This Halloween season, many people will be spending their evenings in the Backrooms: endless yellow corridors, piles of furniture, damp carpet, the hum of fluorescent lights, and no way out. Backrooms opened in U.S. theatres on May 29, 2026 and has since earned more than $400 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing horror film of the year. It is a phenomenal success for a 20-year-old first-time director with a budget of just $10 million. Beneath the jump scares and monsters, though, the film is an exploration of our inner world.
Spoiler warning: this article discusses the ending of Backrooms (2026). If you plan to see it, you may want to come back afterwards.
The film follows Clark, a failed architect whose furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, is on the verge of closing. He copes by turning to the bottle, until his wife kicks him out and he is reduced to living in the store. There he stumbles upon a strange opening in the basement wall that leads into a vast labyrinth of rooms, passages and, yes, monsters.
Clark had been seeing a therapist named Mary, author of a self-help program called The Window Within. In their sessions she tells him we all have our loops: habits that keep us walking in circles, reaching for the same solutions and expecting them to lead somewhere new. Her promise is that the window out was never locked: understand your wounds, confront the truth, and step through to take back control of your life, free to be “the author of your own design.” In the Backrooms, Clark believes he has found a better window. He leaves Mary a message saying he has opened the window and won’t be coming back.
The Backrooms look like the in-between places of ordinary life, often called liminal spaces: an empty office corridor, a mall after closing, a hallway you only pass through. Everything is almost normal (carpet, wallpaper, ceiling lights) but slightly off: too uniform, too empty, with no windows and no purpose. The rooms repeat without end or landmarks, and you can walk for hours and get nowhere. Here Clark confronts his own inner world. Early on he finds a heap of chairs, tables and beds, everything a home needs but nothing arranged into one. It is a fitting picture of Clark himself, with all the pieces of a life but no order. He comes to see the place as a faulty, misremembered copy of reality, one that also copies whoever enters it. That is how Clark meets Pirate Clark, a towering, grotesque version of himself in his store mascot’s costume, his insecurities twisted into unchecked self-hatred.
As twisted as it is, Clark comes to like it in the Backrooms. He feels more at home there than in real life, as if, for the first time in years, he is right where he belongs. When Mary follows him in, he ties her to a chair and demands absolution: she must tell him he did nothing wrong. Instead she gives him the truth: “Nothing is ever your fault.” But the truth alone only leaves him exposed. Mary cannot save him, and the monster comes to consume him.
Backrooms was filmed in Vancouver, where I happened to spend three weeks this summer. While there, I heard a sermon that used the movie to illustrate the day’s readings: Romans 8:12–25 (“if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live”) and the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–30). As the preacher put it, we are in the Backrooms, in our own inner world.
The sermon began well. It rightly warned against seeing the Christian life as a step-by-step climb to excellence through our own effort. The preacher also drew on Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans: “Our whole behaviour, always and to the world’s end, bears stamped upon it the form of this world… As there is no pure act of thought, so there is no pure act of will” (The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns from the 6th ed. [London: Oxford University Press, 1933], p. 434). The point was that God’s work in us is never finished, and the older we get, the more we understand that.
She was right that we cannot find our own way out of the maze. The answer is not to try harder, because Jesus has already done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. But the vision of the Christian life that followed was troubling. The sermon left us in one of Mary’s loops: forever trying to follow Jesus, forever knocked off course, like lost sheep God must keep chasing back to the path. Jesus and the Spirit become distant figures, returning us again and again to a redemption Christ has won but we never seem to live in.
“We begin again and again,” the sermon told us. But the Christian life has only one beginning: being born again, as Jesus told Nicodemus (John 3:3). Israel crossed the Red Sea once. They stumbled many times in the wilderness, but for all their longing for Egypt, they never went back. The pillar of cloud and fire went with them. Every failure was a stumble on the road out, not a return to Egypt. As Paul writes in the very passage the sermon preached on, we “did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear” (Romans 8:15).
“Every time we stray,” the sermon said, “God is chasing after us to come on back and follow.” But in Jesus’ parable, the shepherd does not chase the lost sheep back to the path and leave it to follow. He lays it on his shoulders and carries it home rejoicing (Luke 15:5–6). “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus says, “and I know them, and they follow me… no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27–28). We may stumble, but we are carried, and we never stray beyond his hand.
“In the flesh,” the sermon said, “we are all in the Backrooms.” In one sense we are: we still deal with trauma, insecurity and the ghosts of past addictions. But as believers we are not there in the flesh, wandering aimlessly like Clark. Paul says, “You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9). That changes everything about our experience of the Backrooms. Israel’s wilderness was hard and barren, but they were no longer slaves in Egypt. They were God’s free people, and God had put “in the midst of them his Holy Spirit” (Isaiah 63:11). They may have felt they were wandering aimlessly, but they were always on the road to the promised land. The forty years were God’s judgment, but it fell on the generation that kept longing for Egypt. Read as our own story, that generation is the old man, crucified with Christ (Romans 6:6), and the wilderness is where he dies. It was the new generation that walked into the promised land.
In Christ, we do not follow a lesser Moses but a greater one (Hebrews 3:3). If even Moses would not abandon the Hebrews after they rebelled at Sinai, but asked to be blotted out of God’s book rather than leave them (Exodus 32:32), how much more Christ? In Christ, we are already walking out of the Backrooms in the power of the Spirit, in freedom and confidence. We are not stuck in the maze, trying to follow Christ out and hoping to be free at the end of time. Barth himself, whom the preacher quoted, calls the life we live here and now “the realm of redemption”:
Men can apprehend their unredeemed condition only because they stand already within the realm of redemption; they know themselves to be sinners only because they are already righteous… How could they bring themselves to sigh for the longed-for redemption, if they were not already redeemed and already blessed?
(The Epistle to the Romans, p. 286, on Romans 8:10)
In the Christian life we can grow discouraged. We can have dark nights of the soul and see ourselves in the Backrooms. Clark chose to stay there alone, and Mary could not save him. But we need not walk in fear, hopelessness and desperation, because in Christ we are never alone there. He is not a far-off voice in the maze that we cannot find; he is right there with us, leading us out. Paul asks, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8:35), and answers:
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38–39)
We are in the realm of redemption. The age to come is not only ahead of us. It has broken into the present, and eternal life does not wait for the afterlife; it has already begun for those in Christ. Even the darkness we see in ourselves is evidence of it. When Paul cries, “Wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:24), he can say it only because the new man is already alive in him. The new self is not a future hope; it is who we really are now, whatever darkness remains. The free life is not something we could ever achieve. It is Christ’s gift, and it is ours today. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The Exodus as our own path of redemption, walked with Christ, is the theme of my forthcoming book, The New You: Living Free and Confident Through the Exodus. If this article spoke to you, you can read the introduction free by signing up below.