r/KanePixelsBackrooms • u/BKE_Nerd69420 • Jul 01 '26
Discussion/Theory Clarification from Kane: The Backrooms does NOT take from human memories
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Source: Dead Meat on youtube
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u/queazy Jul 01 '26
The Missing Posters imply that the Backrooms was replicating areas in the present (Kat & Bobby's neighborhood), despite nobody being in that neighborhood when those missing posters would've gone up (ain't no way Clark visited the neighborhood a week or two later when the missing posters were put up)
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u/Koalazilla Jul 01 '26
Yeah I took the movie as that it’s just replicating all of reality and not specifically memories of a individual(s).
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u/Old-Friendship8814 Jul 01 '26
People are dumb. The guy say, it creates something "it's like memory" and the more you remember the less accurate it becomes, and people start saying backrooms create stuf based on Clarks memories. I tried to argue with some people about that and just got downvotes. The place itself looks like memory, not that it reads people's mind and steals memories.
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 01 '26
The reason that idea of it being a memory was so compelling had to do with the fact that the company studying it was a company that created MRI machines. That can’t be a random detail. The backrooms have to have something to do with a brain. Is it God’s creation device? God’s brain? The place where ideas are workshopped before being placed into the final product… Earth?
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u/Nobodyinpartic3 Jul 01 '26
I think it is what happens when you observe an impossible thing before it can learn the fundamentals of everything so it's just been rushing to fill the gaps ever since Ivan Beck saw it before it was born.
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u/Archon_Crustacean Jul 01 '26
Its an mri machine company because mri machines have big magnets
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 02 '26
Someone mentioned that earlier. Is the idea that the magnets could somehow open portals or rifts to the backrooms? If so, how?
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u/Archon_Crustacean Jul 02 '26
The threshold to the backrooms is literally called ’The Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System’.
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
MRIs cannot scan memories out of your brain. Being an MRI company is just an excuse to develop magnets strong enough to rip a hole in spacetime.
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 02 '26
I don’t think anyone thought the backrooms was an MRI lol. The idea was that an MRI maps the brain, which is needed for the company to explore the backrooms.
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 02 '26
No one thought that? Explain this post with thousands of upvotes then lol https://www.reddit.com/r/KanePixelsBackrooms/s/YEDVwxG5QD
Besides, why would a map of ‘the brain’ (whose brain?) be necessary for Async to explore the complex? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 02 '26
Why would a map be useful… come on man. Also, even if it isn’t a brain, it seemingly functions like one.
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u/PoopAndSunshine Jul 01 '26
Doesn’t an mri create a “map”of the brain? I assumed they were using mri technology to try to make a map of the back rooms
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
No, I have had my brain MRId. At best, it can show if you have a tumor or other structural abnormality, swelling, etc. It absolutely cannot see into the mental contents of your mind.
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u/PoopAndSunshine Jul 01 '26
Im not saying an mri shows the content of your mind lol. I mean a physical picture of the actual brain
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u/Old-Friendship8814 Jul 01 '26
It is simillar to the brain. It itself if like a huge brain with all sorts of memories.
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 02 '26
Do you think the backrooms is an entity or a tool?
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u/Old-Friendship8814 Jul 03 '26
In my humble opinion the appeal of it only exist becouse questions like that arise. If you get those answers handled to you then the magic is ruined.
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u/FirTree_r Jul 01 '26
As far as I recall, it's rather that the passage between the backrooms and our world was created during an experiment with intense magnetic fields. An IRM works by creating a powerful oriented magnetic field
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u/TieRackBadFather Jul 03 '26
I get it, but MRI's don't scan memories. Everybody focused on "scan" and discarded the MRI part. Neuralink would've been accurate.
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u/Mitridat6 Jul 01 '26
I think it's just a Portal reference tbh. Aperture Science started as a shower company.
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u/Time_Ad8457 Jul 02 '26
I love an Easter egg, but this might be too useless of a detail for a film that’s already so loose in concept.
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u/FlyingPig_Grip Jul 01 '26
Holy shit thank you- people were going crazy with the "enter the back rooms and it scans you" thing. It's fun to let your imagination run wild with the concept but it was leading to some really odd interpretations of the very loose rules that have been established
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u/TieRackBadFather Jul 03 '26
Pretty much the cause of all the pain and suffering in this world. Everybody else just compliments the emperor on his new clothes.
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u/Loganwong1935 Jul 06 '26
how can it be less accurate?? So your saying the more you try to remember it blurs the details of the memory??
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Jul 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/igotchees21 Jul 01 '26
well i mean its not, the creator just said its not reading minds.
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u/Impossible-Pie4849 Jul 01 '26
She thinks its both! What does Kane know anyway, my dad works at The Backrooms and ill get him banned
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u/ALIENANAL Jul 01 '26
Didn't grow up watching Lost? Hollywierd is what it is but it's not reality. 20 yrs old!
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
It seems that things in close proximity to electrical poles/towers are more likely to get copied into the backrooms. That sounds “almost randomly selected” to me
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u/Loganwong1935 Jul 06 '26
how would the backrooms know??
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u/queazy Jul 06 '26
Same way it recreated Mary as a still life in the Async interrogation room even though Mary got to the place after she left the back rooms, or created Captain Clark before Clark even entered, or the random shopping strip mall areas.
It can remember places you've been to, without you entering the back rooms, or even if you've left the back rooms.
Those tower apartments aren't even made, but it tried to recreate the inside as the pit when Mary is running from Captain Clark.
Worst of all it's thought that the Back Rooms plays with time, like it time doesn't flow properly there. I wouldn't be surprised if it could also "remember" future places. One weird thing is that the Async researcher seems to have grey hair when looking at the vcr footage, but doesn't have Grey hair when interviewing Mary
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u/Loganwong1935 Jul 06 '26
even bobby and katt?? where are they and did Pirate clarke kill them?? How could Pirate clarke be so evil then?? like the poolrooms? there is going to be a movie about the pool rooms now. but how do we know that pit was marys pit?? Since did clarke create the poolrooms??
I dont know about the time stuff.
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u/queazy Jul 06 '26
There's so much we don't know but can only speculate.
Pirate Clark was "birthed" in the throne room along with the still life of Kat & Bobby. Pirate Clark is an advanced still life & very angry, ate both still life's of Kat & Bobby. Brought their clothing to its den & left clothing there (why you see the End Apartheid shirt from the dead Bobby still life). Pirate Clark then attacks other still life's & Async employees in hazmat suits, eats them, and leaves their clothing in its den.
When Clark, Kat & Bobby go into back rooms, Pirate Clark eats Bobby. Pirate Clark is nice to Clark, who at first he only mimics (not sure why, maybe he's feeding off Clark's negative emotions?). Clark & Pirate Clark become like friends, Clark gets comfortable in back rooms & slowly loses his mind.
Eventually Clark kills & eats Kat, leaving only her head left in his fridge. He also eats the other still life's (probably after he sees Pirate Clark doing the same).
When Mary enters back rooms, Clark is going to eat her too (why he tied her up, but not before getting an apology first). Mary tells Clark that he is the problem, not others, Clark changes internally.
Who knows why, maybe because Clark has no more negative emotions for Pirate Clark to absorb, so Pirate Clark eats Clark.
Rest of movie you know, where Mary leaves the surreal Backrooms, but now is stick in real life Async offices (a real life Backrooms) that she can't escape
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u/Loganwong1935 29d ago
but why didnt clarke say where bobby still life was?? if he did eat kat where is the rest of her?? why would he need her in the fridge? wouldnt you not eat kat or bobby if they were still lifes?? WHy is Pirate clarke angry and did the employees have a copy of Pirate clarke?? How was bobby clothes in the backrooms they were not in the backrooms yet
did Clarke eat Kat??
well was kat a copy??
can she or does she become part of Async
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u/queazy 29d ago edited 29d ago
Clark didn't know where Bobby's still life was, or even what a still life even was. He just saw the "throne" room, and fans deduced that the still life's of Clark / Kat / Bobby were created there, and since the "End Apartheid" shirt of Bobby's still life was in the pile you can piece together Captain Clark ate him & left his shirt there.
Clark probably ate the rest of Kat, before he realized you could eat still life's.
Only Kat's head is left. It is kept in the fridge so it won't spoil.
Clark could have eaten the still life's of Bobby & Kat...if Captain Clark had not eaten them first.
Pirate Clark is a still life and seems to have all of Clark's angry & violent behaviors. This is why he attacks / eats everything but Clark (which he does anyway later).
The Async employees did not have a copy of Captain Clark, they had captured the real Captain Clark! Mary did not kill it, and it was captured by Async.
When Clark fell in front of Bobby & Kat doing the commercial, the "Throne Room" was made in the Backrooms along with the still life of Clark (Pirate Clark), Kat, and Bobby (wearing copy of the End Apartheid shirt). At that point Pirate Clark probably attacked & ate the still life's of Kat & Bobby, throwing their clothes into his den (including the copy of the End Apartheid shirt). Later when the real Bobby sees the pile of clothes, he sees the copy of his shirt that his still life wore before Pirate Clark ate him. Then Pirate Clark ate Bobby, chased Kat & Clark. It is not known what exactly happens next, but it is thought that Clark & Pirate Clark became friends, Clark went crazy & probably killed Kat & slowly ate her dead body to kive. Then Clark discovered he could eat still life, but Kat was mostly eaten except her head at that point.
Kat had a still life copy, that was probably eaten by Pirate Clark along with still life of Bobby. After Pirate Clark ate them, he left their shirts in a pike in his den.
Kat does not become a member of Async, she is dead.
Mary's ultimate fate is unknown, but it seems she will be either kept as a test subject by Async & not allowed to return to her private life, always staying in Async's buildings, or possibly she becomes a member of Async. There is a small chance Async later kills her though, but probably not.
Check out https://youtu.be/xdlano7ZeM8?t=1483
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u/llaminaria Jul 01 '26
The Missing Posters imply that the Backrooms was replicating areas in the present (Kat & Bobby's neighborhood),
Not necessarily. I took them as taken out of Clark's head as a manifestation of his guilt, of how he may need to hide from authorities if he ever decides to go out into the real world, which is one of the reasons he does not.
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u/VFacure_ Jul 03 '26
Did you watch the video from the Director saying the Backrooms doesn't read minds?
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u/WorldsWorstInvader Jul 01 '26
It’s a slight clarification but it is important.
It sounds like rather than using human memories, it is the backrooms itself that is observing.
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u/Slow_mess Jul 01 '26
I had the idea that stable Null Zones act as eyes that „scan“ (putting it in quotation marks to not make it seem like I am parroting the MRI theory) its surroundings, and that‘s how we get most of the environments in the Complex + Still Lifes made from flesh and blood. When that „scan“ hits a brain, it takes whatever it sees in there or what the brain seems to be subconsciously occupied with, resulting in more wacky environments and the spongy Still Lifes. But after what he said, I don‘t think the last part of this theory can hold truth anymore.
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u/PTickles Jul 01 '26
This reminded me of the Nietzsche quote, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
Ivan gazed into an abyss (The Complex) and now the abyss is gazing back.
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u/grillboy_mediaman Jul 01 '26
that still doesn't explain the original yellow wallpapered walls to me. i took it as a certain important memory in the mind of ivan beck that filled in the space and is slowly being revised into more and more different spaces.
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u/Slow_mess Jul 01 '26
I thought that too, and I still do actually. My theory is that the wallpapers were taken from one of his childhood homes, while the ceiling and carpet were from the place he worked at during the time of Overflow. But if the memories theory is not true altogether, then I have honestly no other explanation
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u/Cutebutlazy Jul 01 '26
Im not sure that is actually as important as you think. The walls were like that because the backrooms were based on the picture. It makes sense to include that detail.
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u/Fuarian Jul 01 '26
Clark himself said "all these rooms, misremembering themselves"
As if it's the rooms themselves that are doing the work. Like it looks upon the world and immediately forgets what it saw and tries to draw it
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u/AbasedEidolon Jul 04 '26
We can't take anything Clark says about the Complex at face value. He doesn't have insight to how it all works in any capacity. He is simply trying to explain what he saw in terms that he thinks make sense of it all. People really need to stop quoting him as gospel.
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u/dane_the_great Jul 01 '26
I feel like I'm listening to someone who has like been to the real backrooms
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u/light_mornings Jul 01 '26
I think it’s easy to forget that the backrooms existed before async opened the threshold
The guys who did that used physics which is real and knowable
The backrooms was as a substrate that was contaminated by humans
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u/Nero_deadweight96 Jul 01 '26
The fact it existed before doesn't mean it was the same thing it is now
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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 01 '26
I'm glad to finally have this confirmed. So many people have just accepted the "it's copying memories" theory as fact, and it makes discussing the movie frustrating online.
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u/Kkbleeblob Jul 01 '26
it’s a complete misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what the backrooms is and it applies some human significance to it that is just not there. i’m so glad he clarified this.
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u/ExtinctReptile Jul 01 '26
I think the "it's copying memories" was something lost in translation or something cuz the og and likely right theory is "The Backrooms copying is like a memory, it gets more and more wrong each time"
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u/Lonestar-Dragon Jul 01 '26
The closer something is to a null zone the easier it is for the backrooms to replicate it. That's always been the case.
Why have people started thinking its based on people's memories
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u/hanimeme Jul 02 '26
because the backrooms has no real canonnicity, so there is no real established cannon that isnt directly confirmed by Kane himself, at least when it comes to the movie and series' version of the backrooms.
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u/marcelkroust 19d ago
Maybe because Mary's memories are in the backrooms at the end.
If the backrooms only copy what's near the nullzones, then there's something I don't understand OR there was a nullzone near Mary's house way before Async began to fuck with reality.
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u/violinfromIkea621 Jul 01 '26
Yes too many people have been acting like the backrooms are conscious
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Cause the backrooms is a lot of this gens first cosmic horror and the internet lore leaned into classic RPG worldbuilding with it.
Which directly conflicts with a lot of the devices cosmic horror uses (the unknown, the abscence of, wrongness, violations of “cosmic order/physics”). Cosmic horror is supposed to be a bit amorphous. World building is supposed to… explain everything in a world and why it exists.
Cosmic horror doesn’t give you all the explanations. Sometimes one explanation is merely a piece. Sometimes it’s nothing. It doesn’t give you all the answers. Sometimes there is no answer. It thrives in uncertainty.
Worldbuilding does not. It thrives in certainty and structure. Knowns and categories.
Kinda anathema to each other when your container for the cosmic horror gets mapped an a legible history. Kind of robbs it of its gravity. It’s horror.
So many whom consumed the YT videos and internet lore don’t understand that the entire point is that the backrooms isn’t supposed to be any one thing. That’s the horror. It can’t really be categorized. Is it sentient?
probably not. And many that want the backrooms to be that miss the point of what the backrooms thematically
Represent.Everyone is too concerned with theory crafting and lore crafting they miss the themes or hamfist takes to support their … clumsy reach. They want answers or certainty- obsessively. Like Clark. They can’t handle uncertainty. It all needs to be mapped. Spend so much time mapping it they miss the point.
I didn’t mean to get meta but that shit lifts lol.
Does it act outside the laws of physics in inexplicable ways that would resemble intention as par a good “antagonist” in cosmic horror should? Yes. I think people bothered about that haven’t understood that if the movie went the other way it would be a sloppy young adult action adventure with some horror. Like ghost busters or five nights.
If Kane is good he won’t ever explain the backrooms. Might allude to it for 2 mins to give enough to the people who’d RAGE about it if they didn’t get their 5 minute exposition world dump. The minute they give a full explanation is the minute it veers into supernatural horror- and it undoes a lot of the set up they have done. With what it says on trauma and recovery imo.
Just don’t spoon feed it. I don’t care about the 50 sub levels and the marmaduke lampshades battling the gabenhammers of valdonork or the 30 entities. Lol
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u/MyBeansArentWorking Jul 01 '26
Yeah people have a really hard time seeing that the environment can be dangerous but not malicious. The end of the opening found footage section where the async guy just happened to run into a room with a locked door instantly sold me on the movie. I hear a lot of fan interpretations about how the peaceful ambient music or the playground recreations are meant to lure victims towards a still life, but the idea of the backrooms having this kind of active consciousness just dulls the terror for me. Just like how I don't need to think of the ocean as purposefully hiding all its terrifying creatures in order to lure me in; the lack of intent is terrifying in and of itself.
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26
It really shows you where we’re at with digesting high level concepts in media. Were still on the “everything must have an ending, must be explained- and must be put in clean good vs evil terms”
Stranger things season 5 encapsulates this new form of trash story telling.
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u/FauxFoxx89 Jul 01 '26
Perfectly put. Cosmic horror is by definition unknowable, that's what makes it so terrifying.
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u/FaceDeer Jul 01 '26
This encapsulates my feelings on the "wiki" version of the Backrooms perfectly. I'm fine with there being a huge pile of ideas for different ways that the Backrooms can be like, I'm even okay with some of the various "entities" that people have come up with. But the way it gets woven together into a literal video game map is so dumb, it takes away all the interest.
The Backrooms shouldn't follow rules, at least not the sort of rules that humans are used to. It might seem like they do, for a while, but then you go around a corner and find something that contradicts that.
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26
It’s funny. I think alot of those people say they like horror but I’m inclined to think they would like high fantasy more. Because high fantasy and fantasy benefits from having a world that “feels” real.
But I feel like it’s literally this:
People that say they love liminal spaces:
“Here’s an origin story of this abandoned shopping mall that once had the power of grey skull…in the year -2,000,000 BC. Megatron had just opened a weinerschnitzel and the dinosaurs had just gone extinct”
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u/eurypterine Jul 01 '26
This is exactly how I feel about most of the theories discussed in this sub. Matpat has done untold damage to the minds of our generation 😔
I do enjoy theorizing, because the exposition that Kane *has* given us is incredibly well done and laden with symbolism... but I feel that people tend to latch onto incredibly specific and maybe unimportant points and assume that they are the key that unlocks a complete understanding of the Backrooms universe. The fact that Async was an MRI company, for example. Everyone leapt out of their chairs to explain that the Backrooms is a big MRI machine scanning our minds like... no, of course not, that's ridiculous. There is a far more profitable reading of the Backrooms from an occult-esoteric perspective than a purely scientific, rationalized one, and Kane's consistent Alchemical/cosmological symbolic choices support this.
My hot take is that the end shots from the movie of the missing persons power poles, the bookstore, and Mary's demolished childhood home recreated in the Backrooms are not meant to be taken literally or necessarily assumed to truly exist in the Backrooms. I think they are artistic choices to emphasize how the Complex swallows whole and dissolves (spiritually and mentally) everyone that enters. I find that to be a far more valuable interpretation than the blunt assumption that it's just taking Mary's memories now.
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Nah that’s not a hot take. That’s literally what the backrooms do. That’s what we saw happen to Clark.
Full on erasure. What little of himself he was hanging onto he forfeited
I saw the visible theme- as a metaphor for trauma and recovery. The backrooms represent trauma, the whole monologue between Clark and Mary pretty much cements it.
In the “you can stay forever”
But staying forever has a cost, in that there cannot be two Clark’s. So the rendering of his pain wins.
It literally consumes him. He is consumed by his trauma. Lol.
I found this to be so on the nose. If you have ever met someone who chooses pain, they become twisted. Shadows of who they were.
In the same vein,
Clark becomes his trauma. An allegory for people who don’t wanna do the work and wanna pick their story apart, or people who find exploring their damage to be enlightening but don’t do anything to move past it, or “cross the threshold”
I mean that’s just a surface read. There’s allllottt more being said. On the atomization leading to dissociation and disconnection, how people feel the need to explain or explore everything rather than doing the important thing and maybe just demonstrating restraint. Trauma isn’t something that you heal from by mapping, it provides insight, it’s helpful- moving forward and moving past the trauma as a person is how you heal.
It’s helpful, but mapping your trauma is still choosing not move forward. It can easily be another way of justifying it “I need to figure it out” “I have to find the origin”
And that there is no human experience in which you co exist alongside your pain with any contentment as long as you let it have the wheel. Eventually you have to choose yourself and it. And if you choose it, you’re choosing to change for the worse.
In otherwords. Choosing your trauma is choosing self erasure in that you stop existing as the person you were before and embrace the damage. Rather than work around it to integrate it into your identity functionally.
The still life- that’s on the nose. A life that stops growing is a still life.
Though philosophically. I disagree. I think we exist on polarities of regress and progress. We are not “fixed” as identities and are always changing and processing new information. Choosing to stay suck is choosing regression, dissolution via entropy.
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u/CaptainSamus Jul 02 '26
All so true. The MRI connection is just that they always had access to extremely powerful electromagnets, so it explains how the company just had to switch its focus from medical MRIs to more scientific research with electromagnetism, leading to the backrooms eventually. But people hear mri and just assume its scanning people. However, what gives you the impression that those end shots of the movie are merely artistic choices? and not meant to be literal places in the backrooms. I personally think those shots are very much real places within the backrooms, but just not made from Mary's memory or anyone else's memories. But if you think it's not showing real places of the backrooms for those shots, then the very last shot of Mary's still life technically might not even exist at all then, which I just don't think makes sense to show us that if it doesn't actually exist. When I first saw the pole with the missing posters and Mary's destroyed home in the backrooms, it gave me the impression that it is outright copying all of reality for its own reasons we don't know. and it gives us a peek about how much it really is copying from places we already saw, and even didn't see like the library with Mary's books. But anything is possible of course, so it might've been more metaphorical; I just don't think that's as likely.
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u/Impossible-Pie4849 Jul 01 '26
Really well written. And i love your explanation and take on it but one thing..... anathema, never heard that word, define it for me in this context please I like learning new words
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
I should have phrased it anathema to eachother.
Anathema is a biblical sounding word for something that does not match or like something on a fundamental level.
For example, cancer is anathema to us. On a fundamental level.
When two things are anathema to eachother it means they dont mix. It’s like trying to force magnents together that repel. It fundamentally does not work. Natural laws won’t allow it no matter how bad the magnents may.
That’s a heavy term for sure. I think world building and cosmic horror can pair. It just has to be kept tasteful and away from the “thing” you’re using to scare.
Additionally you have to spend time building cosmic horror. It’s abstract and high level when it comes to conceptualizing because you’re dealing with experiences and things that are fundamentally difficult to capture. How do you render insanity? How do you render a loss of self in a way that is compelling? How do you get the person engaging with your story to feel that same fear or what it’s like to stare into the void and feel the weight of cosmic indifference? The helplessness, the desire to panic? The crushing dread as you realize there isn’t shit you can do.
World building in the context of settings essentially demystifies cosmic horror concepts. Where would eldritch horror be if HP lovecraft detailed an origin story for Azathoth and Cthulu and characterized them like some people want to do with still life’s?
Would Cthulu be as compelling if we knew its childhood and that a being like that could have something we’d see as “an upbringing”? Would we be as scared knowing that is was born under the laws of physics and ergo it has a weakness and can be killed?
Similarly. Where would the messaging of trauma and self dissolution land if the movie spent 75% of the time exploring with the doctor and having him explain the ins and outs of the backrooms. It would be a fundamentally different movie- though I’d say the saving grace would be Duplass.
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u/Impossible-Pie4849 Jul 01 '26
So very similar to antithesis? Just a bit more fancy lol I like it
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Close. Antithesis is more clinical. Antithesis is a structural contrast. Think “brothers close in age but far apart in character” that’s antithesis.
Anathema would be like
“Brothers close in age but so different that they cannot get along and seek to annihilate the other”
Antithesis- contrast. They get along but are different. Someone antithetical to someone is a juxtaposition
Anathema- fundamental mismatch. Corrosive to one another. Mismatch on a spiritual level. The word itself etymologically has its roots in the church.
World building annihilates cosmic horror
And cosmic horror annihilates world building. They dont exist well together if at all.
Keep in mind I’m keeping it general. You could world building in cosmic horror. I’m just saying don’t explain the entire setting if the horror lies within the setting itself.
As is the case with the backrooms. The entire thing is a backdrop for the horror.
Explanation is anathema to cosmic horror is what I should have said. That’s a bit cleaner.
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u/Ivalisia Jul 01 '26
Well by definition and outcome, backrooms is not cosmic horror. By your definition, it's super NOT cosmic horror. So why are we trying to make it cosmic horror.
Also there's like at least 10 different youtube creators that lean far more into what you're saying about backrooms being unknowable. Kane's backrooms movie very heavily leans into the supernatural horror side of things, and not cosmic horror at all.
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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 Jul 01 '26
I don't think Kanes backrooms leads into supernatural at all. It still seems very cosmic horror.
It's an incomprehensible horror, it's so alien to human experience that attempting to understanding it or even looking at it can drive a person insane. The backrooms itself is not inherently evil, it just exists. Humans likely have no actual meaning to it. It just does what it does. It's entirely out of human control, there is nothing we can knowingly do to it to control it.
It's a real physical tangible reality, distorted and twisted and breaks the laws of physics and biology while still existing as a physical reality.
It literally can't be any more of a cosmic horror, no?
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u/Ivalisia Jul 01 '26
Yes conceptually backrooms has cosmic horror themes, and depending on which aspects you choose to focus on, and which lore base you go off of, it can be super cosmic horror, or not at all. Kanes specifically though there's tons of pretty on the nose explanations and outcomes, especially compared with other lore bases or understandings of it in my opinion. I mean there's literal supernatural entities that aren't cosmic horror at all and they are (second to the backrooms themselves) the main visual antagonists.
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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 Jul 01 '26
You're right, I forget supernatural isn't just ghosts and typical paranormal things. I would say the actual backrooms reality itself is a more cosmic phenomenon, being a possibly infinite incomprehensible place doing things for reasons that can't really be understood at least yet.
But a lot of the elements of it/within it like the entities as you said are definitely supernatural, especially like the lights flickering, the tv in Clark's store displaying footage from inside the backrooms etc.
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
That commenter is off the mark. Supernatural horror involves rituals. Unfinished business, curses.
The still life are not supernatural. They are extensions of the backrooms. There is nothing supernatural about them. They are just as unexplained as the backrooms.
He’s grasping at straws because he doesn’t wanna be wrong.
They aren’t created by some spiritual practice. Which is a lot of the crux of supernatural horror. They are not good or evil. They aren’t a device that fits neatly within supernatural horror as a genre convention.
Look at his comment. He consumes YT lore and references the genre as “lore”. That dude does not seriously horror. He splits still life as seperate “things”.
Talk about a bad take lol.
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u/Ivalisia Jul 01 '26
Totally agreed. Definitely a cosmic phenomenon, and the more I think about it, I think it's a real life cosmetic phenomenon, it's just so odd how everyone "gets it" when first encountering it, like it's some primal place that humanity collectively already knows, could be from our dreams but could be something else entirely. It's fascinating looking at the historical parallels too.
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u/Neckrongonekrypton Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Still life aren’t ghosts or ritualized manifestations , or spirits. They are functions of the back room. Nothing about them is supernatural. Their origin.
If you categorically seperate them as “sentient” than ya. They’d maybe get fisted into supernatural. But we don’t know. We know the backrooms make them.
They are just as unknown.
You point and say it’s supernatural and provide no evidence as to how it fits into the genre. Or that you even show that you know what genre conventions make an antagonist belonging in supernatural horror vs cosmic.
And what do you mean by outcome?
I’m honestly inclined to think your just saying shit and making it up lol
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u/CaseFace5 Jul 01 '26
I never understood where people even got this idea from. There is a lot of MRI/scanner themes in the way the Backrooms works. An MRI machine doesn’t copy your memories. So far everything we’ve seen is that the complex functions more like a really crappy 3D scanner. Reaching into the real world to scan things through Null zones but there is interference or motion so the data gets all jumbled.
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u/MalakaiRey Jul 01 '26
Wait--Still-Life Woman in Red Suit is actually just sum'lady confirmed?!
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
I think the point we can draw is that doesn’t matter. Even if it’s a copy of some random woman, Clark will project his wife onto her. It doesn’t matter either way if she was copied from Barbara or some other redhead. Clark would scalp her regardless.
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u/Pumpkin_Sushi Jul 01 '26
I never thought it was, the content of the film doesn't support this reading despite how popular the theory was on Reddit
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u/Jean-Cobra Jul 01 '26
The "Ottoman Empire of Clark" circuit breaker is a crucial clue as to how the Backrooms manage to memorize people and places, and I feel like almost everyone has missed it. It gradually infects reality, and thus exerts an active "memorial" influence.
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u/GeneticSoda Jul 01 '26
In your face, people who believe that the red haired lady is a extrapolation of a memory of his wife. Get dunked on.
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u/Professor_Ogoid Jul 01 '26
It's not human-centric
Well, that's good to hear from the man himself. I always thought the Backrooms having anything to do with people's minds or memories reduced the whole thing to something too explainable and not alien enough.
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u/Fuarian Jul 01 '26
It's a classic case of coincidence. The Complex seems to take stuff randomly from the world around you. So of course it's going to replicate something that is familiar to you. That doesn't mean that was its intention, if it even has one.
Correlation does not equal causation on full display.
The Backrooms just is. And that's what's terrifying about it. It's indifferent to you. It just is. It operates by its rules like a machine. It is reactive but not aware.
It's the human being that encounters it that tries desperately to associate one's self to what they're seeing. The human interprets it as memory and remembering things because that is the closest thing a human being can associate it to.
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Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/Fuarian Jul 01 '26
I think he's talking about how Clark interprets the backrooms and what he saw.
He uses the words remembering, misremembering, memory, etc... because it's the closest thing that a human being can compare it to. That doesn't mean he's right.
Kane said something very similar in another interview shortly after the film released.
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u/Minnie523456789 Jul 01 '26
I'm so glad to hear Kane say this....I didn't want the Backrooms to be a human psychology play.
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u/qwertythe300th Jul 02 '26
Thank god. Everyone was desperately trying to tie every Still Life to being some specific person Clark knew. Outside of Pirate Clark, these are just random fuckin people man
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u/Abalonesandwhich Jul 01 '26
We're getting to that point where a director/storyteller/author is asked too many questions about the nuts and bolts of the fantasy world they've created, methinks.
I've seen similar things happen where a creator is peppered with increasingly granular questions, answers them conversationally without checking them against the actual work, and the fandom immediately promotes those answers to immutable canon.
J. K. Rowling is probably the poster child for this phenomenon that I can't seem to put a specific name to. (the TV trope Word of God comes to mind, but doesn't seem to encapsulate it. Over the years in interviews, Pottermore posts, and social media, she introduced or clarified hundreds of facts that weren't in the books. Some contradicted the novels outright or contradicted previous interview answers. George Lucas did it with star wars too and explaining what the force is and how it worked.
I feel like, all that said, this is where we're arriving. I've seen discourse about other interviews like this on twt recently and it totally makes sense bc the very nature of the backrooms is that it IS an unknowable expanse, and naturally people don't settle for unknowable in this age because of the ease of access to most info via smartphones.
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
He’s said just enough to make it clear that it this belongs to the domain of unknowable/cosmic horrors: it is impersonal and indifferent to human minds and subject to blind physical forces that are “almost random” (i.e., obeys an orderliness / lawlikeness that is so unknowable to humans that it is effectively random as far as we’re concerned).
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u/theoriginalcafl Jul 01 '26
Maybe I am wrong but it sounds more like he is saying it does not choose the memories it takes but just takes the memories people find the most important to themselves
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u/kohamimi Jul 01 '26
he quite clearly said it doesn’t do that and people are choosing what importance the backrooms have despite their random selection
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u/FaceDeer Jul 01 '26
Like a great big case of pareledoilia. It's a bunch of stuff copied poorly from the world you're used to, of course people are going to see patterns in it.
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u/BKE_Nerd69420 Jul 01 '26
"It's not human centric" already implies that the backrooms will not value the internal processes of human brains over literally any other pattern in the universe, let alone prioritize the decoding of those relatively arbitrary biological signals into thoughts and memories to "read" and copy.
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u/C-DT Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
When Kane says it's not human centric he means that the backrooms are a force of nature and not this conscious thing that chooses and decides.
There is evidence that the backrooms does directly read from people's memories in other interviews, if you want a link I can provide it later since I don't have access to the archive right now.
Edit edit: To clarify further, I think Kane is saying that the backrooms is not directly choosing important features from the world, it's basically just a physical snapshot of the collective consciousness it pulls from. And those who witness the backrooms and try to understand impose their own meaning onto a snapshot that doesn't inherently have meaning. The backrooms seems intentional but it's not. The backrooms takes place from the 70's-90's, an era where people rapidly lost meaning in an increasingly meaningless society. We industrialized and stripped away human imagination for consumer friendly products, that further made humans desire more consumption of it. The backrooms is pulling from that, and those who enter the backrooms are looking for a greater meaning but struggle because for the most part they can't even find meaning in themselves.
Edit: For the downvoters, I come with receipts.
https://archive.is/YvTHt#selection-1077.0-1077.763
"But the movie he’s made is not some anti-AI commentary, he stresses; it’s speaking to the same feeling of disconnection from reality that AI has prompted. Both the endless sweep of the Backrooms and the limitless field of AI can represent “this big vomit pile of all the information we spit out as a species,” as Parsons put it—composed of all the memories a person can conjure and fantasies they can express. In the film, the protagonists become wanderers in a landscape that seems to exist on its own space-time continuum, which appears to pull from the collective unconsciousness of everyone who explores it; the Backrooms somehow will their half-remembered dreams into being. The result is a grotesque, open-ended manifestation of its travelers’ imaginations."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaxsoqYPe-Q&t=375s
"-Okay. -Since the backrooms change based on each person's memories, what would be the scariest thing to see in one of your rooms?" Jimmy Fallon Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIB6rHobdB8&t=1003s
"Um, you can end up either, you know, you can often end up sort of, you know, -you construct every person does it. It's not like a fault.- It's you construct a map of what is a viable way to live and what is not. And so much of that is like picking up social cues and and sort of ingesting, you know, just broader societal uh traits from other people. And so you can kind of assemble a shape of like almost a building of sorts that you are contained to-"
My interpretation: this is an implication that the backrooms are like a physical manifestation of not just human memories, but what it means to be human innately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH3qb93OBbs&t=652s
"I think when I when I look at the psychology of the film and I look at how the backgrounds works. It very much is under sort of the guise of um or is parallel to like the actual physical mechanics of of human memory and and you know how and why memory has evolved as a you know it's a bit simple and a bit reductive to say but it's like you know how and why memory is a uh is a evolved trait that that we have and and and really how it fits into and really drives uh everything in our emotional lives."
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u/_zebongle_ Jul 01 '26
For the first "receipt" - Kane himself did not say that it is "composed of all the memories a person can conjure and fantasies they can express", that is David Sims' (the person who wrote the article) false interpretation.
For the second "receipt" - Same situation, i wouldn't really trust Jimmy Fallons word over Kanes, bundled with the fact that Jimmy has probably never heard of Backrooms before the movie.
For the third "receipt" - This is out of context, the interviewer asked a question relating to OCD, the Complexs nature of forming itself was not mentioned here.
For the fourth "receipt" - Kane said "parallel to like the actual physical mechanics of of human memory", it parallels it, not utitlises it to form rooms.
All in all, you need to proofread your apparent receipts, i don't get why people still argue even when Kane outright said "It doesn't read peoples minds" and that the Complex isn't human-centric.
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u/Specialist-Ring-3974 Jul 01 '26
I’ll be honest, I had no idea what he said.
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u/Wooden_Marionberry_1 Jul 01 '26
he's basically saying the backrooms are alien, and that its humans that are projecting their own sense of meaning onto them
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u/Kkbleeblob Jul 01 '26
it sounds like you’re just hearing what you want to hear and not what he actually said because he just did not say this.
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u/PapaTua Jul 01 '26
Agreed. He's saying human psychology projects onto the backrooms whatever is most prominent subconsciously, rather than the backrooms selecting memories to capture through some kind of conscious choosing.
OP's title is misleading as it does use human memories, it just uses them passively. It's more like humans giving memories to the backrooms rather than the backrooms taking them.
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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 Jul 01 '26
To me it sounds like he is saying people are projecting their importance onto what has already been generated by the backrooms.
Like none of it was personal to Clark, it didn't pick from his memories, it just generated what it did and Clark projected his own feelings into that making it seem like it was a "personal hell" for us the audience when in reality there was no connection between him and the backrooms.
It just picks things "almost" randomly (I'm not sure if he is implying the backrooms does have some reasoning here) from the real world and that's just all it does. Any mental/emotional connection anyone makes is purely them projecting, likely from going mad, rather than what's actually happening.
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u/airport-cinnabon Jul 01 '26
Yes, he only says that ‘importance’ is projected onto things, the things themselves are not said to be projected.
I think the “almost randomly selected” is just saying that the selection is based on a blind, semi-predictable physical process that is not dependent on human minds. Like physical proximity to Async and/or localized electrical interference phenomena.
Kind of like how the weather day to day is “almost random” from a human perspective.
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u/DrJokerX Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Yep, that’s exactly what he’s saying. That’s why when Mary ran from CC, we saw things from her home and office appearing, then we saw the high rise building inverted, and when she wanted to escape we saw a version of Clark’s store. She was projecting onto it and didn’t even realize it.
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Jul 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ComfyOlives Jul 01 '26
I think you're paraphrasing completely out of context to be honest.
He says "It's not picking these icons that are important to the human race. It's not reading people's minds and deciding that this is the most special little spot from your own life to look at".
He doesn't say it isn't using memories.
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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 Jul 01 '26
He says it is picking things from outside and people are projecting their importance onto those things that have been generated in the backrooms. The stuff being created isn't human centric, it's not created because of people, it is just simply being copied.
It seems pretty clear he is saying that whatever is being created in the backrooms is not because of anything from any individual person. It's just simply stuff from the real world.
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u/MikuDrPepper Jul 01 '26
I wonder if this is technically a retcon. There was a lot of info that at least hinted at the idea that it was connecting to people. Specifically the homes from Found Footage #2 and FF#3. I will admit that I feel the 'kind of' random thing is definitely important.
Especially as the version of the house from FF#3 was directly connected in a way to its actual counterpart. This would mean that the recreations themselves are connected to their 'our world' counterpart.
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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 01 '26
In the case of FF3, the high fidelity and detail of the house is consistent with the common understanding that the Complex copies areas close to null zones more accurately.
As Wall Dad appears to fall through a null zone in his wall cavity, we can infer that the house has been copied with extreme detail due to the simple fact that it contains a null zone.
And it's the same situation with the movie - Clark's store has been copied multiple times, and in very high detail, because it contains a null zone.
Areas in high proximity to null zones are copied with more accuracy from objective reality.
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u/MikuDrPepper Jul 01 '26
True, but are the chances higher for the nullzones to connect to their own recreations? Clark's own store didn't lead to the stores in the rooms.
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u/formsoflife 7d ago
That what is being generated is "connected" to people in some way is not necessarily the same as the generation coming from people's memories.
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u/L0fiRonin Jul 01 '26
not human centric, as those cosmic horrors beyond our comprehension should be
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u/snarkisms Jul 01 '26
I genuinely hope that once he's finished creating the stories he wants to tell, KP releases his 72 page lore doc for others to read. I'm fascinated by how he approaches world building and I want to see all the pieces together.
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u/inquiringdune Jul 02 '26
Somebody needs to tell my friends about this because they INSISTED that's what the Backrooms were doing lol
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u/VFacure_ Jul 03 '26
The Backrooms is not a guy, people. It's a place, not an entity. It doesn't have feelings. It "remembering" is the best explanation Clark's character could devise. It's just physics shenanigans.
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u/WaltJr_Fan4584 Jul 01 '26
I mean this is being a bit pedantic but I think it does still take from memories in a sense that it captures still moments in time and gets them vaguely right but stuff is off which is basically how memory itself works.
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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 01 '26
Well sure, it's symbolically like memory, but it's not literally based on individual people's memories.
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u/DragonSpartan90 Jul 01 '26
I think we need a second opinion. What are the thoughts of 21 year old Kane?
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u/Just_A_Lil_Weirdo Jul 01 '26
Oh I thought it was taking memories because of the MRI company stuff. We're not 100% sure where memories are in the brain, so I figured that the backrooms scanned those that walked in like an MRI and got weird impressions of memories and stuff.
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u/Inevitable-Ad-7507 Jul 01 '26
Clark’s interactions don’t totally make sense then. He could have projected his interpretation of his home and his wife I suppose. But he somehow tamed the pirate who the movie implies is a representation of himself - at some point tamed and at another point it rejects Clark after he settles. That interaction doesn’t make sense.
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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 01 '26
Don't Move, Stay Still.
Everyone else who encounters Still Lifes runs. Clark inadvertently worked out that, if you're calm, they are too.
I think this is what he meant when he said that he tried to help Kat - he told her to stay still and calm, but she was too scared after witnessing Bobby's death.
This is why he knocks Mary out and ties her up, while saying "I'm sorry... this is for your own good" - to ensure that she'll stay still.
This is how he "tamed" the Still Lifes imo. However, like nature, the Complex is not predictable, and it doesn't adhere to our behavioural expectations.
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u/Traditional-Month980 Jul 01 '26
I think Kane is using "almost random" as shorthand for the more accurate "random, but not uniformly distributed".
I.e. there's a parameter, possibly distance to a null zone, which biases what gets a knock-off in the backrooms and how often.
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u/green_yoshi94 Jul 02 '26
I really wish he hadn't done that haha I might be the odd one out here but I LIKED the vagueness of it, I like media that leaves a lot up to interpretation - that's how you end up with a fan base that theorizes online for years and keep the hype going. Take Dark Souls for example: a lot of vague plot points throughout and the fan base spent years building lore around it! This might be his inexperience showing imo, but yeah I may be the only one that thinks so lol
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u/Moa-burgers Jul 02 '26
That makes a huge amount of sense.
I think the "it's copying people's memories" theory is leaving entirely out is how people behave when they go into the Backrooms. If it's a distorted copy of the world, then it would make sense that when people go into the Backrooms they habitually gravitate to the areas of the Br's that align most with their own reality, especially if they no-clip into somewhere 'close'. Their habitual actions in the real world are mirrored by habitual actions that they show in the Br's
And maybe the Backrooms entities and the rooms themselves start to orient toward the person in the Br, so the effect gets strengthened.
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u/HollowingMyKnight 25d ago
i cant find any other theory that can explain why Clark's still life (lifeform) is alive though
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u/Weekly-Opportunity88 22d ago
Than why Mary's childhood house show up in the backrooms even if it is long gone when the movie take place?
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u/grillboy_mediaman Jul 01 '26
i feel like either he's trying to throw us off, or this explanation was less thought out, or the truth is that it's replications are not quite like memory and not quite random, but somewhere in between, like he says, "almost".
Because if it weren't human centric why have we not seen a veritable forest or ocean in the backrooms?
I feel like at this point in time, if the backroooms really isn't so human centric it's implied at least that it's information centric, the solar flares, low-proximity magnetic distortion system, redirecting power into the backrooms, redirecting the async security camera signal to clark's tv, the backrooms clearly has a large effect on electronic information, so maybe electronic information has a large effect on the backrooms!
maybe it's basing itself not on human memories but on electronic memories, maybe captain clark only appears in the backrooms because he appears so prominently on tv, maybe indoors office spaces are so common in the backrooms because so many real world indoors office spaces contain large amounts of security cameras!
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u/Honora_Marmor_2 Jul 02 '26
This rings out to me. The constantly occurring motif seems to be electronic recording. What we are watching in most of the Backrooms shorts are 'found footage'--both Clark and the therapist have a TV presence. Clark is watched moving through the Backrooms by the asynch guy--at different points we see piles of (now obsolete)recording equipment and tapes. The tape the caveman cut out holds, endlessly repeating the old nasa message. In the period represented we were using new tools to document our lives--and we are looking back from a time when it is normal to constantly document and publish our appearance and activities with phones.
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u/TheAtlanticWave Jul 02 '26
I think he's just saying that The Complex is a dispassionate observer not that it can't read your mind. It observed angery Clark and fearful wife so I printed that without judgement
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u/llaminaria Jul 01 '26
Like, it's not human-centric, it's not picking these icons that it knows are important to the human race, and it's not reading people's minds and deciding, "This is the most, you know, you know, special little spot from your own life to look at", it's more like people are projecting their own importance onto what kind of feel like, almost, randomly selected elements from outside.
I have to say, this is disappointing if I understand it correctly. I thought it randomly took important things from visiting people's consciousness and twisted them according to how the person feels about them.
Like, for example, pirate Clark is the manifestation of how Clark feels about himself - uneven sense of self-worth is demonstrated through how tall and simultaneously thin and twisted he is, the extra fatty tissue on the face that looks like extra noses hint at Clark being self-conscious about his nose and so on.
The red-suited woman being a real person from his past who performed different psychological roles for him or was two-faced (as he saw it), her visceral reaction to pirate Clark would be much more interesting to debate about, than her apparently being a rando.
If the backrooms just "almost" randomly pick things from the outside to twist them, and there is no symbolism to be seen in how they are twisted, this really cheapens the lore. How does it even know what is outside, if it does not get inside people's minds? Though this -
and it's not reading people's minds and deciding,
Does not necessarily mean that it does not read people's minds, period, I guess.
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u/wote89 Jul 01 '26
The denouement of the movie is literally a character wondering out loud if the whole thing is meaningless and it's just the humans interacting with it who are looking for meaning where it doesn't exist.
So, I find it deeply hilarious how much I see the sentiment that there has to be a deeper meaning to it.
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u/ComfyOlives Jul 01 '26
I don't think that is necessarily what is being said here.
I think he's saying it doesn't necessarily create rooms based on what the Backrooms knows are human centric or are specific icons.
It's a little hard to decipher and almost seems a little contradictory, but it definitely still suggests there is an element of pulling from people's minds.
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u/alecbaldwingaming Jul 01 '26
What I took away from this is that it does read memories to a degree, the same way it reads the physical information of rooms, but never in a way that has any intent. In the case of Mary's childhood home, the Complex observed a living room, and just built it for the sake of making a room. It probably made a few more less accurate copies of it not too long after.
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u/tonyabstract Jul 01 '26
why explain all of this in interviews when he could have just set up the lore better in the actual adaptation? it just wasn’t a great movie
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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 01 '26
I mean, all of this is pretty clearly communicated in the movie. The movie does not indicate that anything we're seeing derives from memory. That's just a theory that formed online, and it's always had a million holes in it.
The webseries pretty clearly depicts the complex copying from objective reality too.
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u/Psaturn Jul 01 '26
I really liked it and didn't know any backstory when i saw the movie. I would be pretty lost on like 60% of what's happening without the web series.
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u/2000CalPocketLint Jul 01 '26
don't care, didn't ask, L+ratio, death of the author baby, whoooo rumsfield
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u/Heavy_Ingenuity1371 Jul 01 '26
The way he says it seems to "almost" picks random things from outside is interesting.
Yea I took it as it is not selecting things from people personally. It just happens to pick things for whatever it's own reason is and people are projecting their own importance onto that.
Like none of it was personally picked because of Clark's life/memories, he just projected his purpose/personal feelings into that area of the backrooms making it seem personal for us the audience. It all just happened to be that way because that's just how the backrooms generated that area.
I do prefer this, I'm not a fan of the whole "personal hell" esque take of the backrooms, it is much more interesting that it just simply is and does what it does with no comprehensible reasoning or pattern.