The Backrooms

The Backrooms is an urban legend and creepypasta about a maze that seems to have no true end. It has empty office rooms in a moist yellow room and hallways. The area is said to have the smell of wet carpet with the sound of buzzing lights. These rooms have levels with monsters and strange but often dangerous creatures called "entities" living in them. Usually people get into the backrooms by accidentally falling or no-clipping through any solid object in real life.
People exploring and/or trying to get out of the Backrooms are known as "wanderers", though there are some people who have permanently settled down in different levels The Backrooms in places called "outposts"
Since its original creation, The Backrooms has been expanded into other forms of media and Internet culture, including video games, memes, and a horror/science fiction web series.
Levels
The Backrooms original concept has been made bigger by 4chan, Reddit and YouTube users, who have created different levels of the Backrooms. There are thousands of levels found within fan-made Wikis of the Backrooms, featuring different pictures and safety classes in a format influenced by the SCP wiki. One canon is that there are three distinct levels. The levels in this canon include:
Level 0: The level showed in the original Backrooms photo, featuring all of the weird and creepypasta's most well known features - moldy carpet, based on only one color yellow walls and buzzing fluorescent lights. One of the things created by users for this level are dogs, described as Hounds. Another feature of this level is a noclip zone, which can bring wanderers back to Earth's dimension, return them to the starting point of Level 0, or to another level with different entities.
Level 1: A level reached when one chooses not to enter a noclip zone and instead wanders around Level 0 for days. It is darker than Level 0 and features a more industrial architecture, with mechanical like sounds being heard through Level 1. The level appears to be a dark, dingy warehouse with low-lying fog and puddles of water around. Opposed to Level 0, the fluorescent lights begin to flicker more frequently, occasionally shutting down completely - This is when the entities come out.
Level 2: The third level of the Backrooms, according to the three-level interpretation. It is the one of the darkest levels, containing more industrial like architecture. This level appears as long service tunnels with pipes lining the walls. It is described as being reached when one simply wanders around Level 1 for a long enough period of time, and featuring a much higher temperature than other levels. Survivors of the Backrooms claim that the only way to escape the level is to remain calm, stating that only when the Backrooms have become a person's home can they depart. It is said to have entities that are more dangerous than those of Level 1
Popularity and impact
In January 2022, a short horror video titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) was uploaded to the YouTube channel Kane Pixels. This video caused the Backrooms to become popular again. The Backrooms was an inspiration for Apple TV+'s Severance.
References
Internet culture
2019 establishments
Horror
Internet memes
Science fiction