Shadowing Practice: Backrooms Movie Breakdown and Ending Explained - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Backrooms likely left you with quite a few questions about the liminal space itself, the entity that resides within, the guys in the hazmat suits, and what the hell was that ending?
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Hey, welcome back to Screen Crush, I'm Colton Ogbren.
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Now, this movie may have been the first time you have actually heard of the Backrooms, or so you thought.
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But if you were on the internet in the early 2010s, you have definitely seen these walls, especially this picture.
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So what we're going to do here is break down this movie and explain the ending.
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But first, I want to give you a little bit of history on the Backrooms itself.
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This is the back rooms, and so is this and this and this.
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Basically, the back rooms, they are a liminal space, an endless dimension of rooms that you can access by clipping or glitching out of reality.
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Let me explain.
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The back room's urban legend, or creepypasta, started back on 4chan in 2019 when someone started a thread on 4chan's paranormal board with this photograph attached.
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The anonymous poster also said, if you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the back rooms,
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where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights,
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at maximum humbuzz, and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented, empty rooms to be trapped in.
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God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has hurt you.
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And thus the internet myth caught on like wildfire.
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After After that initial post, people began to post their own backrooms, even creating their own subreddits to post new lore on.
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Now one of the new lore pieces established was the backrooms having levels, which we saw adapted in this film.
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This idea of levels allowed backrooms fans to get creative with the liminal aesthetic and adapt their own version of the backrooms,
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which led to many different video game and short film adaptations to be made within the following years.
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Severance creator Dan Erickson even cited the Backrooms as his inspiration for the design of Lumen.
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Now, one of the most popular adaptations of the Backrooms was Kane Parsons' 2022 short horror film, Backrooms Found Footage.
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This was the first of many Backroom horror shorts that he posted on his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels.
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The web series gained so much traction among Backrooms fans that in February of 2023,
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Deadline announced that A24 would be picking up the series as a full-length horror film adaptation.
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That being said, there is a lot of Backrooms lore online from different niche communities, but for this breakdown, we're mainly going to focus on the lore from the YouTube series,
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which is largely regarded as, I would say, like, the canon of the Backrooms.
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Cain Parsons kind of has, like, an authority on this, but it is very open source, so there is no, like, official canon.
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So, going into this Backrooms movie, you do not need to have watched the short films to understand it, But I do highly recommend checking them out if you're intrigued by this universe as a whole.
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There are a couple of pre-established elements of this universe that Parsons explored that we are going to cover in this breakdown, like the organization Async.
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These were the guys in the hazmat suits, the research foundation
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that we briefly see at the beginning of the film as well as at the end of the film
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when Mary is found.
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Now in the Backroom series, Async started out as an MRI company, as Phil mentions in the movie.
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But in April 1988, two years prior to the start of this film, Async began to experiment with opening a doorway into the backrooms.
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These doorways into the backrooms are called low proximity magnetic distortion systems or thresholds.
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They need what is called a null zone to connect to the universe.
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These null zones are areas that connect to the real world like the tapped out door underneath Captain Clark's Ottoman Empire.
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Now after six tests, Async was finally able to open a doorway to the backrooms, which then caused the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
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After this, the threshold remained open, causing a spike in missing persons and leading to a higher exploration of the backrooms.
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Now back to what I was saying.
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So that brings us right up to the opening of this film with researchers at Async exploring Clark's backrooms.
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And how do we know this is Clark's segment of the backrooms?
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Well because we see this same no-credit-needed banner clipping out of the ceiling as we see later in his department store.
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And I have to say that there is no better location for a backroom hub than a department store.
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The entire backroom's lore started from a photo of a hobby store.
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The liminal space genre revolves around these uncanny in-between spaces like a doctor's office waiting room, an abandoned mall, or a movie theater.
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Having Clark live in this department store is such a perfect
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way to show just how far deep into the backrooms he truly is, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
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So, this entire scene, it is shot first-person POV, with the researcher holding the camera, and I really like this detail, because it calls back to not only Parsons' short films,
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but to a lot of the more popular backrooms games like Transliminal and The Complex.
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I also really appreciated the way they were able to integrate the found footage aspects within the film itself.
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A big part of the tension behind analog horror
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or found footage is that it makes you feel like you're a part of it.
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It's much harder to incorporate POV shots like this for a long time as it can be disorienting for audiences, but The Backrooms uses that disorientation in its favor.
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We feel the fear that the researcher has as they are running away, or the fear that Bobby felt as he was scrambling to escape the entity.
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I also thought it was a cool note that this film begins with scientists watching someone on found footage explore the backrooms,
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the same way that we the audience were introduced to the backrooms by Parsons through watching these found footage tapes.
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Now, this async researcher very quickly gets found by the entity.
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Now, at first I had thought this was the life form from the backroom series.
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We've seen this humanoid life form throughout a lot of Parsons short films, and it seems to just wander around this endless maze.
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However, now knowing that we are within Clark's backrooms, as indicated by the banner, I think this is actually Captain Clark that attacks the researcher, but we'll get back to that in a sec.
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So we then hard cut to Mary, watching as her childhood home is bulldozed.
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Mary is such an important part of this film.
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Not only is she acting as Clark's therapist, a person that he can trust and disclose his darkest secrets to, but she is someone who has been through her own journey.
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Mary has already escaped her back rooms, nearly literally as we saw in that flashback.
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The only remnant she has of that old home was the rock handprint
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which she later uses to escape the back rooms once more.
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And that ending battle is a literalization of their own personal mental struggles.
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That hand in the pavement also perfectly represents the physical embodiment of memory and how it can be distorted over time.
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We're not seeing an actual human hand in the imprint of that cement, but still in a philosophical way we understand that hey
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that represents this hand and that's what we see a lot in the back rooms.
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It's not actual things but off representations of things.
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Now when Mary
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and Clark have their opening session she mentions how the unhealthy
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behaviors people learn as children cause them to feel stuck in their daily life.
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And this may be what is causing Clark to act out.
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And there is no better example of someone stuck in their unhealthy behaviors, their backrooms, as Clark.
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Now, as I said earlier, he literally lives above his backrooms.
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He is neighbors with all his dark thoughts and faded memories, so much so that he ultimately lets it take him over.
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This film emphasizes how the backrooms are rooted in our subconscious, how representative they are of our own trauma,
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and how easy it is to drag others into the same unhealthy echo chamber when unchecked.
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Bobby and Kat are both examples of this.
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During the initial therapy session, Clark says that he's not alone, he has employees.
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And we see how heavily Clark relies on these two who are just people who work for him.
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We see this when he hastily asks for their help to explore the back rooms,
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and he leads them past several stop signs offering empty reassurance before leading them to their own demise.
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You still haven't told us what we're doing here, man.
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I did tell you.
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Research.
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Both Kat and Bobby's deaths are so quick because they are just unfortunate casualties in Clark's carelessness.
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The Backrooms is ultimately about accountability and how the entities
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that grow from us not owning up to those darker memories can take over our own lives, as well as those remotely close to us.
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Now, as we see at the end of the film, Clark has no interest in taking accountability, and that's why he ends up getting killed.
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Or so we think, we didn't actually see a body.
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When Clark fully assimilates with the back rooms, leading Mary down there, where we see him playing family with the others, we finally learn that Clark was the entity the entire time.
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Well, not Clark, but Captain Clark, a huge uncanny version of Clark's pirate persona that he uses to sell furniture.
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It's a literal caricature of Clark's rage and failure.
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He is the one that prowls the back rooms and destroys anyone who comes close.
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He represents Clark's trauma within his mind.
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However, we should point out
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that Captain Clark doesn't lash out against the dinner table until after Mary gives Clark permission not to change.
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Captain Clark is Clark's inner demon, his inner entity taking him whole.
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There is nothing left of Clark but the monster that keeps spiraling
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and refuses to let go of the past and the memories that are better left forgotten.
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We also get a glimpse of Clark's past cruelty within this dinner scene from the reaction of one of the backroom's people, aka still lifes.
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A still life is the name given to each of the entities within the backrooms, as seen in Parson's short film Backrooms Number 3 and in this film with the bearded still life,
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the Archibald Leland stutter still life, and the redheaded still life.
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The backrooms are made up of everything and nothing.
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It's a mismatch of our own memories corroding into one another.
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This place builds them.
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Actually more like it remembers them.
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Now that being said, I think it's safe to assume that the redheaded still life is representative of Clark's ex-wife, Barbara, who had kicked him out.
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Other than being the only other woman we saw in the back rooms, this still life does have red hair, like Barbara, and this still life being Barbara is further cemented
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when Clark scalps the still life and puts the hair onto Mary.
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Now, when the Captain Clark entity begins to approach the dining table, the redheaded still life begins to panic, running off into the corner.
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And this makes perfect sense because
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if the entity is the embodiment of all of Clark's memories and secrets and traumas and rage, aka Clark's nights out drinking,
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it would make sense that this memory of Clark's wife would fear that memory of Clark's rage.
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But we have to remember these are Clark's memories, and with him being an unreliable narrator, he may have never let Mary in on just how cruel he can be.
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That is until now.
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Clark admits that he doesn't want to change and that he feels safer in the back rooms.
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He feels safer not changing.
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He doesn't want to admit to the hurt that he has caused to other people, so he feels safer going further and further into his own memories, regressing more and more.
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Even if these memories have all slowly been dissolving away.
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It's a real mess.
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But also beautiful.
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So this entire dinner scene, it was really well done.
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If you're a horror fan, you know that when they sit down at a dinner table, shit's about to go down.
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And man, did both of these actors really deliver.
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So Clark and Mary, they begin to mirror a roleplay that they did during the first therapy session, with Clark reliving the night he was kicked out and Mary acting as his wife Barbara.
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Within this first roleplay, Clark is apologetic for losing his temper, but he's quickly reassured by Mary that it's okay.
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That, however, is completely flipped in this version at the end of the film, where now we are seeing Mary chew him out for nothing ever being his fault.
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She tries to get Clark to see the truth, and how he is not the victim in his life, when in reality he is the person actively making his life worse.
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She has tried her best to get him to escape the back rooms, but he's just continued to drag her and others deeper in with him.
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Again, the back rooms representing his own trauma and anger that he just can't seem to pull himself out of.
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Now, during Mary's grand escape from the back rooms, I love the detail that, though it stays in the same liminal space aesthetic,
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it's clear that the rooms Mary runs through are different from those in Clark's complex.
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She runs through a suburban neighborhood exterior, like the one that she tried to peek out at as a child.
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The rooms themselves have more modern furniture, window chimes, couches, all stacked upon one another.
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This is indicative of more of Mary's life than it is Clark's.
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Now the idea that we all have our own back rooms
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that begins to adapt to our memories is really intriguing and it adds a lot of depth to the movie, showing how our own emotions,
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our own monster, can easily slip into someone else's backrooms.
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And that's a commentary on how we all affect one another.
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Essentially, you can easily slip into someone else's backrooms and take over their life.
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And that's what I think this area is that we see Mary run out to at the end.
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Visually, it's similar to Room 14D in the backroom's short Pitfalls.
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But metaphorically, it's representative of all of our shared lives and collective backgrounds.
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All of the memories of one another that we have impacted or just lived side by side to.
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When you let your entity take over your life, it's just that easy to break out of your own backrooms, your subconscious, and then into someone else's.
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And again, that's why Mary works so well as a character against Clark.
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When her childhood is revealed, we learn that she essentially grew up in a backrooms of sorts.
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Her mother even has the same sound cues as the entity within the backrooms.
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This is a character that has escaped her own backrooms and watched it get demolished and forgotten, and she is now working on pushing forward against another character who is just giving up.
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And it's actually sad.
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The only time that it truly seemed that Clark was ready to take accountability
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and leave the backrooms was at the very end when it was all too late.
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Mary had already decided that there was nothing that she could do for Clark.
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So in the end, she chooses herself.
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And man, that ending fight was cathartic.
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Mary was not going to let another person drag her down into those backrooms, and she took the authority over her own path.
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Using that last remnant of her traumatic childhood, she breaks free from both the entity and Clark, as well as that baggage of her mother that has been holding her back.
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Okay, so now on to that ending.
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When Mary is found by the researchers wearing hazmat suits, we meet the scientist Phil.
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He works for the Async Research Institute, which I mentioned earlier.
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Now, during their discussion of the backrooms, Phil mentions how the company started by working on MRI machines before switching to exploring the backrooms.
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And this is a detail that I think is especially interesting when we interpret the backrooms as our own subconscious.
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MRIs map out your internal structures.
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So for instance, a brain MRI would show a photo of your brain, much like the way the backrooms can act as a map of our own memories and trauma, which exist within our brain.
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And the more times it remembers something, the less it does.
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So Mary then asks if she is able to leave the facility that they brought her to, to which Phil gives a non-answer.
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We then get a pseudo-answer within the next scene where we see a still life of Mary still in the back rooms.
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Showing us that even if Mary is able to leave the back rooms, the memory of her never will.
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We think that Mary very likely got away, or at least isn't fated to be left in the back rooms forever.
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But the important thing to remember about the fun of the back rooms is that it's up to everyone's interpretation.
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Everyone has their own personal backrooms because everyone has their own unique nostalgic memories.
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The only ending for this film that Cain Parsons actually shot down was the it-was-all-a-dream type ending, but other than that, fury away.
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Mary could have died in there, Mary could have escaped, and I think the what-if of it all adds to the mystery of the story.
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And that was another aspect of the film that we really liked.
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It allows the audience to come to their own conclusions about these characters
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and have fun discussions about the film after the fact.
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We open this film on two people that we should immediately be sympathetic toward.
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A woman watching her childhood home be destroyed, and a man dealing with bills and graffiti on his local business.
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We're not led to see Clark as the villain until the very end because in reality, he's not a villain.
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He's just a guy.
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He's by no means a gray guy, but he's a human, and only when he admits that he doesn't want to change for the better, that is when he truly merges with the backrooms.
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Now another thing that this movie did is it proved
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that you don't need a huge budget
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and Hollywood's top director to make a horror film or really any film that means something.
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This movie not only expanded on the backroom's lore, but it gave us two fantastic character performances.
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That was our interpretation of this movie.
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Special shout out to the writer of this video, Lee Mazzeo.
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Let us know what you thought about the film down in the comments below and what you thought about that ending.
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Did we get anything wrong?
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Do you agree with our theories?
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Do you disagree?
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Have fun down in the comments.
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Just be nice.
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If you're new here, be sure to subscribe, hit the bell so you get notified every time we upload a new video for Screen Crush.
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Oh, sh-
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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?
If you’re into english speaking practice, this Backrooms movie breakdown is a goldmine. The speaker uses casual, conversational English—perfect for shadowing! You’ll hear real-world phrases like “left you with quite a few questions” and “caught on like wildfire,” which are great for everyday chats. Plus, the mix of storytelling and explanation helps you practice both listening and speaking fluently. Whether you’re using a shadowing site or just repeating lines, this video trains you to follow natural pacing and tone, making your speech sound more authentic.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
Let’s dive into key structures you can mimic:
- “if you were on the internet in the early 2010s, you have definitely seen these walls”: This mixed conditional (past simple + present perfect) talks about hypothetical past situations with present results—great for sharing experiences.
- “the Backrooms may have been the first time you have actually heard of”: “May have been” speculates about the past, useful for discussing possibilities. Practice saying it to sound more confident in guesses.
- “there is no official canon, so there is no need to have watched the shorts”: “So” connects cause and effect smoothly. Notice how the speaker uses it to simplify complex ideas—perfect for clear communication.
Common Pronunciation Traps
Watch out for these tricky words:
- Liminal (LIM-uh-nuhl): Don’t stress the second syllable—keep it short. The speaker says it clearly, so shadow speak along to get the rhythm right.
- Paranormal (pair-uh-NOR-mal): Emphasize the third syllable. Listen for how the speaker glides over “para-” to keep the flow natural.
- Thresholds (THRESH-ohldz): The “th” sound is sharp—don’t replace it with “t.” Repeat after the video to master this common tricky word.
Using videos like this for learn english with youtube practice makes learning fun and practical. So hit play, pause, and repeat—your speaking skills will thank you!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been playing · has been holding |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have actually heard · have definitely seen · has hurt |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be trapped · be made · being said |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who has · people who work · anyone who comes |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.