A pixelated image, yellow carpet and fluorescent lighting. That was enough for the internet to build, in just five years, the most terrifying collective horror mythology in recent years. Now A24 wants to bring it to the big screen and, although the trailer looks great, the question is whether Hollywood can contain something that, by definition, has no form.
Origins of backrooms. On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user posted a thread on /x/, the paranormal-themed board on 4chanwith a simple request: share images that “felt strange.” Among the responses appeared a photograph without context or signaturea room with immense yellowish carpet, walls of the same color, and everything illuminated with a ghostly fluorescent light. No people, no windows, hellishly mundane. And yet it was ridiculously disturbing.
The next day, another user added a description under the photo. He said that if you “clip out of reality in the wrong areas” you will end up trapped in the Backrooms, a non-space that spans nearly a billion square miles of empty rooms. The original post received four responses, but this repost combined with the image triggered the phenomenon. Pay attention to detail: the term “noclip” describes, in video games, the glitch in which a character passes through a solid wall and falls into the geometric void behind the map. Real architecture becomes a membrane. The monster is space itself.
The myth grows. In a few days there were already stories exploring the myth. In just one month, it had been created a wiki explaining the lore that didn’t stop growing. It wasn’t even clear where the photograph came from, it had no metadata, but ended up being tracked even a blog archived on the Wayback Machine. It was a photograph of a HobbyTown USA store (specializing in radio-controlled cars) in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken around 2002 to announce the renovation of its facilities. Pure abysses of extreme mundanity. That dissonance between the banality of the origin and the symbolic load is what turned the myth into a giant.
He lore. Infinite and unfathomable, but broadly speaking, as the Backrooms wiki explains: they are divided into levelsdifferentiated environments with their own rules. Level 0 is the original room from the first post. Level 1 scales to a larger industrial architecture. Level 2 introduces darkened maintenance tunnels where there is the feeling of being watched. Entities soon appeared: the Smilers, who live in darkness; the Facelings, humanoids that populate most levels with a complete absence of facial features; the Hounds, with four limbs, disproportionate jaws and no intelligence…
Origin in creepypasta. Backrooms have their roots in the creepypasta genre that has its possible origin in the blog of Ted the Caverpublished in 2001, where a man documented his exploration of a cave with increasingly disturbing results. Until the entries simply stopped appearing. Documentary realism, narrative ambiguity and lack of a defined ending were the keys that gave rise to creations such as Slender Man, created by Eric Knudson in a manipulated image contest on the Something Awful forum.
Slender Man he was a tall, faceless figure stalking children in the margins of seemingly normal photographs. On the same 4Chan /x/ board, internal norms and rules appeared that gave a bit of order to its history, but the creepypastaas a genre, had become a monster with infinite heads: stories without ending, without rules, almost without development, that only sought sordid, vaguely familiar terror, with dreamlike overtones and without moral justification. ‘American Journalism’ would describe the phenomenon in 2002 of the “largest collaborative writing project in history.”
Unexplainable fear. The backrooms are a sophisticated version without the need for characters or monsters (although the community would end up creating them, as we have seen) of many stories. creepypasta. Its secret is that it is based on recognizable spaces (offices, shopping centers, meeting rooms, hallways) devoid of their usual context. Researchers Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis described it as “the uncanny valley of physical spaces”.
Jump to audiovisual. The turning point starred Kane Parsons, known on YouTube as Kane Pixels. Parsons was 16 years old when he published his short film ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’ in 2022: nine minutes shot in first person with a VHS filter, in which a cameraman accidentally crosses the threshold of Level 0 and is followed by an entity that does not look good. From there it would come a series which exceeds 197 million views. Parsons created a universe of his own (the fictional Async research institute, experiments with dimensional portals in the 1980s, government involvement) that sometimes contradicted the mythology of 4chan. The community ended up adopting part of its history.
Video game connection. In August 2022, three years after the founding post on 4chan and several months after Kane Parsons’ video, ‘Escape the Backrooms’ landed on Steam proposing a cooperative adventure for four players, and which was embraced by the players: It has 91% positive reviews and a peak of 48,879 simultaneous players. And there’s more: ‘The Backrooms 1998’ takes the concept to the first-person perspective with a VHS filter, with the story of a teenager who films his friends skating and accidentally falls to Level 0.
The backrooms are in tune with one of the most stimulating horror video game fevers of recent years: the lo-fi horror or PS1 aesthetic. There are very active communities like Haunted PS1which functions as an incubator for the subgenre through development competitions, annual builds, and a network of developers who exchange techniques to reproduce the visual texture of the 1990s in modern engines such as Unity or Godot. In this context, Backrooms fit naturally and intuitively.
And now, to the movies. one year later of Kane Parsons’ first video, indie production company A24 won the bid for the film adaptation rights to the series. With an estimated budget of 10 million dollars and a premiere scheduled for May 29, 2026, it has already shown its first trailer, as disturbing as can be expected. It will tell us the story of a therapist whose patient disappears in a parallel dimension, and she must enter it to recover him, moving away from the found footage from the original series. A risky bet but one that could renew the aesthetics of current horror cinema. As already happened on the internet.
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