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.
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.
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.
So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.
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 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...
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.
At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.
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.namu.wiki/w/The%20Backrooms%20With%20Guns
I see others have mentioned Superliminal too, which was great.
If we want to go deeper, then I really think its Earthbound's absurdist take on childhood adventures with cultists, ghosts, dreamscapes, etc. but I think at that point I might as well say dice games influenced things.
Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed...
For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.
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.
You could look from one end to the other, seeing a series of doorways, and then walk through them all; every time I walked from one room to another, by brain would do a little power cycle as it tried to deal with the sensation of having walked into the room I'd just exited.
The deeper-in I got, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that something was "off" about the whole set-up; there were windows, but looking out them, the view felt... fake? It's hard to describe.
This was a few years after SCP became popular, but before the Backrooms - which was why I immediately understood the appeal.
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'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.
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.
Also, the infinite corridors is only part of the appeal. There are other ways in which such spaces can become eerie. I remember how I used to often be the only person still working in an open floor plan office in the evening. There was no sense of infinite corridors, but the dimness with one area alone illuminated by motion-detected light was spooky, and so were the sounds of the HVAC system and of doors and elevators somewhere in a different part of the building. There was also an uncanny empty feeling of seeing all the chairs and desks with no humans at them.
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.
Ironically enough, I first read this book when I worked at Disneyland, at an attraction with tunnel access, that no longer exists, and I no longer have the book because I loaned it to a girl I worked with there who never gave it back. She and I hung out in those tunnels during breaks.
Also interesting to me seeing other responses about found footage, given the guy who first recommended this book to me was a friend from college who covered his dorm room in bizarre free-form prose that switched between play style and novel style during a manic episode, then tore it all down later, set it on fire, and pieced together what survived as the strangest pseudo-poetry that somehow still had a lot of real words in it, kind of nature's "found poem." This book was probably written around the same time Blair Witch Project first came out and this guy also lived next to the real Greenway Trail in Burkittsville, which was also not particularly scary to see in person. I kind of doubt that was really the first example of a found footage film but it's the first I'm aware of. Wikipedia is saying The Connection from 1961 is the first.
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.
Just seeing a few images of the book's pages in this video, yeah it seems like a really interesting book that plays with the novel format directly.
You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas' attack!It's funny, I've always loved that kind of environment. Quiet high school hallways after everyone's left, empty university buildings late at night, offices after hours, even empty offices that haven't been moved into yet. For me it evokes feelings associated more with watching a rainy day from inside, or lofi-girl with headphones studying.
I understand why it can evoke horror or unsettling feelings for people, but for me the first word that comes to mind is just "peaceful".
Even the environments in the Backrooms trailer - minus the obvious horror elements - look like they would be a lot of fun to explore!
When you have assigned desks, people personalize their spaces. It feels lived in (at least a bit). A more contemporary open office feels more liminal, even when it's full of people. And after hours it's even worse: there's no trace of human habitation.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
And then from there back to another game: MyHouse.wad, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyHouse.wad
I don't have any real proof for this, but it feels like House of Leaves inspired a lot of the people making "found footage" and "creepypasta" stuff one the internet in the 2000s and early 2010s (SCP, Marble Hornets, Slender Man), and then that stuff came together to inspire the Backrooms.
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".
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.
A new spin on an old genre replaces flesh-and-blood monsters with the mundanity of modern bureaucracy.

A version of “The Backrooms,” from the original 4chan creepypasta.
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In February, A24 released a movie teaser that was likely difficult for many to parse. The promo for its upcoming film, “Backrooms,” features no characters, no plot, and no music. Instead, the camera moves downward through layers of uncanny interiors, accompanied by a narrator who recalls a “massive” space full of rooms that “build” and “remember” themselves. If you watched this video without context, you might have come away confused. A second trailer released this week offers only slightly more detail, with a man obsessively telling his therapist about an uncannily infinite space: “Sometimes I’m scared I’ll get lost,” he admits, before rhapsodizing, “It’s beautiful… am I right?”
However, there’s a surprisingly deep history behind “Backrooms.” It’s one that touches on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia. But above all, “Backrooms” captures a feeling — and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.
To unpack this feeling — and how it comes into play in “Backrooms” — we must first gesture toward “liminality,” a term that seems to be suddenly creeping out of academia and into the mainstream. The term, coined over 100 years ago by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, originated in reference to a ritual threshold space. Throughout the 20th century, it was used to capture the disorientation one feels in transitional, in-between spaces. By the 2010s, the internet had reified liminality into a full-fledged visual “aesthetic”: Think abandoned bowling alleys, vintage airport terminals, and deserted playgrounds at dusk. More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity.
It was out of this context that the idea for “The Backrooms” emerged, first as “creepypasta” — internet slang for a spooky story that’s cut and pasted so many times that people lose sight of its original authorship. Like all good creepypastas, the post was thin in lore, leaving ample room for endless interpretation and reinterpretation. It appeared on 4chan’s /x/, the paranormal-positive board of the infamously anonymous internet hate machine, and was conjured in response to a prompt asking for spaces that looked wrong. One anon posted a picture of an eerily empty, yellowed office space, alongside the text:
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 the approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.
That term, “noclip,” is meaningful here. It’s video game-speak for falling through what appears to be a stable in-game object — a failure of digital collision detection. This kind of slippage combines esoteric notions about the flimsiness of reality with gaming logic, not unlike the notion that real-life people are non-player characters (NPCs) or the hypothesis that we live in a computer simulation. Like the simulation hypothesis, noclipping presents the world as an imperfect construct built by unseen programmers and suggests a humanity at the brink of becoming digital objects themselves.
For a while, “The Backrooms” was a crowdsourced effort, confined purely to niche corners of the internet. Its fans created level after level of wiki-madness, posting thousands of eerie officescapes one might accidentally noclip into. Then it got bigger: In 2022, then-17-year-old Kane Parsons (who’s also director of the A24 film) created an eponymous web series, supplementing the aesthetic with deep lore. Parsons’ creation, which he designed with a 3D modeling software often used for game development, soon went massively viral, with over 190 million views to date.
In these new tales, offices become inescapable traps — long winding corridors with no way out.
In the nine-minute, 14-second pilot, Parsons carries his camera in a game-like first-person perspective. He plays the role of a 1991 indie filmmaker who suddenly falls downward into duplications of the same interior, navigating an eerie, brightly lit, otherwise empty office of the “Async Research Institute.” After a brief exploration, he is stalked by a chimeric creature (a “lifeform”) composed of wires and unknown organic materials that looks more machine than human. As with all found-footage horror, it doesn’t end well for anyone.
Thanks in large part to “The Backrooms,” media scholars have begun to grapple more seriously with the sudden popularity of liminal aesthetics in online folklore.
Bradley Earl Wiggins argues the genre taps into a “nostalgia” that offers a “critique of consumerist society during perceived notions of late capitalism” through its hyperreal game-like visuals — reproductions of things that never physically existed. Likewise, Elinor Dolliver characterizes the appeal as a new spin on storytelling in the analog-horror style, which gives the impression of folklore without any connection to actual history. I agree with both takes, but I would further suggest the rise of liminality evinces the resonance of a new media genre altogether — one which I’d call the Institutional Gothic.
To understand this shift, we need to wind back the clock a couple of hundred years.
Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), a tale of crumbling aristocracies, secrets, revenge, murder, and hauntings, is widely regarded as the original Gothic novel. The genre exerted its influence throughout the 19th century, with what Fred Botting refers to as the “return of the pasts on the present”— the sins of older generations bearing upon the young. Its settings were necessarily both familiar and mysterious, often situated in dramatic, desolate landscapes. The gothic was marked by duplicitous, monstrous antagonists, terrified heroines, fragmented narratives, and the supernatural. Its particularities changed with new locales and time periods, but at their thematic root, they’ve always been negotiations of cultural and social mores, reminding us that our present can never escape the ghosts of our past.
Which brings us to the Institutional Gothic. Like the traditional Gothic, the Institutional Gothic involves uncanny spaces, malevolent forces, and overwhelming discomfort related to spatiality and power. But where the traditional Gothic is dark and looming with ornate architecture, the Institutional Gothic occurs in winding or otherwise empty office spaces, consumed by machine-made mundanity and the unforgiving gaze of noisy overhead fluorescent lighting. The antagonists, once bloodthirsty lords, are instead soulless corporations. The protagonists, once women at the mercy of those lords, are now often white men, wandering fearfully or uncomfortably through those catacombs.
Taken together, the Institutional Gothic transforms a genre once fueled by phantasmal terror into the familiar, worldly dread of workplace alienation.
There are many examples of this beyond “The Backrooms.” The video game “The Stanley Parable” and the AppleTV series “Severance” (filmed at the semi-abandoned Bell Works complex in New Jersey) share the same aesthetic. Aspects of Institutional Gothic have also crept into real life in recent years, with the emptied fiefdoms of our post-pandemic workplaces. The aesthetic has apparently even found its way into our subconscious: Thousands of people online last year shared the experience of having the same lucid dream — walking through empty food courts and stairs to nowhere in a giant abandoned “Mall World.”
“The Backrooms” reminds us that we have no choice but to negotiate with the monsters and sins of our past.
When it comes to “The Backrooms,” though, we find all the hallmarks of the Institutional Gothic: the labyrinthine hallways, bright lights, the bland “madness of mono-yellow,” and a supernatural subtext built out of the mythologies of corporate and government experimental woo-woo. It is no coincidence that “The Backrooms” is set mostly in the ’80s and ’90s, a time of great prosperity for the American middle class. It was the heyday of cubicles, where infinitely reusable office spaces, despite the booms and busts of modern capitalism, seemed as though they’d be useful forever. By the early 2000s, the cubicles were mostly eclipsed by panopticon-friendly open floor plans. And today, with many industries scaling back, our old institutions are increasingly emptied out.
If traditional Gothic is about the sins of the past revisiting the present, then the Institutional Gothic echoes that trope by focusing not on the class-based horrors of 200 years ago, but on the (still class-based) corporate choices made within the 20th century. The middle class has been alienated and abandoned by Corporate America. In these new tales, offices become inescapable traps — long winding corridors with no way out.
Of course, monsters remain at the heart of the Institutional Gothic, too. The “lifeform” of “The Backrooms” was never the real monster, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror “Frankenstein.” Rather, the monster was always the creator, which, in the case of the Institutional Gothic, is the efficiency-seeking corporation. From environmental destruction to indifference to human harm, our 20th-century oligopolies paved the path to where we are now. Like a hydra, they cannot be killed; they just re-form under a new head.
In one of the most suspenseful moments from “The Backrooms,” we see a group of men in hazmat suits holding a red tether line as they explore the alien office environment. It’s odd watching a cautious exploration into a space that would otherwise seem so familiar, the red line loudly pronouncing itself within all that mono-yellow.
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”?
As we reconcile with our lost spaces and our offices give way to new “lifeforms,” such as billion-dollar data centers for AI and cloud computing, liminality will continue to define this threshold moment between physicality and digitality. “The Backrooms” — in all its iterations — reminds us that we have no choice but to negotiate with the monsters and sins of our past as we noclip into an unknown future.
Shira Chess is Associate Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of “Play Like a Feminist,” “Ready Player Two,” and “The Unseen Internet.” You can find more of her work on her Substack.
It's where the concept originated.
Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
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
The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.