HR Sent Us To The Backrooms
A corporate team-building exercise becomes Backrooms horror, with HR still trying to make it sound like a benefit.
Mandatory fun, now in an infinite nightmare
What happens when a corporate escape-room activity ends up in the Backrooms? This HeyItsEdgar sketch puts three coworkers into a workplace team-building exercise that has moved well beyond its usual level of discomfort. HR is still treating the situation as an opportunity for motivation and collaboration.
The company cannot provide the rewards employees would actually want, so it offers a different incentive: survive the activity and earn a half-Friday off. That small corporate benefit becomes part of the contrast between the scale of the nightmare and the language management uses to sell it.
Corporate language meets Backrooms horror
The setup brings together an overconfident manager, a new hire who is already regretting the job, and an employee determined to get the promised time off. Motivational management advice is dropped into a setting that is already unsettling, giving the usual corporate clichés an absurdly inappropriate backdrop.
The sketch combines workplace satire with the Backrooms horror premise. Its focus is the feeling that even an impossible nightmare might become more frustrating if HR insisted on running it as a company retreat. Watch the full video above for the coworkers’ attempt to navigate their mandatory team-building experience.
