Why does A24’s Backrooms feel desperate?

Why A24’s Backrooms set feels “desperate”

A24’s Backrooms leans hard into a look of workplace decay: fluorescent lighting, yellowing wallpaper, and an enormous labyrinth of corporate-like corridors. Production design is doing much of the heavy lifting—creating an environment that doesn’t just look unfamiliar, but psychologically oppressive.

The story emphasizes that the visual design choice is intentional. The set’s color palette and lighting are meant to evoke exhaustion and entrapment, matching the movie’s horror concept. Rather than treating the space as a simple fantasy location, the production design is built to communicate a specific emotional state: desperation.

This matters because Backrooms is arriving at a moment when viewers are already primed by “infinite space” creep—places that feel endless, indifferent, and hard to escape. By making the environment resemble the kind of mundane, institutional interiors people recognize from real life (office floors, institutional hallways), the film narrows the gap between fiction and lived experience.

In practical terms, the craftsmanship—fluorescent glare, aged surfaces, and cramped institutional repetition—turns a meme-adjacent concept into a full immersion space. The audience doesn’t just watch characters move through hallways; they feel like the hallways are closing in.

The result is a horror aesthetic that isn’t powered only by jumps or plot twists. It’s powered by atmosphere: the way light and color make the space feel abandoned, wrong, and inescapable.