Backrooms' Async Institute Has A Deeper Lore Than You Might Think
The Backrooms is a frightening concept in and of itself, but there are other mysteries hinted at by the film that are just as unsettling.
While the horror film is a constantly shifting and evolving genre, there's little argument that one of the biggest inspirations on it recently has been the internet — specifically the individual horror subgenres that have sprouted up because of it. Arguably the most popular is the Creepypasta (a style of community-oriented storytelling that prioritizes a faux-authentic first-person perspective), but there are many others, including false wikis (think the SCP Foundation), analog horror (defined by a vintage video presentation), and the one that's currently experiencing its heyday: liminal horror.
Liminal horror is a difficult genre to define, but it's mostly characterized by the unsettling nature of transitional spaces — empty malls, swimming pools, abandoned office buildings. It's not a concept new to horror (it's the focus of stories like The Shining, Grave Encounters, and even the book House of Leaves), but the internet's version of it contains an undercurrent of uncanny nostalgia, because there's something scary about locations half-remembered. Kane Parsons' Backrooms movie, based on the wildfire internet phenomenon, taps into those themes directly, and also engaged with a lot of the lore he introduced in his YouTube series of the same name — including a very intriguing and very discreet secret organization dedicated to investigating the location's many mysteries.
Async in Backrooms
Since the internet latched into the concept and ran wild with it, few liminal horror concepts have had the overnight success of the Backrooms.
In Parsons' recently released Backrooms feature, one of our main characters, Chiwetel Ejiofor's Clark, discovers a doorway of sorts to the neverending labyrinth in the basement of his furniture store. While it's clear from his first venture into the space that he's not alone, what's not initially clear is who's responsible for the cardboard cutout decoys spread throughout the Backrooms, or where the wires connected to them lead to. What does eventually become clear, however, is that they're somehow connected to the mysterious watcher (played by Mark Duplass) monitoring Clark's excursions into the other dimension.
By the end, after Clark's therapist Mary (Renata Reinsve) has become trapped inside while trying to find her patient, we discover the truth — the decoys were set up by a shadowy organization known as the Async Institute, whose members rescue Mary before interrogating her about her experience. It's revealed that Async has been executing their own expeditions into the Backrooms, trying to find answers to why and how it exists, but their efforts turn out to be just as fruitless as Clark’s.
What is Async?
Even though the self-centered Clark believes the discovery of the Backrooms to be his, the Async Institute beat him to it by a few years.
The Async Institute isn't an original creation for the film, but a key touchstone of Parsons’ YouTube short films, which the A24 film builds off of. The movie explains that the organization started out as a manufacturer of MRI machines before eventually discovering the Backrooms and pivoting to researching the phenomenon, but the original shorts expand on that. In 1988, Async started research into the “Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System” (itself an experiment abandoned by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, another secretive organization within the universe), a process by which to access the “Null Zones” which allows for entry into the Backrooms.
Initially Async (and their government sponsors) viewed the liminal space as a solution to global housing and storage issues, but within their first few excursions, they immediately recognized the presence of a hostile inhuman entity referred to as “The Bacteria.” The Bacteria (named due to the fact that it appears to be made up of a mutated strain of hay bacillus) doesn't appear in the recent film, a choice that allows Parsons to expand the lore beyond what he's already introduced, but in the YouTube material the Bacteria is a frequent obstacle in Async's efforts to explore and research the Backrooms. Nevertheless, the presence of the inexplicable creature hasn't stopped Async from serving as the closest thing to a continuous protagonist across all Backrooms media, with their quest for scientific knowledge expanding beyond Parsons’ works into other creators' contributions to the concept.
Despite not appearing in the movie, the Bacteria is one of the most recognizable images in Parsons' YouTube series.
One of the best things about Backrooms is its continuity within a much larger fan-oriented community. The movie offers its own explanations and interpretations, but all of it is a culmination of what fans of the concept respond to, and Async is one of the most beloved aspects of the mythos for fans because it taps into a certain contemporary apprehension towards scientific progress at any costs. Now that a Backrooms 2 has already been confirmed to be in the works, there's a less-than-zero chance that the Async Institute won't show up in the sequel, offering fans another opportunity for a glimpse at their shadowy inner workings.
