What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Jun 15, 2026 · 26 min · 10 segments
Two horror films by two young directors have outmuscled an honest-to-Grogu *Star Wars* to become the early box office surprises of the summer. Guest…
Justin ChangGuestMary HarrisHostBackrooms is a movie that grew out of an internet meme, this 4chan image of a fluorescent-lit abandoned room.
Like, if, if I'm telling people to picture in their mind, I'm telling them, like, a yellowed kind of severance set.
... ugly photograph of a creepy, ugly place that nonetheless we all could sort of recognize, like, oh, whatever that was, was that some grody office you visited, like, in the '90s or something? And, you know, and Backrooms the movie is set in 1990, and so the Backrooms, which are sort of referred to I think in the original meme as, like, this maze of, like, hundreds of millions of miles of just office space, the premise of it is sort of, or the question rather is what does this evoke for you? For a lot of people it evokes, um, you know, yeah, some, a, a time from when maybe the, the first time they visited a place like this and felt unmoored.
Like, what if you were stuck there? Why were you stuck there? [laughs] What would it feel like?
It's like without parental supervision the first time you ever went to this completely soulless place [laughs] and like and so ...
And there's kind of a fantasy element too because for some people it's like it's very, um, it's a very enveloping thing to be wandering a place like that.
And the m- in the movie, the character, the lead character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name is Clark, becomes obsessed with this place.
Or he slips through a wall in his, in his f- furniture store basement, and finds himself just wandering this maze for hours and hours.
Backrooms is a movie that grew out of an internet meme, this 4chan image of a fluorescent-lit abandoned room.
Like, if, if I'm telling people to picture in their mind, I'm telling them, like, a yellowed kind of severance set.
... ugly photograph of a creepy, ugly place that nonetheless we all could sort of recognize, like, oh, whatever that was, was that some grody office you visited, like, in the '90s or something? And, you know, and Backrooms the movie is set in 1990, and so the Backrooms, which are sort of referred to I think in the original meme as, like, this maze of, like, hundreds of millions of miles of just office space, the premise of it is sort of, or the question rather is what does this evoke for you? For a lot of people it evokes, um, you know, yeah, some, a, a time from when maybe the, the first time they visited a place like this and felt unmoored.
Like, what if you were stuck there? Why were you stuck there? [laughs] What would it feel like?
It's like without parental supervision the first time you ever went to this completely soulless place [laughs] and like and so ...
And there's kind of a fantasy element too because for some people it's like it's very, um, it's a very enveloping thing to be wandering a place like that.
And the m- in the movie, the character, the lead character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name is Clark, becomes obsessed with this place.
Or he slips through a wall in his, in his f- furniture store basement, and finds himself just wandering this maze for hours and hours.
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3 of 5
Record-Breaking Box Office Surge
First, the figure redefining box office expectations
Consent Debate Gets Heated
Next, the argument challenging viewers' moral compass
Crew Paid Pennies For Hit
Listen to behind-the-scenes fallout over pay issues
+2 more clips · 3 min 27 sec of audio in all
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