Losing the Aura: Backrooms in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Backrooms is a surprisingly conceptual film disguised as a mainstream horror movie. I didn’t love it, but I was absolutely intrigued by it. Rather than relying on gore or conventional jump scares, the film creates dread through atmosphere, repetition, and disorientation. The endless yellow hallways and empty office spaces feel less like physical locations than psychological states. The horror comes from the uncanny familiarity of the environment: everything looks recognizable, but nothing feels human anymore. In that sense, Backrooms operates less as a monster movie and more as an existential meditation on contemporary loneliness.

What makes the film especially compelling is how clearly it reflects the emotional texture of online life. The Backrooms themselves resemble the architecture of the internet: infinite, repetitive, anonymous, and strangely isolating despite being hyperconnected. The characters wander through liminal spaces that seem to have no center and no exit, much like people navigating digital culture itself. The film taps into the paranoia that emerges from spending so much of life online, where identity becomes fragmented and relationships become increasingly mediated through screens. Even when surrounded by endless content and information, people often experience a profound sense of emptiness and alienation. Backrooms visualizes that condition with disturbing precision.

The creatures in the film are particularly effective because they are not entirely alien. They appear as distorted remnants of something once human, degraded reproductions that have lost any trace of authenticity or coherence. That idea immediately recalled Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he argues that endless reproduction erodes the “aura” of the original work—its uniqueness, presence, and authenticity. Backrooms feels almost like a horror adaptation of that theory. Everything in the film seems stripped of aura: the spaces are endlessly replicated, memory becomes unstable, and even the human body appears vulnerable to becoming an empty reproduction of itself.

This connection becomes even more relevant when applied to internet culture. Online spaces thrive on repetition: memes are endlessly recycled, identities are curated performances, and trends mutate faster than they can retain meaning. The internet rewards circulation over originality and replication over depth. Backrooms imagines the psychological endpoint of that process. The characters are trapped inside an endlessly reproduced environment where individuality dissolves and meaning deteriorates. The monsters themselves embody this decay, appearing less like independent beings than corrupted echoes of humanity. They feel like products of a world where authenticity has been worn down through constant reproduction and mediation.

The film also openly borrows from earlier horror traditions, particularly the body horror and psychological unease of David Cronenberg and the lo-fi digital paranoia of The Blair Witch Project. Like Cronenberg’s work, Backrooms is interested in the instability of the human form and the terror of transformation, though it translates those anxieties into a more digital and liminal register. At the same time, its use of found-footage aesthetics and fragmented realism clearly echoes The Blair Witch Project, another film that weaponized ambiguity and the illusion of authenticity. That lineage matters because Backrooms understands that contemporary horror is no longer just about monsters; it is about mediation itself—about not knowing whether what you are seeing is real, reproduced, manipulated, or already detached from reality entirely.

What makes the film especially fascinating is that it emerged from internet culture before becoming a Hollywood production. The Backrooms began as collaborative online folklore, spreading through forums, memes, videos, and fan recreations long before its cinematic adaptation. In that sense, the movie participates in the exact cycle Benjamin describes. The original concept was already infinitely reproducible, mutating through digital circulation before reaching the screen. Rather than resisting that artificiality, the film embraces it. The result is a horror movie that feels uniquely native to the internet age: anxious, recursive, alienated, and haunted by the disappearance of aura in a world saturated by endless reproduction.

I didn’t love Backrooms, but I haven’t been able to shake it either. As a film, it can feel uneven, emotionally distant, and at times more interesting conceptually than dramatically. Yet that may also be part of what makes it linger. Its horror is less about narrative payoff than atmosphere and psychological erosion. What stays with me is not necessarily the story itself, but the film’s unsettling vision of a world emptied of authenticity, where endless repetition and digital mediation slowly dissolve both identity and meaning.