What are the Backrooms?
This liminal-space analog horror concept is moving mainstream
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Picture this: you have a sense of foreboding as you walk through a yellow hallway. Every hallway you turn down feels like it’s the same one. You turn and turn again but still, you’re nowhere. You’re trapped in liminal space–running from something or running to something, you may never know.
This is what the analog horror concept “The Backrooms” puts its consumers through.
And now, it’s being turned into a movie. A24’s description of the project is only a single sentence: “A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”
So, I wanted to put together a little explainer for you on what, exactly, the Backrooms are before the lore1 moves mainstream.
History of the Backrooms
The backrooms originate from a post on a 4chan board in 2019:
The text reads, “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
The “backrooms” are a form of creepypasta, which according to Wikipedia is a “horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet. The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet.”
(I wrote a whole newsletter about it if you’re still curious).
“Not gonna lie it’s super surprising how a single photo made a whole genre and a very expansive and creative one at fact,” one Reddit user said. Another said, “It’s perplexing, but the Backrooms elicits an intangible and inexplicable feeling I cannot explain.”
Branch-off user-generated content popped up across Reddit and 4chan after that, but one video series in particular launched the Backrooms from its own liminal space and into the public eye.
KanePixel’s Spin-Off Video Series
Indie filmmaker Kane Parsons, known as KanePixels, created a series of Backrooms content in the early 2020s, weaving together foreboding Backrooms videos with an overarching plot.
“A lot of the stuff in the series was coming from a combination of ideas that I had floating around in my head for a while, so most of it is predating the Backrooms idea,” Kane said in an interview with Smosh. “‘The Backrooms’ is more of just a texture to wrap over everything.”
The series revolves around “found footage,” or footage that looks like it was recorded first-hand. Think security camera footage or hand-held camcorders. (The most famous example probably being The Blair Witch Project, though Cloverfield is always what comes to my mind first.)
First-person horror is, in my opinion, the scariest version of horror to watch or play, since you’re forced to assume the role of lead character.
“The world that we see in The Backrooms is some sort of simulation, like a giant video game or the Matrix,” Matthew Patrick explains in a video. “What we know of as ‘the real world’ is the topmost layer of that simulation, but below the surface there’s an infinite procedurally generated world of unused and cut content, stuff that either didn’t fit or just wasn’t good enough to make the cut for the real world.”
I’m going to use my favorite word–liminal.
(Spotify even recommended me a playlist called “liminal” with the description “no-clip out of reality.”)
There’s a lot of lore involving molecular science, but Kane Parson’s essential premise revolves around a research institute called Async that is attempting to create doorways into a pocket universe.
The goal? “To help the world store things,” according to YouTuber MA2. “Yeah, the Backrooms is basically a glorified closet.”
But of course, something goes terribly awry. “Doorways,” seen and unseen, lead into corners of the complex that feel inescapable. This is called “no-clipping,” or the idea of people randomly spawning somewhere in the Backrooms, twisting space and time.
“The Backrooms [are] unstable. It shifts around unless it is attached to something in the real world,” MA2 explained.
And if you’re thinking at this point, “Meh, boring.” Just you wait.
“Yeah, I forgot to mention that this Backroom series also has a skinny mold monster that chases and consumes people, even mimicking human voices to lure them out,” MA2 said.
Upcoming Backrooms Movie
Kane Parsons is directing the film in collaboration with A24, which makes me confident this movie will live up to its reputation. Whether it uses the established lore or adds in new details entirely, you can’t go wrong making an abandoned room look creepy.
“I love environmental horror. I’m very obsessed with the look and feel of spaces, especially hostiles spaces. Just ones that feel that they don’t really make sense,” Kane said in an interview with Smosh.
The film will follow the protagonist Clark and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline. According to MA2, the original 4chan Backrooms picture was supposedly taken in a closing furniture store, which could’ve formed the premise for the movie.
“After a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him,” the IMDb description reads.
Knowing A24, the movie is in good hands.
“They are very generous with the amount of creative control they want to give me on this project,” Kane said in an interview with Smosh.
So why might it be resonating with audiences right now?
A Reddit user said, “To me it’s a hodgepodge of nostalgic sensory-sparking attributes. The fluorescent lights remind me of school and doctors visits as a kid…The pattern on the wallpaper is familiar and retro, enough to make most people think of their grandmother’s home with smoke/stained walls….both represent ‘special’ spaces of retrospection to me. The yellow color is off-putting but jolts me back to that kid-like carefree nature of childhood play spaces. And finally, the endless rooms and entities make me feel small, like a literal kid again, which is also eerily nostalgic.”
After School by Casey Lewis referred to the liminal-space horror genre as “anti-hope core.”
“I think it’s because of the constant unknown. It’s a in-between world. A mix of reality and fiction. A dream-like universe. A world where anything can happen. Unpredictable, unexplored, and inescapable,” a Reddit user described.
There’s something foreboding and inescapable about liminal space that makes us feel enticed yet doomed. Is it possible that maybe, just, maybe we can escape?
Guess we’ll have to watch the movie May 29 to find out.
My weekly roundup:
🎶 What I’m Listening To: Still “STORM II” by Yung Lean
🔎 What I’m Reading: “Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online” by Fortesa Latifi
📱 What I’m Scrolling: I love this wholesome meme format about reframing your negative thoughts
⚠️ What’s On My Radar: How are we feeling about the continued coverage of Gen Z’s cigarette culture? Because people are not pleased with The Cut’s recent thinkpiece on it. “did lung cancer write this?” one commentor asks
Read the full Gen Z Dictionary here.
Lore: The backstory of something