The Backrooms

**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 "no clipping 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, 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/, 4chans'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:

> 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
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> God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
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## Growth and fandom

Some stories about the Backrooms include malevolent creatures
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 a 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.

## Adaptations

### 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 as of May 2023.