The article has a screenshot of the Stanley Parable, but misses an opportunity to reference Control (2019) which is much more directly influenced by the "liminal space" concept, and imagines a non-euclidian space called The Oldest House at 34 Thomas Street (a reference to the brutalist, windowless AT&T Long Lines skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, New York City).
It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008 (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.
It does, but its main focus is ludonarrative dissonance, which is why Control would be a better example (along with games that specifically invoke Backrooms lore, like POOLS)
I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy.
The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves).
Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day.
For me, the feeling these “back rooms” evokes is more akin to being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go outside and play.
It’s strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a new generation’s horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from it.
I disagree. I too have worked in these environments. As mentioned in the article, and in numerous other references about the Backrooms - the creepiness stems partially from the "liminal" feeling of walking around large, man-made spaces that are totally empty. Think walking around a shopping mall after hours. I had several odd jobs before I was in college where I had to work overnight shifts, sweeping the floors of large department stores. That feeling of "empty watchfullness" was definitely a thing, and it's captured well by a lot of the Backrooms content.
The other aspect of "creepiness" stems from the idea that the Backrooms represent an endless, malevolent labyrinth. One of the scarier aspects of being trapped in the Backrooms (for me) is that you would just wander around until you died for lack of water and food, in a bland corporate office corridor with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
Day vs. Night are what makes the difference. The sprawling suburban office complex from the 70s was, like you said, just boring and a bit oppressive during the day. At night though, a sea of cubicles. Endless hallways. Nothing but blackness outside the windows. Lights are all on motion detectors so only your area is lit. And only lit for a time. Eventually you'd have to stand up to make the lights switch back on. And when you do, you look over the fields of cubes to see a shadowy figure slowly slump its way across the room. Headed vaguely in your direction but never quite reaching you. You think it's Mark from Accounting, but you'll never know for certain.
For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon. The horror, or unsettling feeling, one gets from seeing a place at night that's usually only seen in the day. Had that constantly as a kid when going to school at night for performances or teacher meetings. A place bright and loud that's now quiet and dark. You know where everything is, but it all seems like it's just an inch or two out of place.
I agree, it's the night-time that makes places, particularly urban ones unnerving and/or creepy. I once worked as a courier, which sometimes involved delivering things to stores or weird ass storage buildings in the middle of the night. I hated those night-time deliveries. Even worse when I had to go through rooms with mannequins, made my skin crawl.
> it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
My teenage daughter is really into this genre but has never actually been in a mostly abandoned 90s mall or fluorescent-lit business park office space herself.
But don't underestimate how much history bleeds forwards in time in various bits of cultural ephemera that can still be absorbed by younger people. She doesn't have much first-had experience with spaces with this vibe, but there is ample second-hand media of it and enough bits and pieces of it still in the real world for it to be both somewhat familiar and enticingly exotic to her.
Feelings of nostalgia can be evoked by things you never experienced first-hand, and that were before your time. It’s not uncommon. There’s also a connection to melancholy that I can’t quite find the right words for.
> The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves).
I'm not sure if that's true. I've definitely been to places that feel intentionally confusing; the basement of my college, several hospitals, etc. Where you walk between two buildings, and suddenly go from Floor 4 to Floor 6, or where you're sure you entered facing north, but after making three right-hand turns, you exit a building facing south.
Most people haven't been in an abandoned mansion, abandoned mental asylum or abandoned mall either, but they've seen enough from people who have to get the idea. Never mind the urbexers bringing them footage of hidden infrastructure.
I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.
> I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
I developed a fondness for 1970s interior decor/styling even though I was born in 1988 because most of the places in my town, such as the library, were last renovated during that time.
Also, many people in my life, such as uncles & aunts, were still living in the homes they purchased in the 1970s and some design choices just can't be easily/cheaply changed.
I grew up within and around a ghost of 1970s architecture and design. As an adult I wound up moving into a suburb built in 1968 for this reason.
It's less nostalgia and more like a vague sense of familiarity that you can only scratch the surface of in your mind.
I never got really super into this subculture thing, or whatever it is, but I vaguely recall skimming things like a subreddit devoted to it, ages ago. I want to say when it was “starting” but then nothing ever really starts or ends. Definitely Pre-Covid though. Anyway, IIRC the focus was not on the horror, maybe a slight unease, but mostly the uncanniness.
I think this is just how things evolve. Creepy is a very strong sentiment that is somewhat aligned with uncanny, so it isn’t that surprising to see uncanny collapse into it over time.
But having spent a lot of time in empty classrooms, auditoriums, and hallways, waiting for students to show up, it’s more of a nostalgic feeling to me.
> I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy.
That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a tardis).
While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting, "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves.
Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.
I think it’s degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and you’ve seen big spiders crawling around? It’s a fear of the unknown and we’re all tuned a little differently, I think we can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending on the person and how much knowledge you have about the environment.
I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check, just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also “black mold” evokes an image of a creeping horror even though rationally I know just going down there once a week isn’t going to give me some horrible respiratory illness.
I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.
I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune).
I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course.
Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.
The Backrooms have always reminded me of House of Leaves and the Navidson Record within specifically. (I think maybe that's a deliberate influence in the lore?)
So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.
House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming this entity into the real)
I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common with a few SCPs.
To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean very different things across the past thousand years). I think liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so multiple different effective horrors have converged on these feelings of discomfort with spaces.
I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
> I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
I think it has something to do with the controlled comfort of modern life. And how even a small disruption can become unsettling.
Like in HoL, the most chilling scene isn't anything that happens beyond the door imo. It's when the book falls because the house changed size ever so slightly. I think the classic haunted house trope is at play there too - home is comfort but those stories frequently involve a move, which is inherently stressful. I remember when I bought my house..every new noise or small change was disturbing. Potentially a hidden horror lurking in the house (like a water leak).
House Of Leaves was published in 2000 and Backrooms originates (as far as I can tell) from like 2011? Not that it's impossible that the ideas developed independently, but given how big a cult hit House of Leaves was I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some direct lineage. Not trying to gatekeep, it's just that the Backroom trailer was giving me _really distinct_ HoL vibes. I wonder if that's just the film mixing in ideas that weren't necessarily present in the original copypasta.
edit: Another thing I will say is that I've noticed both HoL and Backrooms seem to act like a kind of shibboleth for a particular demographic (not even really the same demographic) and you often see this in how people write/talk about both. I think it maybe stems from how dense/unapproachable the two works are, how innocuous they seem on the surface such that you really have to sink some effort to get at them.
Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.
On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.
the akamai access denied page is a perfect, unintentional illustration of the topic. getting paged for a single bad regex in a WAF config that blocks legit users is its own kind of institutional horror
> But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know these environments through the ominous “Backrooms” or the goofy hijinks of “The Office”?
Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy but, no.
"Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe.
How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable.
I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later.
Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept.
There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere.
The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly.
Dreams I've had (since a late teenager) have often taken place in some kind of architecture with infinite rooms, hallways…
I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?).
At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years).
There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy.
When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5].
The article has a screenshot of the Stanley Parable, but misses an opportunity to reference Control (2019) which is much more directly influenced by the "liminal space" concept, and imagines a non-euclidian space called The Oldest House at 34 Thomas Street (a reference to the brutalist, windowless AT&T Long Lines skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, New York City).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI
It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008 (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.
The Stanley Parable definitely plays with non-euclidean and liminal spaces - the room in the screenshot being one such example.
Reminds me how much fun Superliminal was. Might have to get that another play through. :D
It does, but its main focus is ludonarrative dissonance, which is why Control would be a better example (along with games that specifically invoke Backrooms lore, like POOLS)
I was actually a little surprised there was no mention of Escape the Backrooms, although I suppose The Stanley Parable is a better-known game.
> which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.
For the 4 people on HN who don't know, "maze of twisty passages" is a reference to the this (the?) text adventure game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy.
The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves).
Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day.
For me, the feeling these “back rooms” evokes is more akin to being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go outside and play.
It’s strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a new generation’s horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from it.
I disagree. I too have worked in these environments. As mentioned in the article, and in numerous other references about the Backrooms - the creepiness stems partially from the "liminal" feeling of walking around large, man-made spaces that are totally empty. Think walking around a shopping mall after hours. I had several odd jobs before I was in college where I had to work overnight shifts, sweeping the floors of large department stores. That feeling of "empty watchfullness" was definitely a thing, and it's captured well by a lot of the Backrooms content.
The other aspect of "creepiness" stems from the idea that the Backrooms represent an endless, malevolent labyrinth. One of the scarier aspects of being trapped in the Backrooms (for me) is that you would just wander around until you died for lack of water and food, in a bland corporate office corridor with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
Day vs. Night are what makes the difference. The sprawling suburban office complex from the 70s was, like you said, just boring and a bit oppressive during the day. At night though, a sea of cubicles. Endless hallways. Nothing but blackness outside the windows. Lights are all on motion detectors so only your area is lit. And only lit for a time. Eventually you'd have to stand up to make the lights switch back on. And when you do, you look over the fields of cubes to see a shadowy figure slowly slump its way across the room. Headed vaguely in your direction but never quite reaching you. You think it's Mark from Accounting, but you'll never know for certain.
For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon. The horror, or unsettling feeling, one gets from seeing a place at night that's usually only seen in the day. Had that constantly as a kid when going to school at night for performances or teacher meetings. A place bright and loud that's now quiet and dark. You know where everything is, but it all seems like it's just an inch or two out of place.
I agree, it's the night-time that makes places, particularly urban ones unnerving and/or creepy. I once worked as a courier, which sometimes involved delivering things to stores or weird ass storage buildings in the middle of the night. I hated those night-time deliveries. Even worse when I had to go through rooms with mannequins, made my skin crawl.
> it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
My teenage daughter is really into this genre but has never actually been in a mostly abandoned 90s mall or fluorescent-lit business park office space herself.
But don't underestimate how much history bleeds forwards in time in various bits of cultural ephemera that can still be absorbed by younger people. She doesn't have much first-had experience with spaces with this vibe, but there is ample second-hand media of it and enough bits and pieces of it still in the real world for it to be both somewhat familiar and enticingly exotic to her.
Feelings of nostalgia can be evoked by things you never experienced first-hand, and that were before your time. It’s not uncommon. There’s also a connection to melancholy that I can’t quite find the right words for.
> The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves).
I'm not sure if that's true. I've definitely been to places that feel intentionally confusing; the basement of my college, several hospitals, etc. Where you walk between two buildings, and suddenly go from Floor 4 to Floor 6, or where you're sure you entered facing north, but after making three right-hand turns, you exit a building facing south.
Most people haven't been in an abandoned mansion, abandoned mental asylum or abandoned mall either, but they've seen enough from people who have to get the idea. Never mind the urbexers bringing them footage of hidden infrastructure.
I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.
> I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
I developed a fondness for 1970s interior decor/styling even though I was born in 1988 because most of the places in my town, such as the library, were last renovated during that time.
Also, many people in my life, such as uncles & aunts, were still living in the homes they purchased in the 1970s and some design choices just can't be easily/cheaply changed.
I grew up within and around a ghost of 1970s architecture and design. As an adult I wound up moving into a suburb built in 1968 for this reason.
It's less nostalgia and more like a vague sense of familiarity that you can only scratch the surface of in your mind.
I never got really super into this subculture thing, or whatever it is, but I vaguely recall skimming things like a subreddit devoted to it, ages ago. I want to say when it was “starting” but then nothing ever really starts or ends. Definitely Pre-Covid though. Anyway, IIRC the focus was not on the horror, maybe a slight unease, but mostly the uncanniness.
I think this is just how things evolve. Creepy is a very strong sentiment that is somewhat aligned with uncanny, so it isn’t that surprising to see uncanny collapse into it over time.
But having spent a lot of time in empty classrooms, auditoriums, and hallways, waiting for students to show up, it’s more of a nostalgic feeling to me.
> I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy.
That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a tardis).
“Eerie” would be a good translation in the quoted context.
While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting, "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves.
Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.
I think it’s degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and you’ve seen big spiders crawling around? It’s a fear of the unknown and we’re all tuned a little differently, I think we can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending on the person and how much knowledge you have about the environment.
I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check, just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also “black mold” evokes an image of a creeping horror even though rationally I know just going down there once a week isn’t going to give me some horrible respiratory illness.
I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.
The Backrooms and Skinamarink are both classified as horror.
that's definitely how they get you.
I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune).
I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course.
Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.
The Backrooms have always reminded me of House of Leaves and the Navidson Record within specifically. (I think maybe that's a deliberate influence in the lore?)
So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.
I think there's a bit of a convergent evolution
House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming this entity into the real)
I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common with a few SCPs.
To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean very different things across the past thousand years). I think liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so multiple different effective horrors have converged on these feelings of discomfort with spaces.
I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
> I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.
I think it has something to do with the controlled comfort of modern life. And how even a small disruption can become unsettling.
Like in HoL, the most chilling scene isn't anything that happens beyond the door imo. It's when the book falls because the house changed size ever so slightly. I think the classic haunted house trope is at play there too - home is comfort but those stories frequently involve a move, which is inherently stressful. I remember when I bought my house..every new noise or small change was disturbing. Potentially a hidden horror lurking in the house (like a water leak).
House Of Leaves was published in 2000 and Backrooms originates (as far as I can tell) from like 2011? Not that it's impossible that the ideas developed independently, but given how big a cult hit House of Leaves was I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some direct lineage. Not trying to gatekeep, it's just that the Backroom trailer was giving me _really distinct_ HoL vibes. I wonder if that's just the film mixing in ideas that weren't necessarily present in the original copypasta.
edit: Another thing I will say is that I've noticed both HoL and Backrooms seem to act like a kind of shibboleth for a particular demographic (not even really the same demographic) and you often see this in how people write/talk about both. I think it maybe stems from how dense/unapproachable the two works are, how innocuous they seem on the surface such that you really have to sink some effort to get at them.
Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.
On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View
the akamai access denied page is a perfect, unintentional illustration of the topic. getting paged for a single bad regex in a WAF config that blocks legit users is its own kind of institutional horror
> But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know these environments through the ominous “Backrooms” or the goofy hijinks of “The Office”?
Are dungeons just medieval backrooms?
Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy but, no.
"Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe.
How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable.
I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
>"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames
It's where the concept originated.
The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later.
Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
90% of modern memes, internet culture, and therefore a huge proportion of current pop culture, originated on 4chan.
>The concept did not originate in videogames.
Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept.
There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere.
The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly.
It is not where the concept originated.
Dreams I've had (since a late teenager) have often taken place in some kind of architecture with infinite rooms, hallways…
I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?).
At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years).
There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy.
When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5].
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/...
[2] http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA...
[3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong...
[4] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione
curious how this scales with larger datasets. anyone tried it in production?
Arma Reforger military simulation game modders implemented backrooms with all of their psychological horror perfectly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk