Overview
The Backrooms is an internet urban legend that began as a creepypasta posted to the English-language anonymous imageboard 4chan. It is the best-known example of liminal spaces, an internet aesthetic built around images of places that should be crowded but are unnaturally empty. The core premise is an endless maze of vacant office rooms entered by “noclipping out of reality.”
No single person or organization owns The Backrooms. Contributors have added new floors, invented creatures to inhabit them, and built collaborative wikis, fan games, and short films around the original image. Because no work holds official status, drawing a line between canon and fan fiction is difficult, and each contributor’s version of the setting differs from the next.
The Founding Post
On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan’s /x/ paranormal board started a thread asking others to post unsettling images. The image attached to that post — a yellow-wallpapered, fluorescent-lit, carpeted room shot at a Dutch angle — had itself been posted anonymously on April 12, 2018. Its origin stayed unknown for years. In May 2024, it was identified as a photograph taken in 2003 of a HobbyTown USA store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during renovations of a space the store had bought from a furniture retailer.
The following day, May 13, 2019, another anonymous user replied that the yellow room was “The Backrooms,” attaching the text that became the template for nearly everything that followed.
Levels and Wiki Canon
Within days of the original creepypasta, Reddit users began posting Backrooms short stories, first on r/creepypasta and then on r/backrooms. Creators expanded the setting by inventing additional floors and the monsters that live on them. According to Happy Mag, one school of contributors treats The Backrooms as a video game with numbered levels: Level 0 is the yellow room, Level 1 is a concrete room, Level 2 is a narrow, overheated concrete corridor, and so on.
Two English-language wikis became the main hubs for this expansion: a Fandom wiki established in June 2019 and a Wikidot wiki established in March 2020. Each continues to generate new material. As of January 2023, the English Fandom wiki listed more than 1,100 levels. The Japanese Fandom wiki maintains a rule that each level should be written to stand as closed as possible within itself, preserving a degree of independence for individual authors.
Fandom Fault Lines
Like many internet communities, The Backrooms has fractured. Some fans prefer the solitude and dread of the original photograph and reject the presence of active narrative. After the creation of new floors and monsters took hold on r/backrooms, a user named u/Litbeep founded r/TrueBackrooms to focus solely on the original yellow room. Samantha Culp has described “a kind of war between originalists, purists, and expansionists” within the community. Kane Parsons has said he does not fully agree with the purist position but understands it, and has adopted a strategy of extending the original work’s story while preserving its atmosphere.
As of March 2022, r/backrooms had roughly 160,000 members and r/TrueBackrooms roughly 15,000. Kotaku has observed that because The Backrooms belongs to no one, it carries a wide range of possibilities.
Reception
The Backrooms took shape as a subgenre of liminal spaces, an internet aesthetic that has grown since 2010, and its popularity drove liminal spaces into wider circulation. Some sources describe The Backrooms as the origin of the aesthetic. On TikTok, the #liminalspaces hashtag has been viewed nearly 100 million times, and videos of users zooming in on Google Earth to find an entrance to The Backrooms have drawn large audiences.
PC Gamer described the various levels as “the uncanny valley of places,” comparing them to H. P. Lovecraft’s R’lyeh and the city of the manga BLAME!. ABC News, Le Monde, and others classify The Backrooms alongside internet collective horror projects such as the SCP Foundation. Kotaku argued that mass collaboration and the absence of a clear monster or threat set The Backrooms apart from other creepypasta, and, together with Tama Leiber, located its horror in what it makes the audience imagine; Leiber attributed its draw to “an eerie familiarity.” Kotaku added that the subtle “wrongness” inherent in liminal spaces is what generates the fear. Netorabo has introduced the view that it resembles the world of Shin Megami Tensei.
YouTube
On January 6, 2022, Kane Parsons uploaded a short horror film titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube, where he runs the channel Kane Pixels. Parsons built the video over roughly one month using Blender and Adobe After Effects. He has described The Backrooms as a manifestation of a past from the late 1990s and 2000s that he barely remembers. By May 2022, The Backrooms (Found Footage) had around 26 million views. WPST called it “the most terrifying video on the internet.” Otaku USA classified it as analog horror, while Dread Central and Nerdist compared it to the 2019 video game Control. Kotaku praised its withholding of information as a source of fear and mystery. Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing predicted that The Backrooms, like the creepypasta Slender Man, would eventually become “a slick but unwatchable two-hour Hollywood movie.”
By February 2023, Parsons had expanded the series to 18 installments, introducing a narrative element called ASYNC, an organization that opened and investigated portals to The Backrooms in the 1980s. The series has accumulated over 100 million views in total, lifted The Backrooms from obscurity to the internet mainstream, triggered a surge of Backrooms content, and revitalized the found-footage genre. For his short films, Parsons received a special jury prize from The Game Theorists at the 2022 Streamy Awards.
Feature Film
On February 6, 2023, the independent studio A24 announced it was developing a film adaptation of Parsons’s shorts, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino wrote the screenplay, and producers included James Wan and Shawn Levy, along with Michael Clear of Atomic Monster and Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps.
The film opened in the United States on May 29, 2026. Against a production budget of $10 million, it earned $81 million over its first three days in North America, surpassing the previous week’s release Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu to take first place on the domestic weekend chart. It went on to gross more than $200 million worldwide, making Parsons the youngest director, at 20, to debut at number one in North America. A Japanese release was scheduled for September 4, 2026.
Games and Attractions
The Backrooms has influenced numerous video games, including releases on Steam, Roblox, and Minecraft. On July 25, 2019, Pie on a Plate Productions released The Backrooms Game FREE Edition; PCMag, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Bloody Disgusting praised its atmosphere. Sigma Klim likened its novelty to Yume Nikki, while Bloody Disgusting judged that its first five minutes were excellent as a childhood-fear experience but that it grew tedious thereafter and that a single playthrough sufficed.
Steelkrill Studio released the psychological survival horror game The Backrooms 1998 on May 26, 2022, with Bloody Disgusting and PCGamesN praising its found-footage style. Fancy Games released the cooperative multiplayer game Escape the Backrooms on August 12 of the same year; Bloody Disgusting praised it for faithfully depicting the wiki-expanded setting. Other similar titles include Jamathan’s Lost in the Backrooms in 2019, Cosmic Crow Creations’ Enter the Backrooms in 2021, and Patrik Nagy’s The Backrooms Project and MateusDev’s Nocliped in 2022.
In 2022, haunt producer Michael T. Yamaguchi adapted The Backrooms into an attraction.
One Image, Two Posts, Fourteen Months Apart
The Backrooms did not begin as a franchise, a wiki, or a film. It began as a photograph with no explanation, and the distance between the two events that created it can be measured precisely: April 12, 2018, and May 12, 2019.
The first date belongs to an anonymous post — a yellow-wallpapered room, carpeted floor, fluorescent light, photographed at a Dutch angle. Nothing accompanied it. Nothing followed it for over a year.
The second date belongs to 4chan’s /x/ board, where an anonymous user opened a thread requesting unsettling images. The same photograph was attached. A day later, on May 13, 2019, another anonymous user replied that this yellow room was “The Backrooms,” supplying the text that would generate nearly every later interpretation of the setting. Two posts, one reply, and the entire body of Backrooms material that followed traces back to that exchange.
For years, no one knew where the photograph had come from. That question was answered in May 2024: it was a 2003 image of a HobbyTown USA store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken while the store was renovating a space purchased from a furniture retailer, and uploaded to a personal blog. The Backrooms, it turned out, had been a furniture store’s empty floor all along.
The Wiki Years
The expansion came fast and it came from Reddit. Within days of the original creepypasta, users began posting short stories to r/creepypasta, then to r/backrooms. Creators invented new floors and populated them with monsters. Happy Mag documented one faction’s system: Level 0, the yellow room; Level 1, a concrete room; Level 2, a narrow, overheated concrete corridor, with the numbering continuing from there.
Two English-language wikis formalized the growth. A Fandom wiki opened in June 2019. A Wikidot wiki opened in March 2020. Both kept producing. By January 2023, the Fandom wiki listed over 1,100 levels — a figure that says less about architecture than about throughput, since each entry represents an author who chose to add a room rather than leave the hallway alone.
The Japanese Fandom wiki took a different structural approach, requiring that each level be written to conclude as completely as possible within itself, so that individual authors could retain a measure of independence from one another.
The Secession
Scale brought disagreement. Some fans wanted no active narrative at all — only the loneliness and dread of the original photograph. When new floors and monsters became the norm on r/backrooms, a user named u/Litbeep broke away and founded r/TrueBackrooms, dedicated to the yellow room and nothing else. Samantha Culp described the situation as “a kind of war between originalists, purists, and expansionists.”
The numbers, as of March 2022, were 160,000 members on r/backrooms and 15,000 on r/TrueBackrooms. The originalists were outnumbered roughly ten to one. They had also, by then, lost the argument over what The Backrooms was.
Kane Parsons has said he does not wholly agree with the purist position but understands it, and that he has chosen to extend the original work’s story while keeping its atmosphere intact.
The Video That Moved It
On January 6, 2022, Parsons uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube under the channel name Kane Pixels. He built it in roughly one month using Blender and Adobe After Effects. He described The Backrooms as a manifestation of a past from the late 1990s and 2000s that he barely remembers.
By May 2022 the video had around 26 million views. WPST called it “the most terrifying video on the internet.” Otaku USA filed it under analog horror. Dread Central and Nerdist compared it to the 2019 game Control. Kotaku credited its restraint — the withholding of information — with producing the fear. Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing offered the dissenting forecast, predicting that The Backrooms would end up like Slender Man: “a slick but unwatchable two-hour Hollywood movie.”
By February 2023 the series had reached 18 installments and introduced ASYNC, an organization that had opened and investigated portals to The Backrooms in the 1980s. Total views passed 100 million. Found footage came back into circulation as a genre. At the 2022 Streamy Awards, The Game Theorists gave Parsons a special jury prize for the shorts.
The Studio in Los Angeles
The prediction about Hollywood was, in the end, directionally correct and wrong about the details. On February 6, 2023, A24 announced it was developing a Backrooms film based on Parsons’s shorts, with Parsons directing, Roberto Patino writing, and James Wan and Shawn Levy producing alongside Michael Clear of Atomic Monster and Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps.
The film opened in the United States on May 29, 2026. Its production budget was $10 million. It earned $81 million in its first three days in North America, beating the prior week’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu to first place on the domestic weekend chart, and went on to gross over $200 million worldwide. Parsons became the youngest director, at 20, to debut at number one in North America. A Japanese release was set for September 4, 2026.
The Ancillary Economy
The Backrooms spread outward into games and physical space while the film was still in development. Pie on a Plate Productions released The Backrooms Game FREE Edition on July 25, 2019, drawing praise for its atmosphere from PCMag, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Bloody Disgusting. Sigma Klim compared its novelty to Yume Nikki. Bloody Disgusting judged the first five minutes excellent as childhood-fear material and the rest tedious, concluding that one playthrough was enough.
Steelkrill Studio released The Backrooms 1998 on May 26, 2022, with Bloody Disgusting and PCGamesN praising its found-footage style. Fancy Games released the cooperative Escape the Backrooms on August 12, 2022; Bloody Disgusting praised its fidelity to the wiki-expanded setting. Alongside these came Jamathan’s Lost in the Backrooms in 2019, Cosmic Crow Creations’ Enter the Backrooms in 2021, and Patrik Nagy’s The Backrooms Project and MateusDev’s Nocliped in 2022. Haunt producer Michael T. Yamaguchi adapted The Backrooms into an attraction in 2022.
Reach extended to TikTok, where the #liminalspaces hashtag has been viewed nearly 100 million times and videos of users zooming into Google Earth to find an entrance to The Backrooms drew large audiences. Dan Erickson, creator of the television series Severance, has named The Backrooms among the influences on that show. No single owner ever emerged to license any of it.
What 1,100 Levels of Nobody’s Property Produced
The Backrooms produced a body of criticism before it produced a coherent canon. That order matters, because the criticism had to describe something that no editor had ever approved and no rights holder had ever licensed.
The academic literature arrived first at the periphery. Ferran Riesgo Martínez, in a 2023 article in Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico, traced resonances between The Backrooms and the fantastic fiction of Jorge Luis Borges — the title of the piece, “Las Backrooms de Babel,” makes the connection explicit. Phillip Pyle published an analysis in 032c on April 12, 2023. Samantha J. Stephen’s 2022 paper in the Journal of Psychosocial Studies examined the phenomenon as collective meaning-making through the unconscious. Ryūhei Hirota’s essay “Nostalgic Horror: The World of Backrooms and Core” appeared in the Autumn 2021 issue of Waseda Bungaku. Four scholarly treatments, none of them prompted by a release schedule.
Critics, meanwhile, kept reaching for comparisons that described a place rather than a plot. PC Gamer settled on “the uncanny valley of places,” and illustrated it with Lovecraft’s R’lyeh and the city of the manga BLAME!. ABC News and Le Monde grouped The Backrooms with collective internet horror such as the SCP Foundation. Netorabo relayed an opinion that it resembled the world of Shin Megami Tensei.
Why Nothing Chases You
Kotaku’s account of the appeal is worth stating plainly, because it explains what the imitators kept failing to reproduce. What set The Backrooms apart from other creepypasta, in Kotaku’s reading, was mass collaboration combined with the absence of any clear fear or threat.
No monster carries the franchise. In the wiki system that Happy Mag documented, Level 0 is a yellow room, Level 1 a concrete room, Level 2 a narrow, overheated concrete corridor — architectural descriptions, not encounters. Kotaku and Tama Leiber located the horror in what the material makes the audience imagine. Leiber attributed the draw to “an eerie familiarity.” Kotaku traced the fear to the subtle “wrongness” already inherent in liminal spaces, waiting in the image before anyone had written a word about it.
This is the point at which The Backrooms becomes difficult to copy. A creature can be drawn. An empty corridor has to be found.
Originalists, Purists, Expansionists
The internal argument over what The Backrooms should be never resolved, and the reason is structural. There is no individual or organization that owns it. Drawing a line between real canon and everything else is difficult, because every contributor’s version contradicts the next and no work holds official status. Samantha Culp described “a kind of war between originalists, purists, and expansionists” inside the community.
The factions were not evenly matched. As of March 2022, r/backrooms counted roughly 160,000 members; r/TrueBackrooms, founded by u/Litbeep to focus on the original yellow room alone, counted about 15,000. The Japanese Fandom wiki attempted a procedural answer rather than a doctrinal one, requiring each level to stand as closed as possible within itself so that individual authors could keep their independence. By January 2023 the English Fandom wiki had passed 1,100 levels. Whatever the purists won, it was not the encyclopedia.
Kotaku’s verdict on the ownership vacuum was that The Backrooms holds a wide range of possibilities precisely because it belongs to no one. That is a generous reading of an unresolved custody dispute, and it has the advantage of being true.
Found Footage, Restored to Circulation
The form The Backrooms handed back to the internet was found footage. Kane Parsons’s The Backrooms (Found Footage), built in about a month with Blender and Adobe After Effects and uploaded on January 6, 2022, drew roughly 26 million views by May of that year, and the series around it passed 100 million total views by February 2023. Parsons collected a special jury prize from The Game Theorists at the 2022 Streamy Awards, and the genre it belonged to came back with it. Dread Central and Nerdist read the shorts against the 2019 game Control. Otaku USA filed them under analog horror. Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing predicted the ending that arrived anyway: “a slick but unwatchable two-hour Hollywood movie.”
The Unlicensed Property With a Release Date
Beschizza’s prediction landed on May 29, 2026, when A24 released the film in the United States. The production budget was $10 million. The first three days in North America brought in $81 million, enough to beat Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu to first place on the domestic weekend chart, and worldwide grosses passed $200 million. Parsons, 20 years old, became the youngest director to debut at number one in North America. Japan’s release date was set for September 4, 2026.
Consider what was licensed to make this happen. A24 announced the project on February 6, 2023, with Parsons directing, Roberto Patino writing, and James Wan, Shawn Levy, Michael Clear of Atomic Monster, and Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps producing. The source material was a photograph taken in 2003 during renovations at a HobbyTown USA in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, of a space bought from a furniture retailer, posted to a personal blog, reposted anonymously on April 12, 2018, attached to a 4chan /x/ thread on May 12, 2019, and named in a reply on May 13, 2019.
The Room Nobody Paid For
The Backrooms now circulates as an attraction adapted by haunt producer Michael T. Yamaguchi in 2022, as a TikTok subject where #liminalspaces has drawn nearly 100 million views and users zoom into Google Earth hunting for entrances, as a named influence on Dan Erickson’s television series Severance, and as thousands of games spread across Steam, Roblox, and Minecraft — The Backrooms Game FREE Edition from Pie on a Plate Productions, The Backrooms 1998 from Steelkrill Studio, Escape the Backrooms from Fancy Games, plus Jamathan’s Lost in the Backrooms, Cosmic Crow Creations’ Enter the Backrooms, Patrik Nagy’s The Backrooms Project, and MateusDev’s Nocliped.
Price of admission to any of it, before the film: zero. The entity that owns The Backrooms remains the entity that has always owned it, which is no one. For an asset that generated a $200 million theatrical run, an eleven-hundred-level wiki, two warring subreddits, four peer-reviewed papers, and a Fandom wiki founded in June 2019 that still updates, the balance sheet records no owner, no canon, and no monster. It has only the room, still beige, still lit, still empty.