"Backrooms" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Screenwriter

Oscar-winning screenwriter Daniel Hausman-Burger works away at his next script in his office at home but he's interrupted when his agent (and best friend) arrives and slams on his window. They have a frank talk about Danny's isolation; he hasn't been speaking to his friends or family, and it's on account of the fact that his young son, Roman, vanished into thin air in the past months. Danny claims he's keeping busy and focused with a new script.

It's all he can do to take his mind off the situation. All people want is for him to get outside, even if he's nihilistic about the outside world.

Answer: A supermarket

Fed up with his friend's insistence that he get out into the world, Danny asks him to see himself out of his house and storms off, but what he finds, when he steps through the door into the next room, is that he emerges into what appears to be the aisle of an empty grocery store. When he turns around, there's no sign that he walked through any door at all.

Danny calls out into the seemingly-endless store only to find the hollow echo of his voice...until the PA welcomes him to the store and starts playing calming music. He grabs a shovel, blames it on lucid dreaming, and cautiously walks through the aisles.

When he finds a button to press for help, he slams on it several times. A voice suggests that help is on the way, but the lights turn out, leaving him in a sark space where it appears he is not alone. He follows movement nearby to find a pair of dirty, swinging doors-- an emergency exit-- and blood runs from the gap beneath them.

As Danny tries to bash through the now-locked doors, his son, wearing a mask, stands behind him with a cloaked figure...and then he appears, in the blink of an eye, back in his office.

Answer: In the woods

Danny, back in his home, checks on Roman's room and reminisces before picking up the phone and calling his agent to make an apology. It's long overdue, evidently, especially since his agent confirms that Danny's been missing for three weeks, ever since he last saw him in his kitchen.

Danny asks to meet up at a restaurant in an hour, and when he does he finds that this agent has brought his ex-wife, Riva, and she has horrible news. Roman, she says, is dead; his body was found by the police, a week earlier, in the woods behind the playground on Latham Street. Everyone, she says, has been looking for him to tell him. The police have no leads.

Answer: True

Danny can only muse on the truth behind his son's death, but he vows that it only confirms what he believes about the world-- that it, and Hell, are the same place. He claims he'll find the killer and bring them down himself, even through the others are dwelling on funeral arrangements, and he won't take no for an answer.

When he gets up and heads to the restroom, however, he opens the door into another odd space-- an ornate room with green wallpaper-- with no exit. Forced to proceed into this liminal, otherworldly room, he finds a ladder into a dark hole in a far wall. There is no alternative path. He crawls inside, finds a door, and proceeds onward.

Answer: A turkey

Leaving the green hallways, Danny finds himself in a dark, cement corridor littered with cloaks and white masks. An old TV plays a black-and-white film before he plays with the knobs and turns it to static. Behind him, a light turns on and he finds a lavish feast is splayed out on a table. As he investigates the meal, he doesn't notice the cloaks behind him rise from the floor, taking shape as a mysterious audience.

A glint of gold catches his eye, peeking from the turkey in the middle of the setting, and he reaches in to find his Academy Award. Of course, when he finds the crowd waiting to ambush behind him, he drops and shatters it and attempts to flee, back the way he came. He squeezes through the passages, just barely, and into a narrow corridor. There, he finds his son, masked, once more. Just as the boy removes his face covering, Danny realizes his son is missing his eyes.

Danny is tackled by the mob and reappears back in his office an indeterminate time later.

Answer: Super-8

Staring down at a gun and a bottle of vodka, Danny tries to comprehend what he's been experiencing and decides to turn to an internet search, calling up 'places outside of reality'. His hunt for answers brings him to a website of liminal spaces, and on that site is a video of the exact room with green wallpaper he found himself in. The creator of the video indicates that he believed his visits to be hallucinations...until he started bringing a Super-8 camera into them and captured footage of the halls and the supermarket. It's not anywhere on Earth, he suggests, but it is very real.

Danny decides to reach out.

Answer: Yes

Danny's email doesn't get lost. In fact, its intended recipient, Eli, responds and directs him to meet him. The catch is that Eli is in prison; Danny has to meet him during visitation hours. What they discuss is that anyone who passes into the backrooms is able to phase between realities. People are tethered into their reality and, generally, blocked from passing through to the others. The way of breaking that tether is by breaking the rules that govern their involvement within a species. It's almost like a purgatory.

Eli suggests that Danny is still tied to his human faculties. The liminal space looks the way it does to Danny-- as an office or a supermarket-- to appear tangible.

Danny asks why Eli has been there and he's forced to explain it was because of a woman, Charlotte, who he accidentally hit with his car when he ran a red light one morning. He was texting and driving; he lied about the truth and had to tell the lie every day for the rest of his life. The lie was what broke his tether. It's why he told the truth and faced the music.

Answer: Video camera footage

Danny tries to make sense of the information he's received and as he drives home, he attempts to recall what he may have done to result in his disconnection from reality. He drinks he watches the sunset before returning to Roman's room and dredging up his memories. Picking up a Transformer and digging the dirt from its crevices, he apologizes to the memory of his son, crying on the bed.

It's a quiet night until the sirens start to ring out and the local police flood his driveway, declaring on a megaphone that it's time for Danny to give himself up.

As Danny starts to flicker between his real life and the backrooms, he persists with his lies. Unfortunately, he was caught on video camera. There's no escaping the truth.

Danny rushes to the office, grabs his gun, and opens fire as the police shoot him down.

Answer: Killing his son

As Danny takes a series of gunshots to the chest, he finds himself in a memory of returning home to Riva and Roman, drunk after spending time at a meeting with studio executives. Riva chews him out for not being involved in their lives.

In another memory, Danny attempts to get his latest screenplay written but finds himself overwhelmed by his son's noise and his wife's arguments. He refuses to respond as he walks out on them.

In a final memory, taking Roman to the park, he drags his boy off the swings and strangles him to death before dragging him into the woods and burying him in a shallow grave under the cover of night.

Danny awakens, at last, in a red, padded room, once again back in the backrooms.

Answer: To take the exit door

As Danny reappears in the backrooms he finds an escalator descending into darkness and follows its course downward to find his son at the bottom, seated in the lap of a terrifying creature that bears his voice. Danny begs to be let free, but there's no turning back. No one, Roman says, has come this far down.

Danny says he'll tell the truth as the crowd of cloaked figures comes in. An option lays before him-- he can escape by following the EXIT sign or he can throw himself to the crowd. Instead of fessing up, Danny chooses the exit, avoiding eternal torment.

What he finds in this final backroom is a bland office with wood-panelled walls and old furnishings. A television tells him to take a number. In the meantime, he seats himself. Instead of eternal torment, he will spend an eternal wait, alone.