My husband Danny and I explored Backrooms, the 2026 horror movie that’s got everyone facing their fears about the spaces between where you are and where you want to be. Listen on YouTube or scroll to read.

Erin: The Backrooms is about a guy who thinks he’s found the doorway to Narnia in the basement of a furniture store, but it turns out to be the maze at the end of The Shining.

I didn’t expect to like this movie. I’m not into the A24s. I’ve seen The Witch, which was a bad time, and The Disaster Artist, which I just now figured out was one of theirs by looking at the list. I could unpack this movie all day. I liked it way more than I thought I would. I just thought it would be trippy.

I believe I’m not the target audience, and I’m going to talk about that a little bit at the end. But right now, joining me is my husband and my editor, Danny. Tell me what you would say if you were going to give a synopsis of just the first act of the movie, the first 30 minutes. We’re not spoiling this. It’s still on HBO for people who want to see it for the first time.

Danny: You just put me on the spot there.

Erin: That’s what I do.

Danny: And you do it well. It’s about a guy named Clark, who is a guy with many problems. He’s a bit of an alcoholic. He works at a crappy furniture store, and his life has just completely gone to shit. Let’s be honest.

He finds the special room, this hidden room in the lower part of the basement of this furniture store, and things just get weirder and weirder from there. I don’t know. I mean, it’s enough snapshots. I’m not sure—

Erin: It’s said at the end of the movie that it’s everything that’s ever happened. But I think it’s also a little bit of every movie that’s ever been made, and we were just spotting the movies.

Danny: Yeah, there are little bits in there. You talked about the Narnia thing. A lot of the architecture kind of got a little Shining-like, with some of the staircases and such. There’s lots more. I even saw a little bit of The Goonies in there, if you could say that. It’s probably not a movie I saw. I saw a little bit of Slender Man, but that was more of a physical kind of thing. I won’t go into any spoilers or details on that.

Erin: I think that, if you can, you should go into this knowing not much about it. I didn’t know that it was a web series. I knew it was a meme and a bunch of video games, but, like I say, I don’t think I’m the target audience.

I think it’s very much about liminal spaces, which I can best describe as meaning when you’re waiting for something, when you’re neither here nor there. And I think because the director of this film is younger than our son—

Did you know that?

Danny: I did not know that. I’m not surprised, though.

Erin: But that generation feels like they’re waiting for their lives to start.

I want to say, if you are in the target audience for this film and you’re waiting for your life to start, I think there are forces in the media and the government—and this is going to make me sound crazy—but just hear me out. I’m not really a glass-half-full kind of person, but I did become one after I had cancer. Wouldn’t you say?

Danny: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Erin: A lot of the anger burned out of me. I started finding these moments in the worst times when I was a good crème brûlée. Someone coming and playing the violin for me while I was hooked up to chemo machines. Looking down from a nine-story building at the ridiculous traffic. Lying in the hospital with complications, and this nurse coming in and watching a PBS documentary, and that becoming like, okay, if these people just get what they’re trying to accomplish, then everything will be okay.

And so many encounters with people who came in and out of my life.

All that is to say, if you’re waiting for your life to start, if you feel like you’re in a liminal space, there are people who are invested in making you think that way. There are people who want you to think that everything is bad.

And that’s what this movie is about: the fear of your life not starting.

There’s this guy, and I know he’s Gen X. He trained as an architect, but now he’s running a furniture store. You don’t have to feel that way, okay?

That’s what I would say, because I look at movies and think, what is the fear that they’re holding up, and why are we afraid of that thing?

Why are we afraid of Chopping Mall? Chopping Mall was the fear of automation. You had Hide and Go Shriek. That’s, “Oh my God, what are these teenagers up to when we’re not looking?”

And this movie is about the fear of waiting, the fear of training as an architect and running a furniture store.

It’s also about us Gen Xers, on another level, to be fair: your parents not taking responsibility for why you might feel that way, because we’re pointing at the Boomers and saying, “Well, we were wired this way.”

Danny: You know, I never really thought about that. Wow, you just blew my mind there, and I haven’t even had a drink tonight.

I could definitely see that. Yeah, absolutely. We Gen Xers really are kind of wired differently from Millennials and Gen Z and Gen Alpha and Gen X 2.0, or whatever the next one is out there. We’re a little bit different because we’re that group that was in between the old technology and computers, the internet, and creepypastas and stuff like this. All that came within our timeline, right in our twenties.

That’s kind of a weird thing to think about. When you’re a kid, you’re playing—I’ll use myself as an example—a little motorized Dukes of Hazzard car game. Now I can get on the Xbox here and play these complicated, hundred-something-hour RPGs. It’s mind-blowing just how much technology has advanced in such a short period of time, and it’s a little scary, too.

Erin: It is scary. I just want to say, if people are directing movies who are younger than my son, then my life has long since started. And yours has, too.

I’m not upset about training as an architect and running a furniture store. I did some laundry today. I played Animal Crossing. I did some exercises. I waited for my husband to come home and watch this movie so we could record ourselves talking about it, and I am exactly where I want to be.

But we have to stop pointing at the people older than us and saying, “You caused this.” If there are 21-year-olds making movies that make a million dollars—

Danny: Yeah, I would agree with you on that. I don’t really have—I don’t know. You’re kind of blowing my mind here with all this.

Erin: Sorry about that.

I think let’s have some jokey conversation. Why does everybody want to be an architect in the movies?

I’m thinking here of The Brady Bunch and fucking George Costanza.

Danny: Yeah, I was going to say Mike Brady. Everybody wants to be Mike Brady. Who wouldn’t want to live in that house? He designed that house. It’s an amazing house, that staircase and everything, the little kitchen, and the 800 other rooms that you don’t see.

I guess it could be like The Backrooms, like Mike Brady may have created the back room. That’s where I’m going with that.

Now, canon in my head, Mike Brady created the Backrooms. You don’t know how many rooms were back there in that house. You don’t!

Erin: Okay, I think we’re going to stop right there because it’s not going to get any better than that.

Thanks for joining us on Tell Me a Movie. Be sure to go check out Danny on Wide Weird World of Cult Films, and have a good night.

Danny: And stay weird!