How A24's The Backrooms Evokes Eeriness Through Its Design Choices

Aside from the cardboard cut-outs, Captain Clark, and the insincerity behind the Async Research Institute, the set designers excelled at building the emotional world of The Backrooms. After watching the film this weekend, I couldn't help but notice how every scene was aesthetically curated to make viewers feel deeply uncomfortable. The most paradoxical thing about this is that 1990s nostalgia is a period that usually brings comfort and yet The Backrooms design does a remarkable job of doing exactly the opposite.

Every time the film pivoted to The Backrooms, I felt like I needed sunglasses in the movie theater. Yellow fluorescent lights are a clear marker of the past, but there's something intentional about that. The film isn't just using fluorescent lighting as a visual cue for the 90s — it's using a light source that is literally bad for you. These lights were found to emit toxic radiation, strain your eyes, and cause migraines and mental health problems with prolonged exposure. Your body recognizes that light as wrong before your brain does. That's what makes it such an effective tool for psychological horror: The Backrooms doesn't need a monster in every frame when the room itself is already doing damage.

Then there's the symbolism of buildings with infinite space. The world we live in today is obsessed with efficiency and cost-effective solutions. Brick-and-mortar stores have been gutted by the rise of online shopping. The ones that thrived during the 90s were the department stores and office buildings, the Sears and the Macy's, defined by massive square footage and never-ending ceilings. Fast forward to today, and those buildings are closed, repurposed as storage or left completely abandoned. The film leans into that. Instead of giving those spaces the warm nostalgia you'd feel watching a classic 90s movie, you feel the emptiness. It's unsettling. Not minimalist, not modern, just uncomfortable. It feels like there used to be life there. It feels lifeless, but haunted by whatever that life once was. Or maybe by whatever could still be lurking inside.

And then the furniture. Couches and armchairs of the 90s were all about laid-back comfort and playful style. The film made great use of recliners, overstuffed cushions, busy patterns, and yellow wallpaper. Everything blended together, not in a way that feels warm, but deliberately designed to make your skin crawl.

The Backrooms isn't designed to just scare you with what's in the dark. It unsettles you with what's painfully familiar. A24 understood that true horror lives in the uncanny: the yellow light you've seen a thousand times, the couch you sat on as a kid, the store that used to be full of people. By weaponizing 90s nostalgia against itself, the film's production design transforms comfort into dread without a single jump scare. That's the quiet genius design of The Backrooms.