Now that the Backrooms concept has hit the mainstream and achieved box-office success, it’s important to understand that this idea didn’t spring from thin air. From an anonymous photo posting online to selling out theaters around the country, the Backrooms has a story almost as deep and unorthodox as itself.
The movie
Backrooms (2026) follows Clark, a grieving furniture store owner, as he leaves reality and finds a maze of yellow rooms. When his therapist goes to the store to check in on him, she also finds this space that warps memories, life, and people. With the excitement of high-budget actors, a young director, and a unique concept in the horror genre, this film was hyped as something phenomenal. However, it wasn’t just a script that started this story.
Our story actually begins much farther back; its origins both intricate and anonymous.
The beginning
Dating back to an image-sharing website named 4chan, a simple yet mysterious photo was posted on May 12, 2019. This image revealed a dim, empty room with yellow wallpaper, a carpeted floor, and fluorescent lighting. With no apparent threats, this was posted to 4chan with a tag mentioning how the image just felt “off.”
Another anonymous comment posted just hours later changed the game for what this picture meant and jumpstarted the communal worldbuilding:
“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 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.”
Creepypasta and OSC
Creepypasta: a short, user-generated horror story designed to frighten readers and spread across the internet. Acting as modern-day urban legends, the name is a portmanteau of “creepy” and “copypasta” (a term for text copied and pasted across online forums).
The Backrooms phenomenon is technically a creepypasta, given how it started and was shared mainly through the viral “story” above. However, unlike many popular creepypastas like Slenderman or Jeff the Killer, the Backrooms didn’t start with a narrative; it began with just that one eerie photo. Not until after the discussion of what this place was or the feeling it gave did a story start to come into the foreground.
Creepypastas have an immense online presence and a multimedia fanbase. Stories will be retold through graphics, YouTube videos, cosplay, Reddit discussions, video games, and even merchandise. This Creepypasta of the Backrooms, is an example of an Open Source Canon.
OSC (Open Source Canon): Where an entire community contributes lore and worldbuilding, rather than a single author.
The Backrooms have only one true starting image, which means the community contributed to its lore as it became increasingly popular as an Open Source Canon.
Backrooms director Kane Parsons
In January of 2022, teen Kane Parsons uploaded the first of many short films and clips related to the Backrooms lore. His short film, “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” has over 85 million views on YouTube and became a mini-series of clips and scenes featuring liminal and curiously haunting imagery. Suddenly, Parsons’ videos and short films became the face of the concept first conceived by the public a few years prior.
Taking the story and its lore by the reins, Parsons would eventually sign a deal with A24 to make a sub-$10 million-budget movie connected to the backrooms world-building, with Kane as the director.
This movie was received by all sorts of audiences. Reddit and 4chan fans who thought “this isn’t the Backrooms I helped worldbuild,” those who have followed Kane since his first short, and people who knew nothing of the entire concept until the film’s release
Overall, this movie was well-received and featured amazing performances throughout. Some, however, felt as if they were going to walk away with a nice, clean package of answers. I myself walked out of the theatre with many whys, but also understood this as the kind of concept and film that I was okay with my questions going unanswered.
How do the rooms work?
The Backrooms, even though they are a complex and ambiguously vast vat of space and knowledge, boil down to a few simple explanations.
The way we get there stems from old video game glitches, where areas unfilled by the game’s engineers ended up letting characters pass through walls and floors. This “no-clipping” allowed players to advance to later parts of the game or uncharted territory not usually accessible.
The Backrooms involves this video game lore to show how we can just lose contact or connection with reality and suddenly fall into this oblivion of a space. These rooms replicate reality and, as the film says, attempt to “remember” people, items, and clothes. etc.
Demons or monsters of these serpentine mazes haunt these spaces to trap people and feed on their humanity. This “mimicking” of reality is what intrigues people and makes them fall deeper into the rabbit hole of the Backrooms. Reflexively, this mirrors how researchers and critics of the Backrooms film and concept must go down similar passageways to even get a glimpse of what these rooms are trying to tell us.
These yellow rooms were the start of the Backrooms reality in the movie. If we look deep into the 4chan lore, fans have made hundreds of levels in the Backrooms, with these yellow wallpapered rooms not even being close to the beginning. The Poolrooms were a common level of popularity. These were empty waterparks, pools and other aquatic spaces that arose during the popularity of aesthetics like Vaporwave in 2019 and 2020. These pools were seen as calmer levels with less entities and added to the vast world of this uncanny altered reality.
What do the Backrooms mean?
With that in mind, certain theoretical allegories for what the Backrooms stand for are constantly in conversation. In his video titled “The History of the Backrooms | Horror History,” CZsWorld mentions that the Backrooms could stand as a metaphor for video game or social media addiction. These online landscapes are made to mimic real-life ones (GTA V, for example), which leads to addiction and withdrawal from real-world issues and interactions as a consequence. While CZsWorld argues this could be a theory with a solid framework, it doesn’t feel like the overall message the Backrooms could represent or what Kane intended with any of his work.
The YouTuber argues that the Backrooms stand for something not as niche as video game or screen addiction, but rather madness altogether. As we see through the two protagonists in Backrooms, the trauma of loss and heartbreak has clearly fogged their minds, while these labyrinthine mazes of despair only make those emotions bubble to the surface and force us to face them.
Another connection that can be made between the function of the Backrooms and our real-life world is that it stands as an example of artificial intelligence and the uncanny, parasitic nature it holds over us humans since its birth and its reign in these last few years. AI alienates us as humans and attempts to replicate what it thinks is human, natural, and “correct.” In the long run, when we use AI, much like going into the Backrooms, we eat at our own tails, relying on a replication that doesn’t even hold human value.
Whichever theory you agree with, or if you have your own, they all assert that our humanity is what ignites us as humans. Whether that humanity is filled with memories of trauma, excitement, or longing, nothing artificial can fully replicate or replace human society.
Concept and movie together
The Backrooms has its theories, sure. But it was also started online by tons of random people, not with a script. This ambiguity is enough puzzle pieces to let audience members really internalize and understand the concept and film on their own, isolating them within their own imagination and humanity.
And isn’t that what the Backrooms are all about?
