Every generation gets the monsters it deserves. Arkhaven’s reviewer and cultural commentator par excellence clued me into the importance of The Backrooms, and a query from my youngest for an explanation of the film led to a deeper bout of introspection on my part. My initial answer to her question leaned heavily on The Dark Herald’s analysis*, with the occasional sidestep into the nature of narrative and film’s ability to “show don’t tell” the spiritual realms of our lives.
But then came the realization that ultimately, The Backrooms is a Christian movie. Okay, that’s a pretty strong statement, so let me preface my analysis with an open admission that once again I am turning the “Death of the Author” crowd’s tactics against them. If they can claim Frodo and Sam as butt-stuff buffs, then I can claim The Backrooms in the name of Christ our Lord and Savior who died for our sins, rose again on the third day, and will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
Ahem.
In The Backrooms, the monster isn’t a fanged beast or a cosmic horror—it’s the quiet, fluorescent hum of a life lived without a center. Clarke is hunted by demons of a personal nature rather than a physical one, and they have him so far down the road to perdition that he suffers from the earthly consequences of his own disordered desires. If you look at his story through the lens of Augustine, you get a very different reading of Kane Parsons’ Rorschach test.
Augustine points out that man’s “hearts are restless until they rest in You.” One part theology, one part theology, that line is the blueprint for understanding why men like you and me struggle to varying degrees, and why men like Clarke fall apart. The film never mentions Christ, sin, or salvation, but it doesn’t need to. Clarke is the modern man Augustine warned us about: a creature built for God, wandering the world like a glitching program because he’s running on the wrong operating system.
Clarke’s life before the Backrooms is already a maze. He’s chasing career success, numbing himself with alcohol, and trying to outrun the collapse of his marriage. These aren’t random character flaws. Rather, they are the classic Augustinian disordered loves. Good things elevated to god‑things. Tools mistaken for telos. Clarke wants meaning, but he’s looking for it in all the wrong places – mostly within himself and for himself.
Then he slips into the Backrooms, and the metaphor becomes literal. Endless beige corridors. Dead air. No windows, no sky, no sun. No end to all. It’s the spiritual landscape of a man who has lost the plot. Augustine would say Clarke hasn’t just fallen out of reality – he has fallen out of order. The Backrooms are what the interior life looks like when the soul is unmoored from its Creator: repetitive, directionless, and haunted by echoes of what should be.
The creatures that stalk him aren’t demons in the theological sense. They are shadows cast by his own misdirected longings. Fear. Regret. Shame. The film externalizes the spiritual truth the Baltimore Catechism puts plainly: man was made to know, love, and serve God. When he doesn’t, he doesn’t become neutral – he becomes lost.
Clarke keeps searching for exits, but every door loops back into the same stale geometry. That’s Augustine again: the man who seeks fulfillment in created things ends up running in circles. The problem isn’t that Clarke isn’t trying hard enough. The problem is that he’s trying in the wrong direction. Without a transcendent center, without Christ, every path is a cul‑de‑sac.
What makes this interpretation compelling is that there is no triumphant escape for Clarke, no revelation, no catharsis. Just the hum of the lights and the ache of a man who can’t find home until at last he is consumed by his own sinful nature. That’s the spiritual condition of the modern West: men who have turned their faces away from Truth, trapped in liminal spaces of their own making, haunted by the God they won’t name.
Read this way, The Backrooms isn’t just a horror film. It’s a parable. Clarke isn’t running from monsters – he’s running from the absence of the one thing that could give his life shape. His search for meaning is real. But until it becomes a search for God, it will always end in the belly of the beast.
Of course, rare is the teenager who will focus long enough to get through all that, so I just left it at, “One of the themes of the movie is that you cannot find meaning within yourself. You have to look to God. And that’s why we go to Church every Sunday, so we have a fixed star to guide us to where we belong. That way we won’t end up like Clarke.”
*The Dark Herald writes in more detail, but basically: “For Boomers, horror was something you watched. For Gen X, horror was something you rented. For Millennials, horror was something you discussed. For Gen Z, horror is something you *enter*.”