Backrooms is opening this weekend, and it’s awesome to see people so excited about a movie for its location! It also gives me an excuse to talk about the strange time when a bunch of BR fans became convinced I’d actually visited the original backrooms myself…
In 2011, I posted an article about touring NYC’s Farley Post Office, a massive building that at the time was nearly completely empty, just an eerily endless maze of hallways and offices that went on forever.
Nine years later, an email showed up in my inbox: “Hello there, I know that this is a long shot, but I came across this post that you made. There is one picture in it that caught my eye… As you can see, this famous photo of the Backrooms looks notably similar to the picture…”
While it was so cool that someone thought I might hold the clue that could crack open the reigning urban legend of its day, I had bad news. Sadly, there was nothing beyond that doorway but a dead end.
But the the funny thing was, I’d been to tons of similar spaces while scouting office buildings for movies/TV shows that were dead ringers for the Backrooms… because they’re actually fairly common!
While on Wolf of Wall Street, I scouted dozens of office buildings, and found that from the mid-90s on, most places maximized space with execs in the private offices along the perimeter, everyone else in Dilbert bullpen cubicles within, break & copy rooms around the elevator bank.
But! At places built from the 70s into early 90s, there would sometimes be a loop of windowless rooms around the elevator bank. These would often be conference or storage rooms, and sometimes they flowed from one into the next, just like the Backrooms.
I replied to the email with this info and assumed that was the end of it. Then, a few weeks later, I got another asking the same question…and another… And over the next few years, I averaged an email a month from internet sleuths CONVINCED I’d been to the original Backrooms.
At one point, I even got a request to use my office picture in an academic paper on liminal spaces. Eventually, word must have gotten around that this was a dead-end, and the emails tapered off…
But to me, all of it just spoke to the genius of the Backrooms, that sort of proto-location akin to a classic ramshackle haunted house, a singular place we all hold deep in our collective imaginations and can conjure up from nothing more than a single picture.
I didn’t work on the film, but I’ve read the final Backrooms set was 30,000 sq ft (!!). As a location scout, I can say with some authority that coming up with something so powerful is as rare as it gets, and I’m proud to have played a very minor role in keeping the legend propagating over the years.
Here’s hoping the movie smashes box office records this weekend, and inspires future filmmakers to come up with their own wholly original places of dread and despair!
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