Severance creator was inspired by The Backrooms, but the similarities don’t stop there

The original Backrooms lore inspired the liminal horror of Severance, and they both explore the horror of capitalism, especially in America.

In 2022, Severance was released on Apple TV. The psychological thriller series follows Mark, who has signed up for Lumon, a mysterious corporation whose work or purpose are unclear. At Lumon, workers get their brains “severed” to split into their work selves – their innie – and their normal live selves – their outtie. Neither version of them remembers the memories and experiences of the other.

The expansive, never-ending spaces of the Lumon offices in Severance are strongly reminiscent of the backrooms, and co-creator Dan Erickson said this was intentional.

“Stuff like The Backrooms, which is a weird online urban legend,” he said in an interview with Inverse about his inspirations. “There were a lot of disparate influences.”

“It’s scary when you really look at how much of our self-worth and identity are wrapped up in our jobs,” he added.

Similarly, in the Backrooms film, Clark is consumed by a job he doesn’t care about. He functionally operates as an “innie” – he lives at his job, his life revolves around his job, and the place he works is ultimately the place he dies.

Clark has dreams outside of owning a furniture shop. He wants to be an architect, but as we see, that dream is further away from him than ever. He’s forced to be a slave to the system that sands away at our dreams – which is why the monster version of him is the mascot he uses to promote his dead-end store- Pirate Clark.

Adam’s sense of worth is also removed by spending eight hours a day completely detached from himself.

“He’s stripped himself of an identity that most of us latch onto,” Adam Scott said in an interview with Inverse. “He’s just moving along through life without feeling or doing much of anything. He can disappear for eight hours and not feel all of the pain in his everyday life. As far as having any sort of identity around what he does, it’s gone now.”

As the gruelling reality of life under capitalism gets darker, and the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider, we’ll continue to see more horror stories focused around the despair of modern work culture. Elon Musk was just announced as the world’s first trillionaire, while someone dies from starvation every four seconds. What’s scarier than that?

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