Backrooms, Open Door, and the Cult of Nothing
The business of keeping you lost …
I wanted to call your attention to something. But I’ll be honest with you — my writing can be critical. Especially of white male creators in film and TV. I say that not to be incendiary but because I think they need it the most — and receive it the least. Their point of view gets accepted too readily, too enthusiastically, and without nearly enough discernment. I’m trying to fix that. With harm to none and for the benefit of all.
So let me tell you about a short film called Open Door — currently on YouTube, directed by Kevin Cate.
It goes like this. Two coworkers get stuck in an elevator. The floor counter descends below zero. They stop at some impossible level. A button appears. The door opens. One of them says, “Close the door.” Film over. Three minutes. No resolution. No monster. No answer.
It just got a six-figure development deal, according to Variety.
I know.
Here’s what bothers me — and it’s not the deal, exactly. Hollywood has always chased a signal. What bothers me is what signal we’re sending. Because I’m watching a formula take shape in real time, and I think we need to pay attention before it fully calcifies.
It started with Backrooms, created by Kane Parsons. A YouTube phenomenon built entirely on liminal dread — endless fluorescent hallways, no plot, no resolution, no arrival. It became a cultural moment. Hollywood noticed. And now Kevin Cate appears to be running the same play, with Open Door looking very much like the first conscious attempt to replicate that path straight to a development deal.
I’m calling this early. But I’ve seen enough to know what it is.
Same pattern, different packaging. And at the center of each: a young white male creator being celebrated for, essentially, withholding.
Not building. Not arriving anywhere. Withholding.
And we’re calling it depth.
Look. I’m a cinephile. I love storytelling and I love the way it shapes how we understand ourselves, each other, and what we’re living through. That’s not a small thing. That’s everything. Which is why the power it holds leads me to speak the way I speak and create the way I create.
I’m not a critical talking head. But I do specialize in cultural pattern recognition. And I’m genuinely trying to call us all into a greater understanding of the work, of ourselves, and of why this moment matters now.
And right now, I’m not seeing that conversation happening. When I look at the reviews of Backrooms, of Open Door — I see a lot of acquiescing. Dare I say: pandering? I’m not seeing anyone ask the harder question:
What is this actually doing to us?
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with.
We are living through a real and documented crisis of meaning. Institutions are failing. Information is abundant and contradictory. People feel they have no control over systems that govern their lives. This is real. I’m not dismissing it.
But disorientation is meant to be a launch pad, not a destination. It’s meant to take us somewhere. The labyrinth can end. The dark night of the soul has a morning. The journey has a destination.
What these stories do is remove the second half.
You enter the labyrinth. You stay there. Forever. And people call that profound.
It’s not profound. It’s a business model.
Because here’s the thing about never answering the question: if they never leave the elevator, if there is nothing in those backrooms, the conversation never ends. The theories continue. The reaction videos continue. The lore threads continue. The sequel gets greenlit. Permanent uncertainty is, it turns out, extraordinarily monetizable. And the creator — who gave you nothing — becomes the gatekeeper of a mystery he invented specifically to remain unsolved.
That’s not filmmaking. That’s a slot machine with better lighting.
In my former days working in art history — putting together exhibits, researching new pieces, sitting alongside conversations about provenance, context, and technique — we’d often discuss a question that sounds elitist on the surface but is actually one of the more sober conversations the art world ever produced: does this work have a mandate to exist? Not just process — though process matters. Not just intention — though intention matters too. But that third thing. That unspoken justification for why this particular work needs to be here, in the world, now. What does it bring us that we didn’t have before? What does it make possible in us?
Because I can splash red paint on a wall. That doesn’t make it anything.
Backrooms and Open Door have process. They have intention. What they don’t have is a mandate. Because a mandate implies that something returns to the audience — some transformation, some reckoning, some new way of seeing. These works feel like they have no mandate to exist, other than convincing us we have no control over our lives and no ability to create meaning. And that’s not just hollow storytelling. That’s an agenda. Because you do have control over your life. Your ability to construct your own reality and create meaning is exactly how you deprogram and exit The Matrix — a film, incidentally, that had a mandate. Obviously.
These works return nothing to us. They return everything to the creator. Fame. Accolades. Development deals. We are still in the backrooms. We are still in that elevator. The door is still closed.
And someone just got paid for that.
What’s being sold to us, and what we are buying, is the aestheticization of our own paralysis.
The very conditions that should be moving us — toward meaning, toward action, toward rebuilding, toward healing — are being packaged and sold back to us as content. As something to be fascinated by. As something to theorize about in comment sections at 2am.
Making people afraid of something that isn’t there, and then charging admission for the fear — that’s the trick. And we keep lining up.
I think about what storytelling has always, at its best, been for. Not to trap you in the problem. To transform you through it. Every tradition — spiritual, literary, indigenous, philosophical — understood that disorientation was an invitation. Not a mood. Not a brand.
These stories don’t invite you anywhere. They keep you circling the door.
And someone is getting very famous and very paid to hold that door shut.
Just long enough for you to forget that you fucking matter and are here to reclaim your mandate to live as co-creator within this vast universe.
I’m not arguing for easy answers. Great storytelling lives in ambiguity — Chris Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, Jordan Peele. Ambiguity, yes. But ambiguity in service of something. There’s a difference between a story that leaves you in productive uncertainty and one that leaves you in permanent suspension with nowhere to go.
One treats your confusion as the beginning of something.
The other treats it as the product.
We deserve the first kind. We keep settling for the second.
And if we’re not careful, we’re about to fund an entire genre built on it.
Again, I’m a cinephile. I understand what it takes to get a film made. I respect the grit it takes to break into this industry. I genuinely do. How could I not?
And still. Cinema doesn’t owe you comfort. It owes you transformation. And a door that opens into nothing isn’t mysterious — it’s a refund owed. I love this medium too much to pretend otherwise.
© 2026 Lana Jackson. All Rights Reserved.
