With the release of ‘Everything Must Go’, a new Backrooms short accompanying the movie, Alasdair Stuart ventures back into the yellow officer netherworld with the second part of our complete guide.

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A voice mail left by an English Async worker named Clive. This is the first mention of Ivan Beck, one of the senior officers working on the Backrooms. Clive appears to be talking to Ivan about the motion sensors being triggered as Peter Tench returns, years after he disappeared. As the conversation finishes, we hear Clive say ‘this isn’t HIM is it?’ implying Peter’s disappearance is well known.

Found Footage #2

An unnamed woman is filming a taped off square in her garage. She doesn’t know it but it’s a door into the Backrooms, just like the one Clark finds in his store. She’s dragged through it and explores, finding familiar looking horribly distended and ‘mis-remembered’ furniture and doorways.

This is the first real example of the sort of slow burn menace that Parsons really has fun with in the movie. You know awful, awful things are about to happen. You have no idea what or where, and like our nameless lead, you just keep going into the inevitable happens. There’s some interesting geographical evolution too, as our heroine finds a derelict, blood-spattered section of the Backrooms that looks a lot like the reverse tower block from the nightmarish final chase in the movie. She also finds a crashed car that may be the vehicle we see glitch into the Backrooms in 9780415263573.

It ends badly, but as we see, it tends to in the Backrooms. The Lifeform we glimpsed way back in the original video, hidden inside a nest of what seems to be fungal growth, pursues the protagonist until a green light, which seems to trigger any time the Backrooms grows, engulfs the screen. Intriguingly, the last thing we hear are the wind chimes so closely associated with Mary in the movie and Ivan Beck in the short movies…

home_27647.mov

Linked in the description for the previous video, this is a collection of home movie clips in and around New York and New Jersey set to jaunty music. At 1.49, there’s a room laid out very similarly to one we see in the previous video and the implication is this is the house ‘remembered’ by the section of the Backrooms the previous protagonist falls into.

I Remember

A striking change to high-definition video accompanies those wind chimes again and distorted images of seemingly mundane locations. A narrator talks about their home being lost to the sea, and how they remember. As the images accelerate, we see the rig from Prototype, glimpse an Async suit and the lighting turns the same green as we witness at the end of Found Footage. The final line may be ‘You’ve always been here.’

Reunion

Marvin E. Leigh, who we’ve met before, visits the barrier around the Pitfall area and opens it back up for research. We then follow a small robotic ATV as it wheels into the area, We see Marvin lead a team back in, and it’s notable that this time one of them is armed which is a definite escalation on Async’s part.

We also see the delightfully successful, low-tech option of ‘We just build walkways across the pitfalls,’ as the team proceed to explore further into the Backrooms. They’re attacked by a man in black who asks if Async held a funeral for him. Marvin confirms they did and calls for armed support. The man disarms Mark, the member of Marvin’s detail with a weapon, and shoots and wounds him. The video ends as Marvin checks to see if Mark is still alive.

A potentially useful aside in this is the shotgun which is central to the episode. It seems to be a Remington 870 with polymer fittings. The video is set in 1990. This gun was manufactured in 2014. Along with The Simpsons video, which briefly features an advert from 2000 despite apparently being set on January 1st 1991, this is evidence that Async’s presence in the Backrooms is damaging the flow of linear time. If you wanted to be really wacky, you could also argue that the release order of the videos, with these plots unfurling in non-linear fashion, also hints at that.

Damage Control

A rare example of an episode picking up immediately after the previous one and honestly it’s a refreshing change. This is an after action report, following the gun man, now confirmed as Peter Tench from earlier in the series, as he makes it out of the Backrooms via the threshold and flees through the Async facility. Fifteen hours later, an enquiry digs into what happened and why. It recaps the events surrounding the disappearance of Peter Tench and explains Async’s decision to conceal that fact. In chilling, corporate speak we hear Async confess to faking Tench’s death and the tests Tench went through on his return.

There’s a bunch of subtle stuff in here, including a nice piece of gaslighting on why Peter was able to make his way home (he’s a trained scientist navigating an alien environment, so he knew the way).

Things take a sinister turn as the calm and reasoned narration begins to explain that Peter Tench suffered a psychotic breakdown. There’s every chance he did, but the circumstances of his escape and return to the Backrooms feel distinctly odd. Although they also tally, chillingly, with Clark’s sense of belonging we see in the movie. It also ends with Tench’s accidental death which feels distinctly un accidental. Especially as, in the episode’s closing moments, we see frames of a man who looks a lot like Tench running into a city…

Overflow

A voiceover discusses trade negotiations between the US and the USSR as the camera circles the night sky. The shot changes to a wall being burnt through by Backrooms yellow energy and an OVERLOAD warning light flashing. The final shot we see is a wall of documentation, including one signed by Ivan Beck, being consumed by the same green light as we saw at the end of Found Footage 2.

Lighting and Tile Survey

One of the most interesting videos is superficially one of the most tedious. Set almost immediately after First Contact, the video opens on November 14 1989 and follows a team going into the Backrooms and removing a ceiling tile and lighting fixture.

What follows is a detailed analysis of both that concludes they were made in the US, in the 1970s and are slightly larger than they should be. As the video continues we also get an implication that while the serial number on the light fixture checks out, it’s the serial number on EVERY light fixture. The Backrooms is copying things over and over.

Found Footage 3

By far the longest video yet, Found Footage 3 starts in 1995 and follows Ravi, a journalist as he falls into the Backrooms via his basement. It’s by turns maddening and fascinating, treading a lot of the same ground as before but tying the series together to date in some enormously satisfying ways.

Ravi’s journey is eminently sensible, he makes constant right choices, and it’s implied he gets close to getting out. One of the most haunting sequences echoes the movie, where he briefly communicates with someone on the other side of an entrance to the Backrooms. It’s not the only indication that the movie was on the way either, with a sequence set in what seems to be a furniture story difficult not to read as a hint of what was coming.

That’s where this video is at its best, and it spends a good chunk of its run time there. We see a terrifying Still Life in motion who looks a lot like the corpse in ‘Autopsy’. We get our first look at the Async caveman standee in a while and in the video’s best sequences, we finally see the scale of the Backrooms. There are sequences where Ravi walks from one node to another and sees what fans have named the ‘Red City’, an enormous red lit metropolis under a starfield that is by far the largest part of the Backrooms we’ve seen to date. That, coupled with the implications that the Backrooms are still active decades later (there’s evidence the man Ravi talks to is in the ’00s and there’s a poster from 2022) and it looks like this is building on the idea explored through poor Peter Tench that time works differently here.

Static Dead End

Marvin E. Leigh is on the phone, and clearly furious about what (he thinks) happens to Peter Tench. As he speaks, we descend through levels of the world to the Threshold, which seems inactive. Despite this, we go through it and find a team of scientists investigating Room 14D which we saw in ‘Pitfalls’. They investigate further and discover some odd distortions in the dimensions.

We’re back to scientific observation which is fun and a nice gear change from the last couple of videos here. No date, but it’s implied this is not long after Peter Tench’s second (possible) death.

Everything Must Go

The most recent video is currently attached to the movie, and functions as an end credits additional scene. I’ve not seen it yet but it’s been extensively covered from trusted sources and covers three Async employees as they find signs from Clark’s furniture store. The signs are distorted and mirrored and they scientists study them. They explore further and are suddenly attacked by what seems to be Captain Clark. Their camera man flees and the movie cuts. This seems to be an event right before the first scene of the movie, cool!

 

Backrooms is in cinemas now and every video to date aside from Everything Must Go can be found here.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgENeWSfJlH1Ys31Y4GbBwIh4_UEyfpnk