Spoiler Space: The entities lurking inside the Backrooms have always been its weakness

When that something is actually revealed, as in the end of Parsons’ “Found Footage” short and his feature adaptation of Backrooms, this power is taken away. This happens doubly so in the film, because it’s no longer a staticky, wiggly-wiry War Of The Worlds-like tripod that sends that short’s POV character plummeting to their demise. Rather, it’s a variation on star Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, born from his warped psyche as a giant…pirate. Yes, because Clark owns a pirate-themed furniture store (he dresses up in Treasure Island gear to shoot an early commercial), he’s later chased through the non-Euclidean corridors by a towering version of his own inner darkness—one that also happens to be in a pirate costume.

So, more than Backrooms having an “actually, it’s about trauma” kicker, which is disappointing enough on its own (You’re telling me he’s divorced and depressed?), there’s an aesthetic undermining that happens as things turn into a monster movie. We see the pirate mascot-beast for so long and so clearly that it takes much of the uneasiness away from the otherwise slow-burn liminal horror. As has been the case since that original post, the monster isn’t the draw or the point. We’re scared of being stuck somewhere that we don’t understand, and then having to quickly navigate that incomprehensible area because there’s the sensation of being chased—this is key to that dreamlike feeling of helplessness. When you get too close to the chaser, the nightmare gets a bit easier to parse; even if what you see isn’t exactly friendly, just being able to see it at all gives you enough clarity to shoo away some of that primal fear.

And if you do rely on a monster to shoulder your third act, you probably don’t want them to look like the Flying Dutchman from SpongeBob SquarePants. There’s a way that this warped version of its lead character could be uncanny, to be weird in the right way, but this isn’t it. The explicit absurdity, with this big ol’ buccaneer chasing his little human doppelganger around and leaving all sorts of gore in his wake, runs counter to the rest of the film’s tone. And yes, it looks silly as hell.

If you think about other liminal horror, like Skinamarink, it’s scary because a monster could be anywhere and anything in its just-off household. Similarly, Slender Man isn’t a particularly scary creature (What, did he go to Men’s Wearhouse before coming to kill us?), but the fact that he could slip into frame anywhere—appearing in the corner of your eye or behind any innocuous object—makes his presence upsetting. This same wisdom holds true for Backrooms. The mystery, the unknown, the shadows around corners and sounds of footsteps—these add to the architecture rather than steal attention from it. Just like its tendency to overexplain itself, Backrooms‘ overinvestment in its creature moves away from all the things that work best about the liminal wave of horror.