Following the surprise success of architectural horror flick Backrooms, Edwin Heathcote considers the basis for our morbid fascination with endless corporate spaces.

Is it only me, or do we all have that dream about finding a secret door in our too-small apartment that leads to another room, a corridor, or perhaps a whole basement? It's the premise of Backrooms, but not in the vein of an exciting discovery, rather as a sinister undermining of everything we understand about the nature of space.

The movie, currently in cinemas, was based on a series of smart, low-budget YouTube shorts by a now 20-year-old Kane Parsons. These uncanny journeys through cursed leftover space became a breakout hit – viral pieces of faux found footage. Their blend of "creepypasta" urban legend, of pop and the paranormal, seemed to hit a nerve.

For most of horror history the haunted house has been the creepy gothic mansion

The initial photo that inspired the series depicts a real place: Rohner's Home Furnishings in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when it was undergoing renovation work to transform it into a hobby shop in the early 2000s.

Those short films were so striking, and so successful, because they evoked the nightmare of being stuck in a recognisable kind of corporate space, a never-ending labyrinth of generic, fizzingly fluorescently lit abandoned spaces. It is an image that has become familiar to us; from the cringing horrors of David Brent's The Office to the corporate modernism of Severance (itself inspired in part by Backrooms and featuring Eero Saarinen's chillingly cool 1962 Bell Labs in New Jersey).

For most of horror history the haunted house has been the creepy gothic mansion, an imposing, creaking building of dark attics and cellars, cobwebs and odd-shaped windows. The archetype became so embedded – from Psycho to House on Haunted Hill – that it became a joke trope in the Addams Family, the Munsters, the Gruesome Twosome's Creepy Coupe in the cartoon Wacky Races.

The power of the Victorian haunted house to shock dissipated over the years, particularly for subsequent suburban generations more used to cookie-cutter suburban housing to the end of the horizon. Horror moves on. George A Romero shifted the zombie apocalypse from the streets to the mall in The Dawn of the Dead (1978), while in the same year John Carpenter transplanted the horror house to the generic suburbs in Halloween.

Each suggested a new site for terror, the commercial and the familiar, as opposed to the dark, the old and the exotic. Romero of course also used his movie as a brutal parody of an America which had replaced Main Street with the mall, his zombies a hardly veiled critique of stupefied shoppers dulled by desire for consumption.

Now, after online retail shifted habits, the abandoned mall has become the new American horror archetype. They're even called ghost malls, or dead malls, the haunted spaces of late modernist shopping.

There is also a hint here of the back-of-house operations of the hotel or the hospital

This is the new psychogeography, the traces of places that could be anywhere. Marc Augé called them "non-places".

Elsewhere they have been obsessively labelled as "liminal" – a word I am trying to avoid. They are uncanny in part because they are so recent, but their emptiness also represents our horror vacui – the anxiety of emptiness, which even has its own name: kenophobia.

In the movie version of Backrooms, the director focuses in part on defunct technologies – cassette tapes, floppy discs, analogue phones. They are things familiar to my generation, but presumably exotic to Parsons's generation, the same kind of 1980s fetishising seen in Stranger Things, with its Walkman and so on.

These objects add to the uncanny, along with the resolutely unfashionable furniture. This is clearly an era before IKEA brought an acceptable and universal basic modernism to almost every setting.

The film's protagonist, Clark (played by Chiwetel Ojiofor), is an architect. We see him sketching at various intervals. Yet he lives in a world of shit design, bottom-end furniture familiar from low-rent apartments or strip malls.

There is also a hint here of the back-of-house operations of the hotel or the hospital, in which parallel worlds co-exist with seen space. Corridors, rooms, kitchens, laundries, supply and cleaning closets, stores – a whole alternative interior – are invisible to the public, or at most half-glimpsed. It is a kind of architectural hypocrisy, that bare blockwork and vinyl floor aesthetic built for robustness and hard knocks, and so unlike the smooth public face.

This uncanny and endless architecture is the cipher for that uncertainty

More than anything there are those dropped ceilings, with foam panels in their aluminium grids and the flickering fluorescent lights. They give an impression of an infinity of banality, a Tron grid of dusty panels and an unseen void of endless ducts and cables above – the guts and viscera, the hidden-away life support of contemporary space.

One author (and occasional contributor here) explored these notions in his brilliant 2014 novel The Way Inn, in which a protagonist finds himself stuck in the endless loops of corridors and conference facilities, bound by airport ring roads and garage ramps. The same corporate uncanny is described as something initially familiar and almost comfortable, but which descends into an inescapable hellscape.

We might also think of rats or mice in a maze, those poor creatures doomed to spend their short lives enduring experiments designed to frustrate or condition them. The whole genre of backrooms asks whether we, like those unfortunate rodents, are only part of a larger experiment, observed.

Without wishing to spoil the (inconclusive) ending, there is an implication of this here, and this uncanny and endless architecture is the cipher for that uncertainty. It also builds on classical traditions, the maze designed by Daedalus to contain the Minotaur, a hybrid of human and beast destined to be slain by Theseus, who navigates using a thread given to him by Ariadne, just as Clark uses a rope in Backrooms.

Alongside Will Wiles and classical mythology, there is a rich legacy of literary mazes in which architecture expands to unsettle our sense of conventional space. Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, with its hyper-inflating footnotes and parallel stories, is a brilliant exercise in the use of the endless unfolding of space.

Might, in fact, these endless spaces be inside of us?

And the yellow patterned wallpaper which gives the movie its sickly custard tone harks back, consciously or unconsciously, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper, the ur-feminist horror about a woman confined to her small bedroom with nothing but the wall-covering to look at, going slowly insane. But it was architecture's own great writer, Rem Koolhaas, who so brilliantly encapsulated (and christened) this phenomenon in his 2001 essay Junkspace.

"Junkspace seems an aberration," he writes. "But it is the essence, the main thing… the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books). Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain... It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits."

And then, as if perfectly predicting Backrooms, he writes: "Junkspace is the body double of Space." As so often seems to happen, Koolhaas got there first. He both revels in and rejects the junksphere, ultimately concluding that we are ourselves becoming junkspace, with our augmented cyber-bodies.

Might, in fact, these endless spaces be inside of us? Like the ugly, deformed furniture piled up in those leftover backrooms, we exist and subsist in these mazes, surveilled, suspected, like the lab rats, with no real agency.

Their infinite expansion is the nightmare of endless work: the hospital, the big school, the office, the airport, the hotel, the convention centre, the corporate HQ, the care home, the hospital. And so on.

Edwin Heathcote is an architect and writer who has been architecture and design critic of the Financial Times since 1999. His numerous books on architecture include Monument Builders, Contemporary Church Architecture and the recently released On the Street: In-Between Architecture.

The photo is courtesy of A24.

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