The Backrooms

Original creepypasta Between 2011 and 2018, a photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and pale yellow dividing walls circulated on various message boards, and 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, accompanying the thread with the photograph. Another user replied to this post, giving the image its name and supplying 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. The wikis function similarly to the SCP wiki, being fictitious collaborative writing projects that may be expanded upon by users. Dan Erickson, creator of the television series Severance (2022), named the Backrooms as one of his many influences while working on the series. Image origin Until 2024, the source of the original Backrooms image was not widely known. In May 2024, a Twitter user announced in a now-viral post that their friend had discovered the image's origin. which traced the image to an archived webpage from March 2003 using the Wayback Machine. The image was found to have been taken during the renovation of "a former furniture store with plenty of partitions and fake inner walls" in Wisconsin. In 2003, 807 Oregon Street was acquired by a new tenant, a branch of the American hobby shop chain HobbyTown. Sometime in 2002, the second story underwent renovations. On June 12, 2002, the progress was photographed with a Sony Cyber-shot camera, and on March 2, 2003, the various interior views were documented on the Oshkosh branch's renovation weblog. The image was captioned as an original view of "the East (Oval) room", and noted that no windows were visible. The blog entry described extensive water damage that required the area to be cleared. HobbyTown has since converted the facility into a radio-controlled car racing track called Revolution Racing, and the room's original layout is now gone. == Reception ==

, which include "images of eerie and uninhabited spaces", such as the above empty hallway. |alt=An example of a liminal space. This is an image of a long, empty hallway. Some sources believe the Backrooms to have been the origin of the internet aesthetic known as liminal spaces, Paste's Phoenix Simms wrote that the Backrooms and games such as the more absurdist The Stanley Parable is "tied to a long tradition of the liminal in horror" and the color yellow as a symbol of caution, deterioration, and existential distress. The Backrooms' use of the color is "a fungal, sickly yellow", where both the person and the mind can lose themselves. 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". In 2024, American rapper Juice Wrld featured a Backrooms inspired music video for his 2024 studio album, The Party Never Ends. == 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, known online as Kane Pixels, of Northern California, it is presented as a VHS tape recorded by a filmmaker who accidentally enters the Backrooms in the 1990s and is pursued by an unknown 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 1990s and early 2000s. The short was praised by the fandom 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. Expanding his videos into a series of short films, Parsons introduced plot aspects such as Async, an organization which opened a portal into the Backrooms in the 1980s and conducted research within it. 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 were working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Parsons' videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino was set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps were to produce. The episode stars Michael Imperioli as a grief-stricken screenwriter who falls in and out of the "Backrooms", ending up in mundane locations where he is confronted by a manifestation of his missing son. The episode was one in a group of five to be released as a "Huluween event". Video games The Backrooms have been adapted into numerous video games. 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. 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. Dreamcore, a 2025 first-person psychological horror video game developed by Argentinian studio Montraluz, takes inspiration from the Backrooms. ==See also==