The Backrooms beyond Digital Folklore 

The concept of The Backrooms originated as an anonymous post to 4Chan’s /x/ Paranormal board on May 14th, 2019, a combination of aspects of popular horror media formats Creepy Pasta and Cursed Images.2 The short body of text introducing the concept 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. 

This text combined with the image seen above in Figure 1 of an empty interior space with yellow carpet, wallpaper, fluorescent lights, and no windows, furniture, or any signs of human presence aside from the infrastructure itself having once been intended for human use. The concept of The Backrooms started as an obscure image/text post and over the past 5 years, has transformed into a community of thousands participating in the creation and expansion of The Backrooms as a massive world-building project. The emergence of The Backrooms has major implications for the development and construction of digital imagined worlds, not made by a single person, but by a mass of creators who are writing lore, developing canon, creating images, found footage videos, explainer videos, TikTok clips, Wikis, Discord Servers, Subreddits, and more. This section will trace the origins of The Backrooms concept, through a systematic analysis of its depictions in popular media alongside the limited use of the term in academic literature, setting the stage for the primary argument, that The Backrooms are an ‘organic virtual world’. 

I contend that The Backrooms are a unique digital phenomenon that is worth academic attention due to its rapid expansion and the multi-faceted media elements that partially align it with alternative reality game (ARG), the analog horror genre, collaborative fiction community, and virtual world building. The multiple fictive elements that The Backrooms draw on, alongside a sense of distorted realism, result in a unique digital environment with an expandible set of possibilities and institutionalization of unique creative practices. The popularization of The Backrooms through the viral YouTube video “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” by creator Kane Pixels, which has accumulated over 63 million views since being published on January 7th, 2022, has partially elevated the concept from a subcultural genre to a widely recognized popular culture reference, along with its “memeification”3 at the hands of hundreds of creators generating ironic, humerous, and ambivalent depictions of The Backrooms. 

The Backrooms are premised on a sense of eerie familiarity; the recognition of spatial elements, such as color schemes, objects, and audio-visual stimuli. The image that is widely recognized to be emblematic of the Backrooms is described by Manning Patston,’ in their article published in ▲Happy Magazine on 8/23/2021, as, “an image of a tilted, yellow hallway with an intensely disquieting nature.” This image has come to be known as “Level 0” in the Backrooms internet lore, which Patston traces back to an anonymous 2019 4chan post from a ‘cursed images’ thread, simply captioned as “The Backrooms”, to which the original creepy pasta text was added shortly after. Patston describes the Backrooms as an “a terrifying and oddly nostalgic realm” existing in an “uncanny valley,” that is “haunted” and invokes a sense of “fearful nostalgia” that leaves visitors feeling “existential, hollow, and terrified.” We will see many of these descriptors repeated as we move forward in this analysis and will address each concept in turn. Throughout the rest of the essay, I will utilize and expand upon Patston’s concept of ‘fearful nostalgia,’ to address the affective and subversive potentials of The Backrooms in the final section. 

Patston also outlines the basic understanding of how one enters The Backrooms through ‘no-clipping’ out of reality. No-clipping is a video game concept phenomena that can be achieved by running into a specific wall or performing a movement at a particular location, allowing a player’s avatar can glitch outside the game map into unrendered, indeterminate space. In The Backrooms lore, baseline reality takes the form of the video game, and the Backrooms exist behind the rendered facade. Patston explains that today, “noclip has a broader context. It refers to glitches (real-life or digital) in which the walls of reality are torn down, even if only for a split second.” Patston also poses the question of whether The Backrooms are real, taking the novel approach of refusal to confirm or deny their existence and stating that there are real-world examples of finding oneself within The Backrooms, such as “finding a backrooms creature or doppelganger, hovering planes, shadowless images, and other creepy mishaps that make you question reality.” They conclude with a brief explanation of the cultural influences they believe The Backrooms are premised upon, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Jordan Peele’s Us, escape rooms, the legend of Herobrine in Minecraft, and any “other unsettling appearances that just feel… off.” The ‘just off’ feeling is pervasive in the subculture around The Backrooms and will reappear as a descriptor many times throughout this paper.  

RAMCPU, an anonymoujs writer, philosopher, and media theorist, picks up where Patston leaves off, in his article in Sabukaru Online on 12/24/21, positing that The Backrooms are far from being actual places that can be visited within the context of our reality, claiming that image of Level 0, “is actually a photoshopped image of a real office space, of which, the windows were removed, and the sepia tone was added in post.” The images supposed from The Backrooms are, according to RAMCPU, a creation of “those in the know on Liminality.”  The decontextualized use of the concept of liminality in counter-cultural internet spaces is what Karl Emil Koch describes in his article as “The Cult Following of Liminal Space,” which he characterizes as diverging significantly (though not fully) from Victor Turner’s use of the term in anthropology. Pertaining to its use in relation to The Backrooms, Koch characterizes liminality as “a sense of unsettling familiarity, emptiness, and often found in seemingly abandoned or transitional areas, like empty hallways, deserted parking lots, or dimly lit corridors; essentially, places that feel ‘in-between’ and somewhat uncanny.” Key to this expanded understanding of liminality is an important question posed by RAMCPU in his article, “Why the fascination with haunted isolation and vanishing from reality into dimensions more mundane?” RAMCPU answers his own question, arguing that “as humanity moves more into the era of digital personality and remote work, as retail and public spaces dissolve, the fascination about the liminal, offbeat and unexplainable places of our dreams can now finally be realized.” While RAMCPU makes clear in the opening paragraphs of the article that they do not believe that The Backrooms actually exist or are accessible, they posit that The Backrooms are a cultural reconsideration of the multiverse, or the possibility that there are an infinite number of alternative realities that are accessible, or at least visible, at obscure times and places. RAMCPU’s theory about the possibility of the Backrooms being a representation of inter-dimensionality, seems to get mixed in with the idea that the lived experiences of humanity are a simulation and that the Backrooms represent a “collective consciousness that is recreating the inconsistencies of its own existential conundrum.”    

RAMCPU’s connection between inter-dimensionality and Simulation Theory is a stretch but their contribution is nonetheless crucial because it recognizes a collectively held understanding that ‘baseline reality’ is rapidly deteriorating. The physical space of social familiarity have been emptied, left in a state of eerie vacancy. RAMCPU concludes by arguing that “we have arrived in an era where individuals find common ground between one another based on the notion of haunted spaces; for us, spaces are memorable not because of its occupants, but the lack thereof.” Spaces that were once full and buzzing with human activity have been emptied of that activity, a phenomenon that is emblematic of the tearing of social fabric, the decay of physical spaces of a society in decline. Spaces that held cultural significance and were sites of social connection, are now emptied of those qualities.  

The descriptions presented by RAMCPU, while failing to adequately discuss liminality, do conjure a concomitance with the presence/absence dialectic presented by Katherine Hayles in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), which she argues has been surpassed by a pattern/randomness dialectic that signifies the transcendence of digital information over the material form. In The Backrooms we encounter digital depictions of the material form, where the depictions signify the presence/absence dialectic, while their digital format exists within the pattern/randomness dialectic. These relationships will be explored in greater depth in later iterations of this project.  

In their article on the Backrooms, published in Pop🗲Dust on 07/13/2021, Eden Arielle Gordon builds on Patston account, shifting their focus to the development of a subcultural social commentary and practice of The Backrooms. For Gordon, the most important actor is not The Backrooms themselves, but those who have participated in the expansion of its ‘worldness’. Gordon described the rapidly increasing interest in The Backrooms as “users began posting other images of strange, eerie, featureless places such as empty swimming pools or peculiar basements. The Backrooms found their way to YouTube and TikTok and “quickly spread across the Internet, spawning meme groups and odd conspiracy theories. Then things got weird.” Gordon asserts that “the Backrooms have spawned a massive mythology almost as labyrinthine and complex as the rooms themselves.” Gordon also references the growth of sub-subcultures of the Backrooms, particularly  those obsessed with liminality, a concept that they do not explore in detail, aside from offering the insight that, “Perhaps what makes the Backrooms so eerie, so dark, and so claustrophobic is the idea that one might be stuck in a liminal space, forever trapped in a place designed to be ephemeral and impermanent…”   

Gordon also offers a cultural explanation for the emergence and growth of The Backrooms, the most important of which is their connection to Freud’s concept of the Uncanny. The application of this concept depicts The Backrooms as “not something foreign or mysterious, but rather as something that was once familiar but then became repressed and later reemerged in a distorted way.” Freud approaches the Uncanny as a marginal area of aesthetics that “belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread,” arousing feelings of repulsion and distress. (Freud, 123) Familiarity is key to Freud’s theory, in which “the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” (Freud, 124) The Uncanny is a species of the familiar, though not the enjoyable, comfortable kind of familiarity, but one that is eerie, frightening, and distorted.  

This tracks with popular understandings of The Backrooms looking familiar, but “just...off” enough to compel feelings of fright and discomfort. But liminality is not reducible to the uncanny, a claim that is militantly defended throughout the fractured community. It is something else that often defies candid verbal or textual explanation, something that has the potential to generate affective experiences that go beyond the uncanny, beyond nostalgia, into a separate phase, space, or state of consciousness. Emerging research from Slovakian neurologists Ján Necpál and Marcela Šoltýsová raises the possibility that over exposure to The Backrooms may contribute to the development of “functional movement disorders” and a form of derealization called “reality shifting” in which the brain simulates the experience of jumping back and forth between The Backrooms and baseline reality (Necpál & Šoltýsová, 3647-9). 

Freud famously extends this vision of the uncanny to the human form, citing wax figures, hyper realistic dolls, mannequins, and even epileptic fits as arousing “vague notions of automatic – mechanical – processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person.” (Freud, 135)  The concept of the uncanny was advanced in the field of robotics by Masahiro Mori in his paper “The Uncanny Valley” (1970) which hypothesized a relationship between an object’s degree of resemblance to a human and a human’s emotional response to that object, suggesting that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. Mori’s Uncanny Valley hypothesis was recently extended beyond humanoid forms and applied to a theorized “uncanny valley of physical places” by Diel and Lewis (2022).  

While the uncanny valley of physical spaces  (Diel and Lewis 2022) will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter, Gordon captures the essence of some key aspects of their argument, describing The Backrooms as uncanny in the sense that they are “spaces that were once full of life, but in their eerie reemergence in some bleak parallel dimension, it seems certain that something awful has happened there — something traumatic and unthinkable, something that could easily manifest as a monstrous entity in more imaginative minds,” (Diel & Lewis, 7). The distortion of spaces with familiar features and patterns generates a relationship between realism and uncanniness “mediated by increased distortion sensitivity for stimuli that are closer to fully realistic,” (Diel and Lewis, 2). When these physical spaces, which are described as “liminal” by Diel & Lewis, simultaneously become more realistic and uncanny, the degree to which they are recognized as a depiction of a reality that is not, but is remarkably close to being our own, increases.   

If the reality depicted is not our own, but evokes feelings of familiarity and dread, it could either be a depiction of an alternative reality that runs parallel to ours, “detached from reality” or as a near-future imaginary of “Post-Apocalyptic Residue,” (Gordon). An important connection is made between Freud’s argument that the uncanny is a byproduct of our individual fears of death, and Heidegger’s conception that the Uncanny is “related to fears of the future, proposing that angst or dread is a way of "being in the world.” However, this connection never advances past the phenomena of individual death toward Heidegger's primary point about collective social death as being even more terrifying than individual death. This brings up a pair of crucial questions that will guide the rest of this work: are The Backrooms a creative medium through which people try to make sense of the future in a time of extreme uncertainty and societal decay? How can a concerted examination of The Backrooms as a unique digital phenomenon provide us with a better understanding of how the future is perceived by a specific generational demographic with which the concept deeply resonates?  

Gordon also contributes an impressive section on the “Hauntology of the Backrooms” drawing on Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher to argue that “The Backrooms are also distinctly haunted. In addition to being haunted by the ghosts of the past, they are haunted by the ghosts of lost futures.” The invocation of Hauntology brings the theoretical discussion back to the dialectic of presence/absence where, "’the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.’ One could describe the Backrooms as neither being nor not-being. Theoretically, they are places, but they are also the inverse of place, both literally and conceptually. They are there and not there at all, and in that, they embody the glitchiness of existing in a human body, and specifically in our precarious modern era.” (Gordon) In this sense, The Backrooms are situated between existence and nonexistence, presence, and absence, in that they exist and have affect via digital depictions, but are indeterminate, existing outside of history because they are not actual places, they are the spaces of a future that may or may not be impossible, lost to time, or increasingly inevitable.  

Throughout the popular media articles that have addressed The Backrooms, there is a tension between whether they are “real” or not. This tension comes from a variety of sources, but the primary contradiction is that many depictions of The Backrooms are of existing places or could be convincingly passed off as places existing in base-line reality. In their article in the online journal The Ghost in my Machine, Lucia splits the article up into staggard sections that describe The Backrooms from “Within the Mythos” and “Outside the Mythos,” underscoring a perceived separation between what is real and what is not. Lucia frames The Backrooms a meme that evolved into a collaborative fiction project, with the qualifier that “The Backrooms themselves don’t actually exist, but when you’re engaging with them and their extensive mythos...it’s best to play by what I generally think of as NoSleep rules: While you’re here, everything is real, even if it isn’t...the Backrooms may not exist as a real, physical place, but you’ll get the most out of the experience if you willingly suspend your disbelief and treat them as real while you’re immersing yourself within them.”   

What Lucia is describing here is The Backrooms as an imagined world, constructed through a contrived belief in its existence and the limitless possibilities for its expansion. However, only a partial suspension of belief is necessary to fully immerse oneself in the imagined world of The Backrooms. The tension between the collaborative fiction elements and the use of images of actual places demolishes the boundaries between real and not real, making the use of a rigid dichotomy totally impractical. Lucia describes what is “inside the mythos,” the complex lore and multiple canons, as not real and the social relationships that have developed around the act of creation as “outside the mythos,” as the real. But the real bleeds into the mythos through the depictions of real places, and the not real spills over into the real through a blurry boundary between roleplaying (RPing) and world building. Further, The Backrooms in their imaginary state are “real” because they have been brought into existence through the concerted practice of a complex social organism. The reality of The Backrooms is unquestionable; the major question should revolve around the interplay of virtuality and actuality in the collective imaginary of this world. 

Mainstream media has also taken a fleeting interest in The Backrooms phenomenon, though to a limited extent, with Vice and ABC News publishing articles that offer language comprehensible to a more general audience who may never have heard of The Backrooms. What these articles, by Andrew Lloyd (Vice) and Michael Dobuski (ABC News) respectively, lack in depth, they make up for in the richness of observing how mainstream media institutions attempt to account for and report on subcultures that may seem incomprehensible to their audiences. These sites mainly took notice of The Backrooms after the explosion of the Kane Pixels “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” video was released in January 2022. Kane Pixels, a high school student, was interviewed in both articles but only provided a shallow overview of why the creator took up this project in the first place aside from wanting to see if he could recreate the image in the 3D rendering software ‘Blender’. The Vice article fares slightly better, presenting one quote from Pixels about why The Backrooms resonated with him, “For Pixels, the Backrooms is a physical manifestation of a poorly remembered past, appealing to those with a cloudy recollection of the late 90s and early 2000s. ‘I mostly remember that time through little glimpses of memories here and there and then family photos,’ he says. ‘The flash is always on, the lighting is gross looking, there's yellow walls, the white balance is all off.’”  

Lloyd’s article in Vice conducts a series of interviews with people who saw the image shortly after it emerged in 2019, asking them to describe the effect it had on them. “So many people grew up in the odd transitional period of the 2000s, where things from the past sat completely unchanged, unmaintained, unrenovated buildings. It's just one of those odd, shared experiences," stated one person who was interviewed. Another interviewee shared their initial reaction as being taken aback, “Viewing these images of barely furnished, or many times unfurnished yellow, tinted rooms, it elicited this feeling of longing and nostalgia. Sometimes those feelings even gave way to a bit of anxiety.” The expression of desire and nostalgia alongside anxiety track with the above application of the uncanny, and the invocation of “fearful nostalgia” by Patston. “Everyone has a memory somewhere in their brain of being somewhere like the Backrooms,” stated one final interviewee, underscoring the fact that The Backrooms are partially composed of childhood memories of places, some nostalgic and some eerie, that were forgotten and then resituated in the mind through exposure to certain visual stimuli.  

The ABC News article by Dobuski relies on the expert opinion of freelance writer Samantha Culp, who attributes the emergence of The Backrooms to living in the “digital era” which situates us historically in a way where urban legends and modern fables spread much more quickly than in pre-digital society. The possibilities for collaborative storytelling and world building have expanded exponentially due to advances in digital technology. "This original image prompted an original story," Culp said, "which kind of conjured almost an entire universe of inspiration for people engaging in, you know, writing, cinema, art, video game making, illustration, even music and soundscapes." Culp connects what she calls “an ancient human impulse about storytelling and art” to “a new generation growing up online,” which bridges the generational divide between the eternal qualities of humanity and the posthuman qualities of digitally rendered worlds. Culp also is credited with briefly mentioning “liminal spaces” as “normal space, that is somehow now estranged, because it's not doing its normal function,” citing empty airports, hotel lobbies, or school buildings that are devoid of human activity.  

Culp goes into greater depth in her interpretation of “liminal spaces” in an article for the daily entertainment newsletter Dirt where she describes the concept as having “stretched Victor Turner’s original anthropological concept to its breaking point, [to where] the young and extremely online who were redefining it in real-time were also breathing new life into the term, responding to...a host of anxieties and longings about the real but ephemeral, everywhere-and-nowhere digital space we dwell in.” This transition in the meaning of liminality and its application to The Backrooms as a digitally rendered imagined world allows the concept to “tap the mainline of cosmic horror, channeling much more ancient traditions of uncanny geography, existential dread, and inferno art from Lovecraft to Lynch, Sartre to Tarkovsky — even the Minotaur’s labyrinth. While creepypasta are inherently collaborative, this one, with its mythic charge and the fact it depicted and described a speculative ‘space’ (instead of a discrete character or artifact), issued even more of an irresistible call to ‘fill’ it." 

The Backrooms are real. There is no cogent argument against their reality. They are part of the daily lives of thousands of people and a comprehensible reference to millions of others. When I taught middle school here in Milwaukee a couple years ago, every single one of my students, out of the dozens and dozens I saw every day, were familiar with the concept of The Backrooms, with many having spent significant time engaging with the world through different mediated formats. There is something about The Backrooms that fractures dichotomies of ‘real’ and ‘not real’ and forces us to ask more complex and nuanced questions about the nature of their existence.  If The Backrooms are real, then what aspect of reality do they inhabit? Are they purely virtual, only actualized through the mediating powers of digital computing technology? Do they problematize even the traditional distinction between virtual and actual as it is applied in the prevailing literature on virtual worlds? The next section will offer greater definition to the concepts of virtual and actual as well as introducing other important terminology vital to the serious analytical consideration of The Backrooms as a virtual world.