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The Backrooms are an online urban legend originating from a creepypasta posted on a 2019 4chan thread. One of the most well-known examples of the Internet aesthetic of liminal spaces, which depicts usually busy locations as unnaturally empty, the Backrooms was first described as a maze of empty office rooms that can only be entered by "noclipping out of reality".

As its popularity grew, internet users expanded upon the original concept by creating different levels and entities which inhabit the Backrooms. Fan-made video games, collaborative fiction wikis and YouTube videos have also been created: a series of horror shorts created by YouTuber Kane Parsons in 2022 is credited with popularizing Backrooms content on the mainstream internet, and he is slated to direct a film adaptation of his Backrooms videos.

Original creepypasta
On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user started a thread on /x/, 4chan's paranormal-themed board, asking users to "post disquieting images that just feel 'off. One of the posts was the original photo of the Backrooms: a picture of a large carpeted, open room with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting on a Dutch angle. It is not known where the photo was taken, but it appeared in an earlier thread on April 21, 2018.

Another user replied to this post with the first description of the Backrooms:

Growth and fandom
Days after the original creepypasta, users began to share stories about the Backrooms on subreddits such as r/creepypasta and later r/backrooms. A fandom began to develop around the Backrooms and creators expanded upon the original iteration of the creepypasta by creating additional floors or "levels" and entities which populate them. Happy Mag noted in particular two other levels: Level 1, a level with industrial architecture, and Level 2, a darkly lit level with long service tunnels, with the original version named Level 0.

As new levels were devised in r/backrooms, a faction of fans who preferred the original Backrooms split off from the fandom. A Reddit user named Litbeep created another subreddit called r/TrueBackrooms focusing only on the original version. ABC News said that unlike fandoms surrounding existing properties, the lack of a canonical Backrooms made "drawing a line between authentic storytelling and jokes" difficult. By March 2022, r/backrooms had over 157,000 members.

The fandom steadily expanded onto other platforms with the upload of videos on Twitter and TikTok. Wikis hosted on Fandom and Wikidot dedicated to the Backrooms lore were established. Dan Erickson, creator of the television series Severance (2022), named the Backrooms as one of his many influences while working on the series.

Reception


Some people believe the Backrooms to have been the origin of the internet aesthetic of liminal spaces, which depict usually busy locations as unnaturally empty. The #liminalspaces hashtag has amassed nearly 100 million views on TikTok. A TikTok trend of videos that zoom in on Google Earth to reveal an entrance to the Backrooms have grown popular. Other sources describe the Backrooms as only a subgenre of the aesthetic.

PC Gamer compared the Backrooms' various levels to H. P. Lovecraft's R'lyeh and The City in the manga Blame!, describing it as "an uncanny valley of place". ABC News and Le Monde grouped the Backrooms into an "emerging genre of collaborative online horror" which also includes the SCP Foundation. Kotaku said that this collaborative aspect, as well as the lack of overt horror or threat, made the Backrooms stand out from other creepypastas. Both Kotaku and Tama Leaver, professor of internet studies at Curtin University, felt that the Backrooms was scary "because [it invites] you to interpret what's not shown". While Leaver believed that the "eerie feeling of familiarity" helped draw fans together, Kotaku said that the horror was in part derived from the subtle "wrongness" present in liminal spaces.

Writing
The Backrooms have been the subject of numerous collaborative wikis. The earliest and most prominent example is the Backrooms Fandom Wiki, founded on June 2, 2019 by user Cicicicity. An equally prominent example is the Backrooms Wikidot Wiki. Following its initial creation, users from r/backrooms chose to use it for documenting the lore that was posted on the subreddit, as well as write new lore. However, due to a lack of staff members, users of the wiki were unable to properly combat the mounting vandalizations and raids that began taking place. Several users would eventually become overwhelmed by this, and broke away to found their own wiki on Wikidot in early 2020.

In the period of early 2020 to late 2021, the wiki was left unregulated, with spammers and vandals freely posting. In late 2021, staff were appointed on the wiki by Fandom, and began working to reverse all vandalization and raise the quality standards throughout 2022. As of 2023, the wiki is now properly moderated, with standards similar to those of the Wikidot wiki.

Wikidot wiki
on Wikidot was founded on March 28, 2020, in response to the poor moderation and low quality of the Fandom wiki at the time. Its original purpose was to serve as an archive of specific pages from the Fandom wiki that the founders deemed worthy of preservation. However, it would eventually branch off into its own universe, using the ported pages as a base for new original lore. Up until 2022, this wiki was widely preferred as the primary source of lore about The Backrooms, given the state of the Fandom wiki at the time. Today, it continues to host a large active community of writers.

YouTube
In January 2022, a short horror film titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) was uploaded to YouTube. Created by then-16-year-old Kane Parsons of Northern California, known online as Kane Pixels, it is presented as a VHS tape recorded by a filmmaker who accidentally enters the Backrooms in the 1990s and is pursued by a monster. Parsons used the software Blender and Adobe After Effects to create the environment of the Backrooms, and it took him a month to complete it. He described the Backrooms as a manifestation of a poorly remembered recollection of the late 90s and early 2000s. The video has over 48 million views.

The short was praised by the fandom and received positive reviews from critics. WPST called it "the scariest video on the Internet". Otaku USA categorized it as analog horror, while Dread Central and Nerdist compared it favorably to the 2019 video game Control. Kotaku praised the series for exercising restraint in its horror and mystery. Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza predicted that the Backrooms, like the creepypasta Slender Man and its panned 2018 film adaptation, would eventually be adapted into a "slick but dismal 2-hour Hollywood movie."

Expanding his videos into a series of sixteen shorts, Parsons introduced plot aspects such as ASYNC, an organization which opened a portal into the Backrooms in the 1980s and conducted research within it. The series has collectively garnered over 100 million views. It is also credited with lifting the Backrooms from obscurity into the mainstream internet and causing a surge in Backrooms content, particularly on YouTube. For his shorts, Parsons received a Creator Honors at the 2022 Streamy Awards from The Game Theorists.

Film adaptation
On February 6, 2023, A24 announced that they are working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Parsons' videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino is set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps are set to produce.

Video games
The Backrooms have been adapted into numerous video games, including on the platforms Steam and Roblox. An indie game was released by Pie on a Plate Productions two months after the original creepypasta, and was positively reviewed for its atmosphere but received criticism for its short length. Many others, such as Enter the Backrooms, Noclipped and The Backrooms Project, were released in the following years. Co-op multiplayer Escape the Backrooms by Fancy Games was praised by Bloody Disgusting for its depiction of the extended lore, while The Backrooms 1998 (both 2022), a psychological survival horror game independently released by one-person developer Steelkrill Studio, was noted by reviewers for its found footage visuals and limited save system.