About Backrooms

It’s gone viral. Sensational it’s been. The latest scare, the newest horror, comes in Backrooms, a YouTube phenomenon that has swept the world’s compass in muffled terror. I have seen it through an algorithm, and I think I have entered the door into the backrooms โ€“ willingly by the winks of intrigued moments. Is this the way people get lost in the maze of horror? Even if they are fictional, or so they like to think, nothing is purely fictional without some foundation in reality. Be it ever imaginary, a mental void, emotional distress, continual depression, or perpetual heartaches will be of their backrooms with seemingly no way out. And I think this feeling of utter hopelessness is where Christianity fills or saves the wretchedness of a soul with a promise of hope, the existence of a reason to go on in a seemingly purposeless life.

Watching a few of the Backrooms series makes me realize that this is how the present-day MZ generation sees a concept of a labyrinth where King Minos of Crete at Knossos kept his illegitimate half-man, half-bull son Minotaur and feeds him on Athenian youths until the Athenian hero Theseus with the help of Adrianne’s thread ball came to the rescue and killed the monster. Is it considered too cheesy for today’s youths to think of Adrianne’s thread ball? Backrooms are all devoid of Christian hope and Greek wit because new generation kids are too smart to believe the existence of such saving grace because there is none of such nonsense, and because they are simply the best of all generations wallowing in the advanced civilization only countable steps below the most advanced extraterrestrial beings in the universe.

Notwithstanding the ingenious idea of creating such terrifying liminal places within a minimal budget, the whole series will shine in its brilliance as a genre of online game series rather than a film in the fashion of a fake documentary as a new Blaire Witch Project. As civilization gets more technologically advanced, the people become more highly primitive, returning to the laws of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth with no signs of light-heartedness as if it were synonymous with simple-mindedness or backwardness. And I don’t know why Verdi’s “The Chorus of Hebrews” keeps playing in my mind these days.