An internet aesthetic
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(Image credit: Kane Pixel)
(Image credit: CGMatter)
(Image credit: h0rrort0k / knoxstars474 / yeetme084)
The Backrooms, along with the overarching Liminal Space, comes under the umbrella of creepy internet ‘aesthetics.’ It’s sister to the and movements, both of which evoke this sense of unease in their own ways. While they focus on (as the names suggest) dreamscapes and childhood trauma, The Backrooms aesthetic focuses on the fear of being lost and forgotten.
It does so by depicting these derelict, indoor liminal spaces, intensely lonely photos that are sometimes edited to contain strange entities. You might call it a modern take on the , a maze-like representation of man’s inner turmoil, complete with the roaming incarnations of our innermost fears.
For a more modern comparison it’s similar in concept to the gargantuan, Escheresque setting of the old Manga series, Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei (as pointed out by ). The manga’s setting, ‘,’ is an immense megastructure that continues to be built as an AI’s approximation of what a city should look like, long after humanity has been all but extinguished. The astronomical sizes of these empty chambers, and nonsensical geometry make them simultaneously awe-inspiring and panic-inducing.
(Image credit: Tsutomu Nihei)
Even the twisted, non-Euclidian city of R’lyeh in H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic Call of Cthulhu could be cited as inspiration for The Backrooms, in its «broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth.»
Plot[]
On July 4th, 1991, Kane Pixels is filming an amateur film with other people. After shooting a certain scene of an ape rounding the corner of a container to scare an unsuspecting man with a hat, the director tells Kane to move back for a wide shot. While moving backwards, Kane phases through the ground and falls into the Backrooms.
Confused and frightened, Kane walks around the maze of yellow walls while he continues to film. While walking down a long and dark corridor, he hears something behind him and looks back. A creature is following him and quickly hides behind a corner, but Kane thinks nothing of it. He continues walking, finding a small sliver in a wall and looks through it. On the other side is another long corridor with a door at the end. He continues and finds a ladder leading up to a small opening in a wall, which he climbs through, but the other side is more of the same. Later, the creature pokes its head around a corner at Kane (who is still exploring), but Kane doesn’t notice.
Eventually, Kane reaches a room with arrows painted on the wall and follows them. They lead him to a drawing of a face on the wall, with several words written underneath. A confused Kane looks at one such line, “DONT MOVE STAY STILL”, through his camera. As he tries to make sense of it, he hears a horribly distorted scream behind him. The creature reveals itself, and starts to chase after him, screaming the entire time. Kane eventually narrowly escapes by jumping down a pit, causing the camera to glitch out.
Kane is now in a basement like area with a large staircase. He goes up the stairs, turning the lights off along the way via a light switch. The stairs lead to a new area of the Backrooms that looks like an empty galley, which he begins exploring. He looks out of a window and sees a courtyard. He passes a dumpster with weird graffiti, with a rope laying next to it. After walking down the entire hallway, he encounters a wide chasm blocking his way, with an infinite number of windows lining the edges. He begins to question his sanity.
Kane goes back and passes several filing cabinets and finds a door with an exit sign on top. The door opens to a stair leading up to another door, but the other door only leads back to the maze of yellow walls. Despite his disappointment and knowledge of the monster, he goes back. While going through another hallway, the monster tosses a chair at the wall on the end. Kane immediately runs away, hearing the monster’s faint howling. He finds a dark room to hide in and observes the strange creature through the opening. He goes in deeper and encounters a steep pit, but as he is preparing to jump, he hears a faint but deep “Hoo” sound. Turning around, he sees the monster, which grabs him but then Kane lifts it in the air and hurts it.
As the monster grabs Kane, he drops the camera and it falls down the pit, causing the footage to glitch out due to hitting the walls. The camera then yes-clips back in reality high up in the sky and falls down and lands on a lawn.
The Backrooms YouTube Series
Kane Pixels
That certainly proved to be the case in Kane Parsons’ first YouTube video. Astonishingly, the sole-creator was only 16 at the time he used Blender to create the photorealistic depiction of a first-person journey through the Backrooms. It’s a cunningly slow build, showing off directorial chops well beyond his years, introducing not only the liminal space, but then daring to add something to it. Something that’s only glimpsed, and yet in its scribbly, intangible form, possesses everything that makes online horror memes so compelling.
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Parsons, under his Kane Pixels moniker, has gone on to create a whole series of videos that develop the mythos of this space, creating a narrative that begins in 1988, where scientific research appears to be exploring methods to create access to the Backrooms through some sort of portal. By 1990, government researchers are entering the Backrooms to begin investigations, resulting in Parsons’ next longer video, an internal informational video about what has been learned so far.
Kane Pixels
Watching through the current total of fifteen videos (some just a couple of minutes, others as long as a quarter of an hour), the influence of both Half-Life and Portal is very clear. In the 14-minute-long Pitfalls, there’s a very deliberate nod to Half-Life’s omnipresent mysterious figure, G-Man, staring down from an observation window at the facility’s entrance to The Backrooms.
Kane Pixels
Over the course of the videos, there’s a very subtly introduced colonization of the yellow corridors, as the researchers build their own facilities within the formerly liminal space, carrying through not just equipment, but creating far more tangible rooms within, seemingly oblivious to the monstrosities that exist beyond.
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What’s so spectacular about this series is the restraint. The videos are all compelling, but more for what they don’t deliver. The very first showed what might exist in the floors above and below the yellow office space—a subject that has literally caused schisms in The Backrooms’ subreddits—but then this is entirely ignored for the next handful. Indeed, the monster doesn’t appear again for a tantalizing number of entries. Parsons is enormously brave for this, showing a maturity missing in most adult directors. Of course, this means when we do get to see more, it means vastly more to us, and is seventy-thousand times more scary. And oh wow, does that come to fruition in Found Footage #2:
Kane Pixels
The Backrooms Movie
With news that a movie is set to be made, set in The Backrooms, this year, that’s perhaps something to be deeply hesitant about. Creepypasta tends to work online because of its unfixed state. There are no time limits, no fixed locations, and it sits alongside all the other information in the universe. Attempting to capture such things, and confine them to 90 minutes of film, more often than not defies the very reasons the fiction was ever effective. 2018’s Slender Man might have been a terrible film for any number of reasons, but it also might never have been able to not be a terrible film. (Meanwhile, 2018’s The Rake, and 2019’s The Soviet Sleep Experiment slipped so far under radars that neither has received a single review from any major site.)
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However, when it comes to The Backrooms, there’s more cause for hope. While it certainly has origins in that same nonlinear online space, it’s a myth that came into its own via Parsons’ YouTube work. It really found its feet as film, and so does seem more likely to lend itself to the format. And in a more peculiar detail, despite the serious names attached to the project, the 17-year-old YouTuber is set to direct.
This a film coming from A24, who are currently riding high on the Oscars success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, alongside production companies Atomic Monster (M3gan, Mortal Kombat), Chernin Entertainment (New Girl, Luther: The Fallen Sun) and 21 Laps Entertainment (Shadow and Bone, Stranger Things). Stranger Things producers Shaun Levy and Dan Cohen are on board. Saw writer James Wan is also producing. And as previously mentioned, DMZ’s creator and writer, Roberto Patino, is set to script it. Should the production successfully go ahead, this is a movie from a who’s who of horror, giving a teenager a chance to direct his own creation.
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If the film could be presented similarly to the YouTube videos, as a compilation of found footage, scientific archival tape constructed into something suggesting a narrative, then there’s every hope that The Backrooms could survive the transition that few creepypastas have before them.
Beyond The Backrooms
The joy of creations like The Backrooms is they don’t “belong” to anyone. Beginning in the anonymity of the internet’s most fetid image boards, then leaking out in various directions via Reddit, YouTube, Tiktok and so on, there’s no outright owner to start imposing restrictions, flinging copyrights, or perhaps most interestingly, dictating the direction in which the myth can head. Like a playground rhyme, such memes spread virally, maintaining their core elements while expounded upon by whomever may pass it on next.
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The Backrooms is especially interesting in this respect, given how many directions it’s taken. Dozens of games, with inevitably dozens more to come, are one channel. Another is Parsons’ video series leading to what seems inevitably to be a movie franchise. Then there’s the so-called “liminal spaces” movement, where the concept of uncanny reality, empty transitional spaces, is its own phenomenon.
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Tiktoker THIS IS FRANK is creating their own peculiar take on the potential of The Backrooms, while ChildhoodDreams takes the concept more broadly, pairing uncanny photographs with distorted music to excellent effect.
And The Backrooms’ influence is spreading into the wider public consciousness, with TV shows like Severance citing it as a source of inspiration for its unsettling office spaces.
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While Slender Man may have far greater public recognition, and creepypasta-adjacent horrors like Poppy Playtime may have inexplicably found their way into children’s toy stores, The Backrooms is likely having a far greater influence overall. It’s just, until you accidentally fall into it for yourself, you might never know it’s there.
Why Are The Backrooms So Scary?
So why? What is it about this yellow, empty office space that is powerful enough to motivate such creativity?
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“For the general population the Backrooms instills the fear of the unknown,” says James Karagiannis, the developer behind indie studio Mistcloud Games, and creator of the excellent Backrooms Exploration. “ sparks their curiosity as it’s something so simple yet very unsettling. The Backrooms are also comforting to some people, including me, as I love the feeling of liminal spaces.”
In a genre filled with overtly horrifying figures, like Momo, Slenderman and Jeff the Killer, or urban myth staples like unexplored roads and videos that curse the viewer, The Backrooms stands out for its apparent innocence. Where just still images of Momo could give a child nightmares for weeks, a bland yellow space could be scrolled past without even being noticed. But it seems it is its very emptiness that gives it so much power. It is sometimes claimed to be the origins of the recent #liminalspace meme, the latest name given to the eerie aesthetic of abandoned locations.
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Liminal spaces, named for their appearance of being transitional, in-between places, are scenes observed out of context of their visual narrative, without beginnings or endings. Empty, stretching corridors, or abandoned hotel foyers, creating an uncanny valley sensation when viewed. The Backrooms achieves this so well, not just because its void offices represent a space we’re used to seeing in the context of business, with furnishings, equipment, and most of all, people, but because everything about it is slightly wrong. The walls are wallpapered, not painted; the doorways have no doors, and are too wide; some walls don’t reach the ceiling while others do; and the fluorescent ceiling lights are spaced incorrectly.
There is, in just that initial image, a wrongness. But at the same time, unlike Momo or Slenderman, The Backrooms aren’t the punchline. That liminality, that space between spaces, implies something ongoing, incomplete, and ultimately that gives our imaginations so much more to work with. Sure, Momo’s scary as fuck to look at, but that’s the scare. In The Backrooms, the scare is still to come.
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Context is key
Much like The Backrooms, the three examples above intersect at a kind of uncanny valley of place. Rather than the uncanniness present in the almost human faces of AI robots, the Backrooms phenomenon similarly takes our understanding of places as being designed for human use and enjoyment, and strips it of almost all traces of humanity.
This omission of human interaction is what many people attribute their discomfort to when browsing liminal spaces, since without human interaction to give these spaces context they’re simply shells, architectural cadavers disconnected from all that we are. A smattering of bogeymen doesn’t go amiss, either.
For me, at least, The Backrooms is a frightening look at the collective hive-mind. One that’s littered with this kind of macabre hope. It seems to say to me «Let’s freak each other out and, at the same time, revel in the fact that we are not, in reality, hopelessly lost.»
Контекст – ключ
Как и в случае с The Backrooms, три приведенных выше примера пересекаются в своеобразной долине необычного места. Вместо того, чтобы неясностей, присутствующих в почти Феномен Backrooms, как и феномен “человеческих лиц” роботов с искусственным интеллектом, берет наше представление о местах, предназначенных для использования и наслаждения людьми, и лишает их почти всех следов человечности. Это просто оболочки, архитектурные трупы, оторванные от всего, чем мы являемся. Именно с этим отсутствием человеческого взаимодействия многие люди связывают свой дискомфорт при посещении лиминальных пространств, поскольку без взаимодействия с людьми, придающего этим пространствам контекст контекст это просто оболочки, архитектурные трупы, оторванные от всего, чем мы являемся. Не помешает и россыпь “гопников”. По крайней мере, для меня “Задние комнаты” – это пугающий взгляд на коллективный разум. Он наполнен подобными мрачными надеждами. Он как бы говорит мне: “Давайте напугаем друг друга и в то же время порадуемся тому, что на самом деле мы не безнадежно потеряны”. Подпишитесь, чтобы получать лучшие материалы недели и выгодные игровые предложения, отобранные редакторами. К черту спорт, Кэти предпочитает наблюдать за борьбой Intel, AMD и Nvidia. Будучи одержимой компьютерами и графикой на протяжении трех десятилетий, она изучала игровое искусство и дизайн до уровня магистратуры в университете и с тех пор уже два года занимается разъяснением технологий и науки – довольно саркастично. Ее можно встретить восхищающейся достижениями в области искусственного интеллекта, бьющейся над интересными проектами для Raspberry Pi, проповедующей кибербезопасность, вздыхающей над полупроводниками и таращащейся на последние обновления GPU. Она возглавляет поход за контентом PCG Steam Deck, терпеливо ожидая возможности загрузить свое сознание в облако.
The Birth Of The Backrooms Creepypasta
The Backrooms’ growth into one of the most inspired internet-born creepypastas has been slow and steady. After that initial image board posting, it was over a year before it would appear again, this time once more on /x/, but as part of a thread asking for “disquieting images.” According to Know Your Meme, another anonymous poster then responded with a short narrative describing the image. It read,
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A couple of days later, another user posts the image and quote together, which was then pasted to Reddit. It does the rounds over there, then onto wikis, and then after a week receives an animated video posted to Twitter (on an account that has since been deleted). By this point, the idea is embedded in the internet’s consciousness, but remains pretty obscure. In March 2020, a Tiktok video that seemingly just uses previous animated footage and the same 4chan quote goes viral, currently sitting on 2.1 million views. But it’s not until January 7 of 2022 that the creepypasta becomes a phenomenon. That happens when Kane Pixels (aka Parsons) posts his first video set in the Backrooms.
It’s fair to say that The Backrooms stepped out of obscure internet corners and into more mainstream channels thanks to Parsons’ video. Between 2019 and 2022, Steam saw a total of four games released based on the meme. Come May 2022, following the video’s viral success, the floodgates opened, beginning with The Backroom Project, followed by at least another 41 games in the year since.
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Screenshot: Kane Pixels / YouTube
What Are the Backrooms?
The heart of the film is the exploration of liminal spaces. There is actually a community on Reddit dedicated to exploring them. That’s where I learned that liminal space is a physical representation of «the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing.»
The Backrooms started as a «creepypasta» a few years ago when 4chan users created a story for a creepy photo of a yellow-tinged room. Since then, the idea of this strange, endless space has haunted horror fans.
In Kane’s short, there’s a new monster that reminded me of The Babadook or Slender Man—something you don’t really need mythos for, it just is terrifying as hell to see. I swear it felt like my heart was beating out of my chest for the hour after I watched.
What Kane has done with his short film, which has actually expanded into a series of shorts, has added a layer of worldbuilding as backstory for this internet legend. In his version of the Backrooms, the liminal space is explained as a government experiment gone awry. The fictional «Async Research Facility» was trying to create an infinite, liminal location to solve the problem of limited storage and living spaces in the 1980s, but something went horribly wrong.
This worldbuilding creates almost an interactive element as viewers are taken through strange clips and images that reveal bits and pieces of this imagined alternate history. The creation of the Backrooms, for instance, «caused» the real San Fransisco earthquake of 1989—an idea suggested in one of Kane’s unlisted videos titled «collateral.mov.»
It’s clear that Kane is not only a talented director, but knows how to hook an audience with engaging storytelling, too.
This online series is being updated now, so you still have a chance to catch up and learn more alongside other viewers.
Did you watch? Was it the best horror short you’ve seen in years?
Are you Kane Parsons? We love you, hit us up to be on the podcast! Reach out!
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Происхождение The Backrooms
(Image credit: Anonymous 4chan user) 12 мая 2019 г. Приведенное выше изображение было обнаружено на форуме 4chan /x/, предположительно, это фотография, сделанная в заброшенной части рабочего места Анонима. С этого момента “Задние комнаты” начали набирать обороты и разветвляться как поджанр воздушных и ностальгических “Лиминальных пространств”, которые с 2010 г. прокладывали себе путь в интернет-эстетике. Вскоре на основе уже устоявшейся игровой терминологии возникла главная идея: если вы случайно “выскочите” из реальности, то окажетесь в The Backrooms. Началось все с крипипасты, а затем тенденция переросла в масштабную краудсорсинговую программу по созданию мира с исчерпывающей вики в придачу. В последнее время известный ютубер Кейн Пиксель начал выкладывать видеоролики, снятые в стиле “Backrooms found footage”, что привело к своеобразному возрождению Backrooms. В настоящее время история игры состоит из леденящих душу видеороликов и теорий о том, кто создал и контролирует Backrooms, а также бесчисленные скопления уровней, подуровней и “аномальных” уровней. Каждый уровень уникален, и каждый из них призван вызвать страх, ностальгию и неопределенность, которыми славится Backrooms. Вики-записи в игре варьируются от жутких до откровенно непонятных, и есть даже бестиарий “Существ”, который можно изучить, если вам не хочется спать сегодня ночью. Это лабиринт, представляющий внутреннюю сумятицу человека, в котором бродят воплощения наших самых сокровенных страхов. В книге также описаны группы, населяющие различные зоны, с которыми поклонники Backrooms будут ассоциировать себя, включая M.E.G. (Major Explorer Group), которая стремится “помочь странникам и создать правительство в Backrooms, чтобы прекратить анархию и хаос”. Материалы о “Задних комнатах” появляются в Интернете повсеместно. Мне больше всего нравятся адаптации “Тиктоков”, в которых люди приближают случайное место на Google Earth, чтобы обнаружить вход в “Задние комнаты”. Было даже создано несколько игр, посвященных этому феномену, в том числе одна, в которую можно играть в VR. Но эта игра не вызывает у меня доверия. Ужасы в VR – это не для меня, но особенно мне не нравится идея полного погружения в эти постоянные желтоватые мучения.