom of its first descent, it’s not that bad. Well, what if you don’t have that kind of comfort on the other side. What if your fears are less comprehensible, more existential, would that still be a rollercoaster worth riding?

Backrooms does have thrills, and it does have chills. The performances from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are especially bone chilling and mesmerizing. First time director Kane Parsons is great behind the camera, and the story he’s written alongside Will Soodik is one hell of a gripping tale. I was glued to the screen, but I found myself, at a certain point, not wanting so many answers. That’s great, because this movie loves to pose questions so much more than answer them. It makes for a movie that’s hard to hold in your hands, hard to grasp completely, but perhaps that’s the point?

If I explained a dog to someone who has never seen one, and then asked them to draw it, whatever they put out on the page would never look exactly like a dog. Some people may go their entire lives without ever seeing a dog, and everytime I bring one up in passing they’ll have to either politely nod through the interaction or bring it to a halt so they can have the concept clarified. I can only imagine how much it must suck to not have ever seen a dog, but most of those people who aren’t burdened by the knowledge literally don’t know what they are missing. For those of us who are burdened, I suppose we will have to just sit with that burden until the end of time. And sometimes, if the stars align, we might get to see a pretty good movie about the impossible to cross chasm between us and those who have never seen or known a dog. Sometimes that is enough to, at least temporarily, ease the pain of knowing in a world where few care to find out.