I watched Backrooms (2026)

According to Internet lore, the Backrooms began on the website 4chan in May 2019. An anonymous post started circulating in a thread-based subsection of 4chan that called for "disquieting images that feel off." Hence, this post: an image of an empty office building with yellowing walls and burgundy carpet. The caption beneath the picture read as followed:

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.

God save you if you hear something wondering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."

It quickly and quietly went viral and the circulation of the post on 4chan quickly circulated the rest of the internet. In 2019, I was a frequent re-poster on tumblr.com, which is where I had come into its' virality. But as well as a seemingly successful movie that just started streaming everywhere in September of this year, it inspired a string of video games that explore the dream-like underground tunnel system known as the Backrooms.  

The quick circulation of the 4chan post set a tone that would inspire a young high schooler named Kane Parsons to create a YouTube channel that explored the world of the Backrooms by expanding its universe in 2022, and in a few short months it soon would be picked up by A24 in 2023.

In the Backrooms movie, we meet the main character Clark, a newly divorced man who owns a furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire that is going nowhere fast. Clark is greatly unhappy in his life because of it and tells Mary, his therapist that his real goal in life had always been to be an architect.

Mary is Clark's therapist; she, in character development through storytelling using flashback sequences, became a therapist because she watched her mom go crazy. Mary became interested in helping people and understanding her mother through them.

The movie also introduces Kat and Bobby, played by Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett. Kat works for Clark as an assistant manager and Bobby is her boyfriend introduced to us - the viewers - as a cinematographer, filming a commercial for Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire.

And the Backrooms in itself is a character – we are introduced to an empty building that slowly begins filling itself with objects that collectively tell the story of the character it belongs to. What the Backrooms are according to what we know as theorists is that the Backrooms take the 'nitty-gritty little pieces of ourselves that we try to keep locked away or try not to acknowledge about ourselves and push it to the forefront' says Amanda the Jedi on her video essay about the movie published in late August of 2026.

My theory is that Mary is in a coma throughout the entirety of the movie, and we're observing her dream-like state of existence from the viewpoint of Mary as the dreamer. It does not allude to Mary being in the Hospital until the ending of the movie, but hear me out.

According to interviews regarding the movie, director Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels on YouTube) the movie is telling two stories in one. What we see and what we don't see. We're led to believe that Clark is the main character in the movie; however, we are also introduced to a few people that we don't yet know that the movie doesn't fully explain them as anything more than random people who have also fallen into the Backrooms. But what if the old man in Clark's kitchen is actually somebody like Mary's dad, and that scene where Mary is tied up in the Backrooms is actually what happened before Mary fell into a coma (again, hear me out).

What isn't said but alluded to is that Clark might of had a psychotic break after leading Kat and Bobby into the backrooms of his furniture store, where the storage is stored and killed them, this is probably what the entity of the movie which was never brought up again, was referring to (probably after filming the commercial).

After doing so, he comes home, where he's been recently kicked out, and kills his wife. He calls Mary and tells her he opened the window and isn't coming back. This sets off an alarm in her head, and she goes to see him at his store a few days later during the day, where she finds him, Kat, and Bobby. He drugs her the way he drugged Kat and Bobby, ties her up and starts reliving what he had done and telling Mary how it makes him feel. Mary comes to and sees an older fat man in a chair, and his ex-wife propped up like a mannequin in the back room of the ottoman furniture store where Kat and Bobby were killed; this is a speculation. She puts two and two together and breaks free as he goes into his office to put on his Cap'n Clark costume to really emphasize his station in all of this - probably still talking to her as he's getting dressed and lunging at her after coming back into the storage room after Mary gets free.

Where the movie went is where I think Mary might have severe trauma in recollecting what happened next while she's reliving it in her coma. In the movie, we hear Clark's wife get brutally murdered off camera before the still life of Cap'n Clark comes into frame and chases the now freed Mary into the arms of Async Scientists who, I think might actually be real doctors.

But the way the movie ends throws my theory out the window that it's not Mary who is in the coma but someone we meet in passing through an ID card.

What makes this theory work

The background of the movie tells a similar story to what I managed to piece together. Coming up with a concluding argument that the story we're seeing is being told from the viewpoint of a coma dream, deep in healing from whatever the patient had endured that led them into a coma. Thinking, of course, that it's Mary, because most of the suggested scenes and storytelling draw her in as an important character to the story being alluded to, we also have familiar symbols and suggested themes that pull the viewer into this story the set of the movie is telling.

Backrooms (2026) can be streamed now on HBO Max