What Are The Backrooms? The Online Origin Of The Sci-Fi Horror Movie, Explained

If you've browsed the internet sufficiently, you've almost certainly heard of "The Backrooms," a mythology of user-curated liminal horror content, which has managed to reach full Hollywood film status. The R-rated film "Backrooms" (sans "The") revolves around individuals who have "no-clipped" through the bounds of reality and landed in an infinite maze of dull corporate hallways and fluorescent lights with the threat of supernatural predators around every corner. This massive internet phenomenon has humble roots in a single photograph posted to the paranormal section of online image board, which sparked endless lore and eventually a series of videos created by a young filmmaker.

The first cited appearance of the photo that would go on to inspire The Backrooms was on 4chan's Paranormal image board in 2019, a place for users to post photos and extrapolate creepy stories from them. The photo in question depicts an empty, aged office space with worn, yellow wallpaper, moist, brown carpets, and bright fluorescent lights. An anonymous user on this thread extrapolated on the photo, conceiving of a massive labyrinth of identical hallways that normal individuals would inexplicably fall into between the cracks of reality, with a constantly looming dread that something vicious is stalking them. This was a prime example of what would come to be known as liminal horror, focusing on individuals trapped in transitory spaces like hallways and garages.

From its initial inception, the concept of The Backrooms has branched outward exponentially, matching the influence of some of the best horror movies and inspiring horror-centric video content, written works, and entire video games, each one adding to the existing mythology. The Backrooms circulated very quickly across other social platforms, with Reddit's Creepypasta subreddit in particular being home to many new stories set in those yellow hallways and even inspiring a separate subreddit. Elevating the lore even further, Kane Parsons – known as Kane Pixels on YouTube – posted a short film in the style of found footage horror, which became a viral sensation, with 78 million views since 2022. Parsons also directed the film adaptation, "Backrooms." 

It was the booming popularity of The Backrooms that largely inspired the liminal horror content explosion of the 2020s, and we could be looking at the birth of the next great horror film you'll be streaming on Halloween nights. Interestingly, in 2024, a group of internet sleuths actually managed to successfully track down the origin of the original Backrooms photograph after several years of combing through archival data. Despite the standing assumption that it was an office space, The Backrooms image actually came from a hobby store based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Specifically, the shot was of a space that had experienced water damage, hence the signature "moist carpets," prior to its renovation as a space for R/C car racing.