The Backrooms

Overview

On May 12, 2019, someone posted a photo on 4chan’s /x/ (paranormal) board. The image showed a room — or rather, a space that was technically a room but felt deeply, inexplicably wrong. Yellowed wallpaper. Fluorescent lights buzzing at a frequency that you could almost hear through the screen. Damp, stained carpet. No windows. No obvious exits. The kind of space you might find behind a door you weren’t supposed to open in an office building that was being demolished.

The accompanying text was brief: “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.”

That’s it. One photo. One paragraph. From this, the internet built one of its most elaborate collaborative horror mythologies — complete with hundreds of distinct “levels,” taxonomy systems for the entities that inhabit them, detailed survival guides, lore wikis with thousands of pages, and visual media so sophisticated that a Hollywood studio came calling.

The Backrooms aren’t a conspiracy theory in the traditional sense. Nobody is covering up the existence of an infinite yellow office dimension. But they live in the same cultural space as conspiracy theories — they emerge from the same internet communities, spread through the same channels, and for a surprising number of people, the line between “this is a cool horror concept” and “what if this is actually real?” gets blurry in the middle of the night.

The Concept

Level 0: The Original

The foundational Backrooms concept is elegant in its simplicity. “Noclipping” — a term borrowed from video game culture, where disabling collision detection lets you pass through walls into the empty space behind the game world — is repurposed as a metaphor for accidentally slipping through the fabric of reality.

You noclip. You’re suddenly in the Backrooms. There is no obvious way back. The space extends in every direction — identical rooms, identical hallways, identical fluorescent lights. The carpet is slightly damp. The air tastes stale. You are alone, and yet you feel certain that you are not alone.

The horror is not in a monster or a jumpscare. It’s in the space itself. The infinite, meaningless, identical space. The Backrooms weaponize the kind of rooms you’ve walked through a thousand times without thinking — office hallways, hotel corridors, the back areas of shopping malls — and ask: what if you could never leave?

The Expansion

The internet being the internet, the original concept was immediately expanded:

Levels: The community created a taxonomy of Backrooms levels, each with distinct characteristics:

• Level 0: The original — infinite yellow rooms
• Level 1: An enormous industrial warehouse, darker and more dangerous
• Level 2: Dark maintenance tunnels with pipes and steam
• Level 3: An electrical station with active wiring
• Levels continue into the hundreds, becoming increasingly abstract and hostile

Entities: Various creatures inhabit the Backrooms:

• Hounds: Fast, aggressive creatures that hunt in packs
• Skin-Stealers: Entities that take on human appearance
• Smilers: Floating, grinning faces in the darkness
• The Thing on Level 7: An enormous creature in a flooded level
• Dozens more, each with detailed behavioral profiles

The M.E.G. (Major Explorer Group): A fictional organization of survivors who have mapped the Backrooms, established safe zones, and documented entities. The wiki writes about the M.E.G. with the same clinical tone that a real organization might use, which adds to the immersive quality.

No-clip points: Specific real-world locations and conditions where noclipping is more likely. Abandoned buildings, certain types of stairwells, moments of extreme exhaustion or dissociation.

Kane Pixels and the Visual Revolution

In January 2022, a 16-year-old filmmaker named Kane Parsons (working under the name Kane Pixels) uploaded a found-footage style video called “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube. The video depicted someone falling through the floor of a building and landing in the Backrooms, rendered with photorealistic CGI.

The video was stunning. The lighting, the texture of the carpet, the movement of the camera — it looked real. It went massively viral, accumulating over 50 million views. Parsons followed it with a series of videos that built an elaborate narrative around a fictional research institute (Async) that had discovered the Backrooms in the 1980s.

The quality was so exceptional that A24 Films — the studio behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Everything Everywhere All at Once — signed Parsons to develop a feature-length Backrooms film. A teenager making horror videos in his bedroom got a Hollywood deal. The internet does occasionally work as advertised.

Why It Resonates

Liminal Space Psychology

The Backrooms tap into a real psychological phenomenon that internet culture has labeled “liminal spaces” — transitional or threshold spaces (hallways, waiting rooms, parking garages, empty malls) that feel eerie when encountered without their usual human activity.

Psychologists have identified several reasons these spaces unsettle us:

Kenopsia: A term coined by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows for the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place usually bustling with people but now empty. An office building at 3 AM. A school during summer. A mall after closing. These spaces feel wrong because our brains expect human activity and its absence triggers a low-level alarm.

Spatial expectation violation: Our brains constantly model the spaces around us, predicting what we’ll find around corners and behind doors. Liminal spaces violate these predictions — they’re too uniform, too empty, too infinite. The resulting cognitive dissonance manifests as unease.

The uncanny valley of architecture: Just as faces that are almost but not quite human trigger revulsion, spaces that are almost but not quite normal — slightly wrong proportions, slightly off lighting, slightly uncanny repetition — trigger architectural unease.

Evolutionary alert systems: Open, featureless spaces with poor sightlines and no obvious resources or shelter would have been genuinely dangerous for our ancestors. The Backrooms trigger threat-assessment circuits that evolved for actual survival.

The Video Game Connection

The noclip metaphor resonates because anyone who has played video games has experienced the disconcerting feeling of breaking through a wall and seeing the empty void behind the game world — the raw geometry, the missing textures, the space that exists but wasn’t meant to be seen. The Backrooms translate this digital experience into physical reality, asking: what if the world you see is just the rendered surface, and behind it is something vast, empty, and not quite right?

Post-Internet Horror

The Backrooms represent a distinctly 21st-century form of horror. Previous generations had campfire stories, urban legends, and creepypasta. The Backrooms are something new: collaborative, multimedia, open-source horror — a mythology built by thousands of anonymous contributors across dozens of platforms, with no single author, no canon, and no end point.

This mirrors how conspiracy theories develop: collaboratively, iteratively, with each contributor adding their own details to a shared framework. The difference is that Backrooms contributors (mostly) know it’s fiction. The overlap with conspiracy culture comes from the small but real number of people who begin to wonder if the fiction might be describing something genuine.

The “What If It’s Real” Contingent

Every sufficiently elaborate fiction acquires believers. The Backrooms are no exception:

• Dissociative experiences: People who have experienced depersonalization or derealization — psychological states where reality feels unreal or dreamlike — sometimes describe the experience in terms eerily similar to Backrooms lore. This creates a feedback loop where the fiction validates the experience and the experience validates the fiction.

• Dream reports: Some people report dreams featuring Backrooms-like environments and interpret these as evidence that the Backrooms exist in some psychic or dimensional space accessible through altered states of consciousness.

• Liminal space encounters: Real experiences in creepy, empty, monotonous buildings feel more significant when you have a framework for interpreting them. A late-night walk through an empty hotel corridor becomes a near-miss with noclipping.

• The simulation theory connection: If we live in a simulation (see: Simulation Theory), then noclipping isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a description of what might happen if the simulation glitches. The Backrooms become the debug space behind the rendered world.

None of this constitutes evidence that the Backrooms are real. But it illustrates how fiction becomes belief when it resonates with genuine psychological experiences and existing conspiratorial frameworks.

Cultural Impact

A New Folklore

The Backrooms represent something genuinely novel in the history of storytelling: internet-native collaborative mythology. Like the SCP Foundation before it, the Backrooms demonstrate that anonymous internet communities can create fictional universes of remarkable depth and coherence — mythology for the digital age, created by and for the terminally online.

The Liminal Space Aesthetic

The Backrooms catalyzed a broader aesthetic movement. “Liminal space” became a recognizable visual category on social media, with dedicated subreddits, Instagram accounts, and TikTok feeds sharing images of empty pools, deserted malls, nighttime parking garages, and after-hours office buildings. The aesthetic has influenced photography, game design, and film.

The A24 Pipeline

Kane Parsons’ progression from bedroom filmmaker to Hollywood director is a case study in how internet culture feeds the entertainment industry. The Backrooms film — if and when it arrives — will be the first major motion picture directly adapted from a 4chan post.

In Popular Culture

• Kane Pixels’ YouTube series (2022-present) — 50M+ views on the original video
• A24 Films development deal for a feature-length Backrooms movie
• The Backrooms Wiki — thousands of pages of collaborative fiction
• Multiple Backrooms video games on Steam and other platforms
• Referenced in mainstream shows and by mainstream creators
• The “liminal spaces” aesthetic movement it spawned
• Parodies and homages across TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms
• SCP Foundation crossover content

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• IlluminatiPirate (anonymous). Original 4chan /x/ post, May 12, 2019.
• The Backrooms Wiki. Community-maintained lore encyclopedia.
• Kane Pixels. YouTube series, 2022-present.
• Beck, Julie. “Liminal Spaces and the Architecture of Unease.” The Atlantic, 2022.
• Various analyses of internet horror and collaborative fiction.
• Koenig, John. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster, 2021. (Coined “kenopsia.”)

Related Theories

• Simulation Theory — The reality-as-simulation framework that contextualizes noclipping
• Mandela Effect — Another theory about glitches in reality
• Shadow People — Entities perceived during altered states