The West Mall in Sioux Falls is not big by mall standards, at least not from the outside. I went there over the weekend to watch the widely successful and acclaimed Backrooms movie. While I won’t dive too deeply into the synopsis of the film, you can find Mapharmacist’s fantastic review of the film here. 

From the outside, the mall is flat-walled, painted with a blinding albedo white, and virtually featureless. It looks to be the size of a small department store. Numerous parked cars implied that the interior would be full of people Both of these prove to be false. Inside, the mall is a cavernous place, lit with high fluorescent lights. 

The shopping mall was deserted when I got there. It was a massive, cavernous place, lit with fluorescents and arcade lights pouring through windows. My ride dropped me off early, so I took some time exploring the mall before the matinee. I found a golf place, hair salon, church, healing room, insurance agencies, gold exchanges, each emerging from the walls with facades and posters. The mall seemed designed to serve everyone, and yet there was nobody there. The only sounds were my own footsteps and faint music over the loudspeakers, the kind designed to keep the mind placid and ready to buy things. I couldn’t help but feel like the movie had already started. 

A little creeped out, I made my way back to the theater, where I saw the first people – a security guard eating an early lunch, and the concession and ticket workers of the West Mall 9 theater. A ticket cost five dollars, and they told me I could sit wherever I wanted. True to it, only two other people showed up to see that morning showing, seen only as dim silhouettes a few rows behind me. 

The movie itself, like the mall, felt empty and lonely for much of its duration. The two greatest sources of warmth and connection—the two teenage employees of Clark’s Ottoman Empire—experience a horrific fate, and we’re left for the rest of the film with Mary and Clark, two lonely and isolated people, to explore or escape the empty halls of the backrooms. When the credits rolled and I left the empty theater, I was not eager to enter the broader mall. I thought that the empty halls and objects half jutting out of the wall would get to my already jumpy nerves. But by now, the mall was not empty. Families, kids, seniors all wandered about, entering stores, chatting, carrying goods they bought. And that same place that had creeped me out earlier didn’t feel so bad. 

The structure of the mall was still weird, sure, but I was reminded that the absence of people, not weird architecture, is the core of liminality. The emptiness, not the strangeness, signals to your brain that a place is unsafe. From Mary and Clark in The Backrooms, we learn from them that isolation leaves us vulnerable. The world is far more terrifying when we navigate it alone.