The Real Horror in The Backrooms: Attachment Trauma

I want my two hours back because I hate horror movies.

I hate jump scares. I hate slasher films. I hate that feeling of sitting on edge, waiting for something to jump out of a dark hallway when you already know it’s coming.

So naturally, I spent my Friday night watching The Backrooms with my teenagers after a long week of work.

Self-care is apparently flexible in my house.

To its credit, the film does exactly what it sets out to do. It’s unsettling, atmospheric, and creepy as hell. The lore is fascinating, and the tension builds in that slow, uncomfortable way horror fans seem to enjoy.

There’s a reason people rate it so highly.

But as a therapist, I wasn’t really thinking about the monsters.

I was thinking about attachment trauma.

What struck me most was that attachment isn’t just a theme hidden beneath the movie—it’s woven directly into the lives of the two main characters.

The therapist at the center of the story isn’t simply confronting monsters. She’s confronting the lingering impact of growing up with a mother whose severe, untreated mental health struggles made emotional safety unpredictable. As adults, we often tell ourselves we’ve moved beyond those experiences. Yet attachment wounds have a way of resurfacing when life becomes stressful, relationships become vulnerable, or old fears are activated.

The second protagonist is grappling with a different painful wound—the loss of his wife. Anyone who has experienced heartbreak or bereavement knows how disorienting that kind of loss can be. The future you imagined disappears. The person who once felt like home is suddenly gone. You find yourself replaying conversations, revisiting memories, searching for answers that never fully arrive.

As a therapist, I see versions of both stories every week.

One person is still trying to earn the safety they never received in childhood.

Another is trying to make sense of losing the person who made them feel safe in adulthood.

Different histories. Different circumstances. The same human longing for connection, security, and belonging.

That’s why attachment feels so present throughout the film. Beneath the horror, beneath the strange architecture and flickering lights, the story is really about what happens when people are forced to confront the relationships that shaped them—and the wounds that continue to follow them long after those relationships have changed or ended.

The monsters may be fictional.

The fear of abandonment, rejection, loss, and emotional disconnection is not.

What The Backrooms gets right is that when old wounds don’t heal, life can start to feel like those endless hallways. You think you’ve finally found your way out, only to find yourself back in the same patterns—different people, different settings, same emotional terrain.

That part hit me.

Long before I became a therapist, I worked in Child Protective Services. I spent time with families living in chaos and children trying to make sense of adults who couldn’t always be emotionally available.

Those experiences don’t leave you.

So while the movie gave us flickering lights and impossible hallways, I found myself thinking about something much more familiar: what it feels like to grow up without emotional safety—constantly searching for solid ground and never quite finding it.

One thing the movie also reminded me of is how memory works.

The Backrooms are full of spaces that feel familiar but not quite right. Memory can be like that too.

Clients often worry about remembering every detail correctly before talking about something painful. But the details aren’t always the most important part.

The room may be blurry. The timeline may be fuzzy.

The feeling usually remains.

People may not remember exactly what happened, but they remember what it felt like to be scared, alone, or responsible for things no child should have been responsible for.

That’s often where healing begins.

Back to the therapy scene.

My reaction?

Yeah… we don’t do that.

I role-play all the time in therapy.

Job interviews? Absolutely.

Difficult conversations? All the time.

Helping clients find words for things they’ve never said out loud? Every week.

But reenacting trauma while stepping into the role of a spouse or loved one in a way that intensely activates a client?

No thank you.

Hollywood takes liberties with therapy. That’s nothing new.

It made for a compelling scene.

It didn’t make me think, “I should try that on Monday.”

Being trapped in the Backrooms with a client would be my least favorite professional development training.

I’d like to think I’ve built strong enough therapeutic relationships that my clients know my limits. Besides, if I ended up trapped in the Backrooms with them, my constant questions about feelings and nervous system regulation might actually reduce their odds of survival.

“I know the lights are flickering and you’re being chased by something, but where do you feel that in your body?”

Probably not the intervention the situation calls for.

But here’s what The Backrooms actually gets right:

Pain doesn’t disappear because we ignore it.

Fear doesn’t vanish because we avoid it.

The things that hurt us have a way of showing up again.

Different person.

Different relationship.

Same wound.

The monsters in the movie may not be real.

But the experience of feeling trapped in patterns you don’t understand absolutely is.

That’s what stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

So yes, dear friend, if you’re looking for lore, psychological suspense, and a genuinely creepy experience, The Backrooms delivers.

If you’re looking for an accurate portrayal of psychotherapy, maybe not so much.

But it does offer an important reminder:

Sometimes the scariest places aren’t the ones with monsters.

They’re the places we keep returning to until we finally heal what’s hurting underneath.

Out of the Backrooms (and not looking back),

Mandy