Disability and The Uncanny in Backrooms
Content note: spoilers for the movie Backrooms; abuse and ableism in fiction
I recently watched Backrooms (the 2026 horror movie from A24 that’s now streaming on HBO Max). There are some intriguing concepts here, but like horror in general and A24 in particular, it relies on outdated, ableist tropes and imagery. It’s also an excellent pop culture example of the uncanny as Sigmund Freud explained it in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” These aspects include the familiar blurring with the unfamiliar, the comforting and the domestic becoming bizarre and horrifying, doubles, and compulsions to repeat. I’ve written repeatedly since 2019 that the uncanny is also often ableist, marginalizing disabled people’s bodies and movements as frightening.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my favorite actors. For decades, I’ve watched him in Serenity, Kinky Boots, Love Actually, 12 Years a Slave, and many more movies. He has a huge artistic range and can play heroes or villains equally well. I initially empathized with Clark (his character in the film), but this has more to do with Ejiofor’s acting skills than with the script.
Near the beginning of the movie, we see Clark filming an ad for his furniture store. He attaches a wooden leg to his own leg. Pirates are often depicted as amputees with wooden legs in pop culture. Clark falls while dancing with the wooden leg, then angrily tells his employee to turn the camera off. It’s an early indication of Clark’s rage and arrogance. It also foreshadows the disabled, pirate version of himself who appears later in the film.
In the beginning, before the ableist tropes started, I loved the vibe and concept of the Backrooms. They’re a perfect example of a liminal space: an in-between, transitional place, like a threshold or a hallway. I’ve said before that not every example of the uncanny is necessarily ableist. I’m unfamiliar with director Kane Parsons’ web series about the Backrooms, the basis for his film, but I immediately recognized the movie setting as an uncanny, liminal space.
Alexander Highcliffe said in a YouTube video that the Backrooms are liminal space as a metaphor for not moving on in one’s life. This also fits thematically with Clark’s psychotherapist, Mary’s, audio cassette tapes about getting stuck in looping thoughts and behaviors.
After fighting with (and it’s implied, abusing) his wife, Clark moves into his furniture store. By doing this, he blurs all the boundaries between work and home and cozy and industrial. He passes through a wall to the Backrooms: seemingly endless rooms and hallways that defy logic and physics. You’re supposed to move on from liminal spaces. Most people pass through corridors and storage rooms quickly, barely noticing them. They become creepy when they last indefinitely, become dangerous, and when Clark calls them home and lives there 24/7. Instead of taking accountability for his actions, Clark retreats into unreality.
The Backrooms also exemplify the uncanny. They are both familiar and unfamiliar, as well as unsettling, causing people to go around in circles. Passing the same places repeatedly, even where it should be physically impossible, is a hallmark of both the uncanny and the Backrooms. Uncanny places are indistinguishable from one another and disorienting — another example of the familiar becoming unfamiliar.
When analyzing Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” in 2019, I wrote: “Freud also talks about circular thinking in ‘The Uncanny’ — sometimes literally walking in circles! Our professor’s example was The Blair Witch Project. Freud discusses getting lost in the ‘red light district’ and feeling ashamed and trapped because he hadn’t meant to be there.”
However, if you’re familiar with Freud’s work on repression, he’s also implying that he subconsciously wanted to be there in the “red light district.” Clark calls the Backrooms his home and finds them paradoxically comforting. They merge with his identity in bizarre, terrifying ways. The Backrooms manifest Clark’s desire for violence, which becomes more overt the longer he stays there. They are also surreal. They reminded me of nightmares and of the physics-defying art of M. C. Escher, such as impossible staircases.
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Ironically, the Backrooms initially also reminded me as a disabled person of how inaccessible spaces feel. The experience of being lost, going in circles, and panicking is very evocative and relatable. Many questions that characters might ask in the Backrooms are ones I think while navigating environments daily:
“Where am I? Yes, I got in, but can I get out (or up or down)? Am I stuck here? If I fall, will anyone help me?”
Many critics compare the liminal spaces of the Backrooms to abandoned shopping malls. Clark’s furniture store, which leads into the Backrooms, is in an old shopping outlet in 1990. I’ve observed in real life that many of these older, decrepit buildings are especially physically inaccessible and often predate the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).
Doppelgängers are another aspect of Freud’s “The Uncanny” found in the Backrooms. A doppelgänger (literally “double-goer” or “double-walker” in German) is an unexplained lookalike. Freud says of doubles or doppelgängers: “From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.” The Still Life characters in the Backrooms are doubles who seem wrong and frightening. They are omens of violence and death. (The term Still Life in Backrooms lore has a totally different meaning than in painting).
In a line that’s used in the movie trailer, Clark explains that the Backrooms reproduce people and things from the outside world but often corrupt them in some way. “And the more times it remembers something, the less it does.” This paradox can also be a metaphor for the subconscious mind and how memories become distorted over time. A scene showing many floors of Backrooms under the basement can symbolize deep repression. Things that look slightly “off” or unnerving are another characteristic of the uncanny.
If the Backrooms corrupt people, then it’s a problem that they often do so by making them disabled. One Still Life character has six eyes, and another is a wheelchair user. After Clark torments Mary in the Backrooms, she acquires extra fingers (polydactyly). By the end of Backrooms, the brutal, pirate version of Clark appears to have a facial difference, can’t speak, and needs the wooden leg because he is an amputee. Fans often describe him as monstrous. They may not realize the word monstrous has a long history of being applied to disabled people. Still, the film relies on ableist clichés by the end.
One moment complicates the film’s use of ableist tropes. Clark says, “Somewhere out there is a man in a wheelchair,” implying that the “real” or “normal” version of a person is sometimes disabled. This is good and subverts the trope momentarily, but usually in the film, the “off” or “wrong” version of a person is disabled. This Still Life character who is a wheelchair user, Archibald Leland Sutter, has a lamp attached to his wheelchair and is named after different kinds of lamps. Inability to tell whether a being or object is animate or inanimate is another characteristic of the uncanny, as Freud wrote. Sutter’s name is a joke, and the Backrooms somehow conflate him with his wheelchair and a lamp.
In a film ripe for Freudian interpretations, pirate Clark may also represent Clark’s id. The id was Freud’s term for the part of the self that contains basic (often socially prohibited) urges. Clark is a mentally ill, Black man with substance use disorder who abuses his white wife. Ejiofor’s acting, and not the script, gives him depth as a character at the beginning of the film. However, the more unrestrained, openly violent version of himself has acquired more disabilities. The film descends into stereotypes, using disability to seem scary, like so many other horror films.
There are also many other possible interpretations of the Backrooms and the Still Life characters besides ableist imagery. Characters with more than five fingers on one hand or more than two eyes literally have limb and facial differences. The Still Lifes could represent generative AI imagery. This is ironic considering that A24 is partnering with a genAI company, but I want to explore multiple possible interpretations, consciously intended or not. The Still Life people could also represent blurry motion photos. This fits better with all the analog technology in the film, which takes place in 1990. Analog technology corrupts the more it reproduces (and so do the Backrooms).
The film implies that Mary became a therapist partly because her mother was mentally ill. The Async company, which monitors the Backrooms and the people within them, previously made MRI machines. Mary is a therapist who tries to help Clark. I interpreted Async as representing abusive medical professionals and institutions, or perhaps government surveillance. Mary’s Still Life appears disabled in the final shot of the film. Some fans and critics call her “d*formed,” an ableist term.
Many fans say that Backrooms is “about trauma” broadly. I think it explores Freudian psychoanalytic concepts like the id, repression, the subconscious, and the uncanny. As a disabled person watching it, I also related it to inaccessibility and unethical healthcare corporations.
However, it simultaneously relies on ableist images and concepts. Being evil, frightening, wrong, or corrupted should not be conflated with disability, but this happens in this horror film and countless others. Some fans online say that the Backrooms treat each person equally, regardless of their disabilities. This may refer to the web series and Reddit lore, not the film itself. I also want people to understand how the uncanny and other ableist concepts work, if they aren’t already aware of them.
