What are the Backrooms?
The Backrooms are a horror story and shared fictional world born on the internet. They are said to be a strange space you can end up in if you are unlucky enough to “noclip” out of reality: an empty, office-like maze of rooms with dingy yellow wallpaper, the smell of damp carpet and the constant hum of fluorescent lights, stretching on forever.
It began with a single image
It all started in 2019 with a photo of a yellow-walled room posted to a thread on the anonymous forum 4chan asking users to post disquieting images that just feel “off.” Another user added a caption saying that if you are not careful and noclip out of reality, you end up in the Backrooms, and the story spread rapidly. “Noclip” refers to a game glitch that lets you pass through walls.
Levels and entities
Many people then added to the lore, building a vast collaborative world in which the Backrooms have countless levels, “Level 0,” “Level 1” and so on, each harboring dangerous “entities.” In 2022, a found-footage-style video series posted on YouTube by the young filmmaker Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels) became a huge hit, and a film adaptation was later announced.
Liminal spaces and strange nostalgia
The popularity of the Backrooms rests on the feeling of “liminal spaces”: places such as an empty shopping mall at night, a school corridor or a swimming pool, where people ought to be but no one is, with an atmosphere of unease mixed with nostalgia. It has something in common with Japanese stories of wandering into deserted worlds, such as the man of time and space and Kisaragi Station.
