Backrooms Easter Eggs: The Important Details That Set Up More Stories

This article contains spoilers for Backrooms.

Backrooms, the long-awaited A24 horror movie directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, hit theaters last week with a lot of expectations from the audience of Parsons’ previous short film series, The Backrooms (Found Footage), which has more than 80 million views on YouTube. While Parsons has said that the feature-length movie exists within the reality of his YouTube films, he’s also aware of what he refers to as “lorebloat” a term that describes the internet’s inclination towards incessant theorizing. “[Lorebloat] really does run the risk of totally defeating the ability of this project to actually resonate with who’s not already in that in-group and it becomes inaccessible if it goes too far,” the filmmaker told IGN.

Thankfully, Parsons’ films keeps a healthy balance between easter eggs hinting at his previous shorts and creating a story for a viewer who has never heard of Backrooms’ past internet lore. He also sprinkles in some unanswered easter eggs that are hopefully answered in a sequel, which Parsons has hinted to several times on Backroom’s press tour. Here are some of the most revealing tidbits. 

The Handheld Camera Opening Scene 

The opening scene of the movie is a very straightforward tribute to Parsons’ original web series. The majority of that project is depicted through its main character holding a VHS camera. The glitching VHS and the audible breath of the character behind the camera in the beginning captures the same nostalgic eerie feeling for fans of the original project while simultaneously serving as a successful hook for the members of the audience experiencing the backrooms for the first time. 

Later in the film, when Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is exploring the backrooms for the first time he finds a duffel bag with an Async workers badge and a pile of VHS tapes behind a hole in the wall. This scene not only references the beginning of the movie but the title of his original web series, “Found footage.” Clark in this movie seems to be the one that discovers this former Async employee’s footage. 

Captain Clark Is a Tribute to the Original Monster

The original entity in Parsons’ The Backrooms (Found Footage), is a long-legged slender biped that chases the camera while making a loud screeching noise. Many fans expected this to be the main monster of the film, but instead the main monster is the backrooms’ manifestation of Clark in the pirate costume he wore for his Cap’n Clark Ottoman Empire furniture store commercial. 

Both entities share similar aspects like height, sound, and mobility. The unbalanced walk of the original entity is emulated through Captain Clark’s peg leg and both creatures make a similar deep inaudible noise while chasing the characters. 

Some fans on TikTok speculate that the correlations are not a coincidence but a tribute or prequel to the monster in the original backroom shorts. The origin of how the monster becomes a mimic of Clark is still unclear. At the beginning of the movie, the monster that kills the Async worker can be spotted with a peg leg, similar to Captain Clark, but Clark had not yet entered the backrooms to be remembered. So the answer behind the entity’s original form and origin is unclear and may be answered in future sequels. 

 The CCTV Footage Date Reveals the Timeline

Backrooms reveals its timeline in the scene where Async employee Phil (Mark Duplass) watches Clark enter a backroom through CCTV footage. Async has placed cameras around the labyrinth next to cardboard cut outs of cavemen to capture creatures in the backrooms or people that may stumble in like Clark and observe them. When the film cuts to the footage of Clark on the TV the date displayed is June 19, 1990. 

The date appears to be almost a month after Async had faked the death of employee Peter Tench because of a failed experimental trip in the original Backrooms‘ canon. It is speculated that the acknowledgement of this incident may be the reason behind the Async CCTV cameras. Async upped the surveillance of the backrooms to avoid another Peter Tench situation and monitor the people who discover the backrooms to keep them from revealing their research to the public. 

Async’s confidentiality is depicted in the ending through Mary (Renate Reinsve), the second main character in Backrooms. Async captures her after she escapes from Captain Clark and questions her on her experience. When Mary asks what will happen to her, Phil responds “That’s not up to me,” leaving an ambiguous ending for Mary as to whether or not she truly escapes or if she knows too much about the backrooms for Async to let her go. 

Can the Backrooms Time Travel?

The aforementioned Peter Trench storyline in the web series episode Backrooms – Informational video represents Parsons’ interpretation of the backrooms complex time and space structure. We don’t know how time works in the backrooms but viewers of the web series can infer it operates differently because Peter Trench transported to May 8, 1990 during his expedition that took place on February 29, of that same year. 

The backroom’s unnatural time rules are displayed in the movie as well through Clark’s rapid mental decline during his stint in the paranormal location. When Mary enters the backrooms to find Clark, it seems that Clark has only been in the backrooms for a couple days, but he nevertheless has fully acclimated to the environment, exhibited an altered mental state and a change of clothes. It is not confirmed how much time has passed for either of them, but time does seem to be moving differently between Mary’s outside reality and Clark’s backroom reality. 

Similarly, the mural that Mary finds depicts the monster Captain Clark lifting someone up toward a window. This seems to foreshadow the remaining half of the movie. The person being lifted is theorized to be either Clark himself or Mary escaping Captain Clark through the window depicted at the top. Another widely accepted theory from fans on TikTok is that Clark or Captain Clark is the artist behind the mural. In the mural the words, “The floor plan changed again. Roof is wrong, roof is wrong. I don’t know who signed the plans but the handwriting looks like mine.” These words are likely in reference to Clark’s sketched floor plans of the backrooms that he shows to Mary earlier in the film. Clark may have painted the mural in the height of his confused mental state, or Captain Clark painted the mural through the backroom’s tendency to try to mimic reality. 

A lot is left to interpretation from this mural, but many of the images depicted do seem to reveal coming events, meaning the future was reflected on the walls of the backrooms. How that is possible is not yet clarified but may be in coming sequels. 

Missing Persons Tribute

When Clark is deep into his personal exploration and mapping of the backrooms he asks his employees at the furniture store to come with him. This exploration ultimately leads to both his employees’ deaths and his mental decline prompting him to stay in the backrooms because he finds he likes it better there. 

At the end of the movie, during an eerie montage of the backrooms that are mimicking the memories of Mary, there is a room with a row of spiraling electric posts that have missing posters for both of Clarks employees. This signage is a tribute to the intro of Parsons short Backrooms – Missing Persons. The beginning of the short shows a series of missing persons posters that of people seemingly went missing in the backrooms. Clarks employees have become new flyers to add to the stack of Parsons missing characters.