The Backrooms

• 1. Introduction

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  The Backrooms promise a visitor "approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in." That line comes from an early forum description of a place that does not exist. The same description lists the stink of old moist carpet, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights, and "the madness of mono-yellow." The place came first. The stories came afterward, written by strangers on the internet, and the idea began on the imageboard 4chan. It is now counted among the best known examples of the liminal space aesthetic. Three questions run through what follows. Where was the photograph taken that started it all? Why does a room with nothing in it unsettle so many people? And how did a post on a paranormal message board end up as a feature film?

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• 2. The Thread on /x/

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  On the 12th of May 2019, an anonymous user opened a thread on /x/, the paranormal board of 4chan. The request was simple. Users were asked to post disquieting images that just feel "off." The opening poster attached a photograph of a large carpeted room with fluorescent lights and pale yellow dividing walls. The picture was not new. It had already circulated on various message boards between 2011 and 2018.

  A second user answered the post and did two things at once. They gave the image its name, the Backrooms, and they wrote the first description of the place. In that account, a person reaches it by slipping out of reality in the wrong spot. The reply ends with a warning: "God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you." That sentence about something wandering nearby would soon grow into a whole population of creatures.

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• 3. Levels and Entities

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  Reddit became the first real home of the Backrooms, with stories appearing on r/creepypasta within days and later on r/backrooms. Writers added floors, called levels, that connect to one another. They also invented hostile creatures, called entities, that live on those levels.

  As new levels were devised on r/Backrooms, some fans decided they preferred the original version. A Reddit user named Litbeep created r/TrueBackrooms, a subreddit focused only on that first iteration. ABC News observed that, unlike fandoms built around existing properties, the lack of a canonical Backrooms made "drawing a line between authentic storytelling and jokes" difficult. The argument did not slow the growth. By March 2022, r/backrooms had over 157,000 members.

  Videos on YouTube, Twitter and TikTok carried the fandom well beyond Reddit. Wikis on Fandom and Wikidot, along with dedicated Discord communities, collected the lore and worldbuilding. These wikis work much like the SCP wiki, as fictional collaborative writing projects that users may keep extending.

  Dan Erickson, creator of the television series Severance from 2022, named the Backrooms among his many influences. Yet for years, nobody in these communities could say where the founding photograph had been taken.

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• 4. The Oshkosh Store

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  In May 2024, a Discord community dedicated to the Backrooms traced the picture to an archived webpage from March 2003. The Wayback Machine made the search possible. The page showed a renovation in Wisconsin, inside "a former furniture store with plenty of partitions and fake inner walls."

  For much of the 20th century, Rohner's Home Furnishings occupied 807 and 811 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In 2003, a branch of the American hobby shop chain HobbyTown took over 807 Oregon Street. Sometime in 2002, the second story went through renovations.

  On the 12th of June 2002, the progress was photographed with a Sony Cyber-shot camera. On the 2nd of March 2003, views of the interior were documented on the Oshkosh branch's renovation weblog. One photograph showed an open, carpeted room with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting, tilted at a Dutch angle. It was uploaded under the file name "Dsc00161.jpg." The caption called it the East (Oval) room and noted that no windows were visible. The blog entry also described extensive water damage that forced the area to be cleared.

  Today there is nothing left to visit. HobbyTown has converted the facility into a radio-controlled car racing track called Revolution Racing, and the room's original layout is gone.

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• 5. Why Empty Rooms Unsettle

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  The #liminalspaces hashtag has gathered nearly 100 million views on TikTok, and some sources believe the Backrooms gave birth to the aesthetic behind it. Liminal spaces show usually busy places as unnaturally empty. They can also show places that give viewers an eerie sense of having been there before.

  Phoenix Simms of Paste wrote that the Backrooms, along with games such as the more absurdist The Stanley Parable, is tied to a long tradition of the liminal in horror. Simms also read meaning into the color yellow, which stands for caution, deterioration and existential distress. In the Backrooms it is "a fungal, sickly yellow," where both the person and the mind can lose themselves.

  PC Gamer compared the levels to H. P. Lovecraft's R'lyeh and to The City in the manga Blame!, calling the result "an uncanny valley of place." ABC News and Le Monde grouped the Backrooms into an emerging genre of collaborative online horror.

  Kotaku argued that this collaborative quality, together with the lack of overt horror or threat, made the Backrooms stand out from other creepypastas. Kotaku and Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University, both found it scary because it invites you to interpret what is not shown. Leaver believed the eerie familiarity helped draw fans together. Kotaku placed part of the horror in the subtle wrongness of such spaces. Soon a short film would test how much of that wrongness a video could carry.

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• 6. Kane Pixels

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  In January 2022, a short horror film titled "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" appeared on YouTube. Its creator was Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, then 16 and living in Northern California. The film 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 built the environment with the software Blender and Adobe After Effects, and it took him a month. He described the Backrooms as a manifestation of a poorly remembered recollection of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As of 2026, the video has over 78 million views.

  The fandom praised the short, and critics gave it positive reviews. WPST called it "the scariest video on the Internet." Otaku USA categorized it as analog horror. Dread Central and Nerdist compared it favorably to the 2019 video game Control, and Kotaku praised the restraint of its horror and mystery.

  Parsons then expanded the video into a series of short films. He introduced a plot element called Async, an organization that opened a portal into the Backrooms in the 1980s and conducted research inside it. The series has collectively garnered over 197 million views. It is credited with lifting the Backrooms from obscurity into the mainstream internet and with a surge of Backrooms content, particularly on YouTube. For these shorts, Parsons received a Creator Honors at the 2022 Streamy Awards from The Game Theorists.

  Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing had a forecast. He predicted that the Backrooms, like the creepypasta Slender Man and its panned 2018 film adaptation, would eventually become a "slick but dismal 2-hour Hollywood movie."

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• 7. Hollywood and Beyond

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  On the 6th of February 2023, A24 announced a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Parsons's videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino was set to write the screenplay. The producers named were James Wan, Michael Clear of Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, and Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps. The film was released in the United States on the 29th of May 2026.

  Television arrived at the Backrooms too. The third season of American Horror Stories, a direct spin-off of American Horror Story, included an episode inspired by them. Michael Imperioli stars as a grief-stricken screenwriter who falls in and out of the Backrooms. He ends up in mundane locations, where he is confronted by a manifestation of his missing son. The episode was one of five released as a "Huluween event."

  In 2022, a TikTok trend had users zooming in on Google Earth to reveal what appeared to be an entrance to the Backrooms. In 2024, the American rapper Juice Wrld featured a Backrooms inspired music video for his studio album The Party Never Ends. Video games, meanwhile, had been drawing on the Backrooms for years.

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• 8. Playable Backrooms

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  Pie on a Plate Productions released an indie Backrooms game just two months after the original creepypasta. Reviewers liked its atmosphere but criticized its short length.

  Many others followed in the years after, including Enter the Backrooms, Noclipped and The Backrooms Project. Escape the Backrooms, a co-op multiplayer game by Fancy Games, was praised by Bloody Disgusting for its depiction of the extended lore. The Backrooms 1998 came from a one-person developer, Steelkrill Studio, and was released independently, like Escape the Backrooms, in 2022. It is a psychological survival horror game, and reviewers noted its found footage visuals and its limited save system.

  Dreamcore, a first-person psychological horror game from 2025, was developed by the Argentinian studio Montraluz and takes inspiration from the Backrooms. A yellow room photographed in a Wisconsin store in 2002 had by then reached a studio in Argentina.

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