Last week I went to see the movie, The Backrooms. You might have heard of it.
If you’re of a certain age and a certain degree of internet literacy, then you’ll also be familiar with the original version. Investigate all of the lore on your own time, because I won’t go into it here (and I have only a superficial awareness of it myself).
The movie was decent for what it set out to be, namely a psychological/cosmic horror movie that capitalized on a well-known internet phenomenon. There was one thing that I think it did particularly well, however, and I wanted to highlight it because I think writers—especially those who write speculative fiction—can benefit from it.1
What the movie did especially well was that it did not over-explain. There are plenty of unanswered questions and that is a good thing.
Like any horror movie there are, of course, a healthy dose of jump scares. But those aren’t really what makes a scary movie scary, and The Backrooms is no exception. What frightens us is the unknown, the idea that something is lurking just around the corner and we don’t know what that something is. Until the something is revealed our minds play through all the horrifying possibilities. The tension in a monster movie dissipates, or at least abates or shifts, after we first get to see the monster. There has been a kind of visual explanation of the horror that was previously unknown.
There is a bit of a “reveal” in The Backrooms, yet we are ultimately left in the dark about the biggest question of all: What are the backrooms in the first place?
The movie gives us no real answer to that question. People will speculate, of course, and perhaps they can even come to plausible conclusions by rewatching the movie and searching for clues or by cobbling together all the extraneous internet lore surrounding the backrooms. There’s no harm in that and it’s part of the fun of a movie like this.
Some moviegoers, perhaps, will find the ending unsatisfactory. I think it would be fair to say that the ending only leaves the viewer with more questions. I haven’t done any looking, but I would not be surprised at all to find lots of responses to the movie along the lines of: “We need The Backrooms 2 so we can finally know what happened with [fill in the blank]!” If producers give in to such pleas, it would be a huge mistake2
I see only two possible directions for a sequel:
Give people an explanation about what the backrooms are; or
Continue to leave the backrooms unexplained.
The second option, while preserving the essence of what it is that makes the backrooms scary, would likely prove unsatisfying to many viewers. “If we still don’t know what the backrooms are, then what was the point of the second movie?” The first option, is just as likely (perhaps even more so) to leave viewers unsatisfied because to explain the thing, to remove the quality of the unknown, is to rob it of what made it interesting in the first place.
So then what is the lesson for writers?
Speculative fiction—and here I include science fiction, fantasy, and horror—thrive on (to state the obvious) the speculative element. They do so in different ways and some stories contain more explanations than others. Writers should be wary, however, of trying to explain every little detail to the reader.
To go back to the idea of a monster story, the reader doesn’t necessarily need to know the precise details of how the monster’s physiology works or its diet or the place in the taxonomy of cryptids and other ghastly creatures. Those might be things a writer would want to know if they help him form the story, but they are certainly not essential elements of a good story; they can, in fact, spoil a story by over-explaining. Similar points could be made about “magic systems”3 or the “nuts and bolts” explanations of some “hard” sci-fi stories.
Writers of speculative fiction should remember that not every question requires an answer. Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is resist the urge to pull back the curtain.
After all, once you’ve mapped every corner of the backrooms, they’re no longer the backrooms.
And I think I can do it without any real spoilers.
I mean a mistake from a storytelling perspective. From a strictly financial perspective, I’m sure there are half a dozen producers gunning to get their hands on the next, highly lucrative, installment.
Or “Aragorn’s tax policy.” I’m scowling at you, George R.R. Martin.