The Backrooms

The original Backrooms was one paragraph and one photograph: if you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas — a gaming term for slipping through solid walls — you end up in the Backrooms, roughly six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms, old moist carpet, walls in mono-yellow, fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz; and God save you if you hear something wandering nearby. The anonymous text appeared in May 2019 on 4chan's paranormal board /x/, replying to a thread for "disquieting images" with the now-famous photo: a tilted view of harsh yellow rooms with no exit in sight.

That minimal seed swelled into a collaborative universe. Fan wikis expanded the Backrooms into numbered levels — Level 0 the original yellow expanse, then endless parking garages, hotel corridors, a poolrooms level, hundreds more — plus survival guides, almond water, and a bestiary of entities, absorbing the wider "liminal spaces" aesthetic of photographs showing places that should be occupied but are not. In January 2022, sixteen-year-old Kane Parsons (YouTube's Kane Pixels) released The Backrooms (Found Footage), a fake-archival short with 1990s camcorder grain and crushing scale that carried the mythos into the mainstream; the series drew hundreds of millions of views, and in 2023 A24 announced a feature film developed with Parsons.

In May 2024, internet sleuths traced the original photo to a store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, shot in 2003 during renovation — the Backrooms' real-world origin pinned to a map, without diminishing its standing as the internet's shared bad dream.