There’s a popular interview where David Bowie is explaining how the internet is going to revolutionize media and ends up describing the web as “an alien lifeform.” Despite the video being from all the way back in 1999, I’ve always thought that this was one of the wisest and most concise descriptions of what cyberspace has become since it first expanded from government intranets and evolved into an invisible overlay that haunts and manipulates the real world.

If you need proof that the internet is a living, breathing entity, look no further than the ever-evolving collection of viral myths and online folktales that seem to organically spread across the world as if promoted by a singular intelligence. It just so happens that one of these ideas has finally blossomed into popular culture outside the internet, with The Backrooms – a Creepypasta dating all the way back to 2011 – finally being turned into a fully-fledged studio horror film courtesy of A24 and YouTube prodigy Kane Parsons.

In honor of the first teaser promising that the upcoming adaptation is a faithful retelling of the internet legend that conquered the world, we thought that this might be a good moment to refresh readers’ memories about what the Backrooms actually are and where this story originally came from. So strap in because we’re about noclip into layers of reality that the human mind was never meant to comprehend…

The Rise of a New Creepypasta

The original Backrooms.

For the uninitiated, Creepyastas are the horror form of “Copypastas”, a term meant to refer to frequently reposted stories that were “copy-pasted” and shared across numerous forums, websites, and even viral e-mails. As these bite-sized horror yarns became more popular, online communities soon gathered to collect and collaborate on them. The Backrooms mythos was actually the result of a single photograph, which sparked users’ imaginations and led to a form of collaborative fiction.

The original image that began the story was later revealed to be a HobbyTown store under renovation, but the uniform carpets, bizarre wallpaper, and seemingly never-ending hallways somehow lent themselves to storycrafting about a place that looked both utterly alien and eerily familiar at the same time. This is where we get into liminal horror, a topic that we’ve previously covered due to the genre’s inspirations in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (itself a book about an infinitely expanding house that’s larger on the inside).

Though I argued in that article that liminal horror can be traced back to Danielewski’s 2000 novel and possibly even further in media like The Shining (with the genre being best described as architectural terror derived from uncanny spaces), I don’t think anyone can deny that The Backrooms really popularized the concept. Liminal horror became a household name as users attempted to classify this collection of seemingly innocuous and “empty” images that made them feel uncomfortable.

The Backrooms Game

Of course, the Backrooms ball only really started rolling in 2019 when an anonymous 4Chan user answered a repost of the original picture in a thread about disquieting images. This is where we got the now-iconic nano-horror story that serves as the first example of Backrooms lore:

“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.”

*A term used to describe exiting the designated play-area in videogames in a way that wasn’t intended by the developers.

The Backrooms Leads to New Wave of Liminal Horror

This brief little piece of existential terror was enough to kickstart the liminal horror movement into overdrive, with other users creating their own liminal hellscapes (such as the liminal pools) and some even choosing to expand the existing mythology with additional “levels” to the Backrooms – each featuring their own collection of photoshopped images depicting all manners of monsters and oddities.

The popularity of these stories also led to adaptations in the form of several video games and even a bizarre episode of the American Horror Stories anthology show. However, the biggest addition to the mythology would only come in early 2022 when High Schooler and YouTuber extraordinaire Kane Parsons (then going by the online moniker Kane Pixels) uploaded the iconic first entry in his incredibly popular Backrooms webseries.

The short film served as a perfect introduction to the concept of a terrifying alternate world layered underneath our own, with its found footage elements and retro aesthetics turning the video into something of a viral phenomenon even outside of the Creepypasta community. Parsons wasn’t a one-trick pony, however, with the YouTuber soon expanding on his (ongoing) series and coming up with his own mythology surrounding an institute named Async and the challenges that they face in attempting to study the Backrooms Complex.

With the web-series becoming a worldwide hit, it’s only natural that Hollywood soon came knocking as several studios were interested in bringing Parsons’ vision of liminal terror to the big screen. A24 was ultimately the one to convince the young filmmaker to adapt his ideas into a feature film, though Parsons wisely decided to finish High School before committing to directing such a massive project.

That’s how we get to the long-awaited release of the first trailer for Parsons’ and A24’s Backrooms film. A nightmarish dream come true for fans of liminal horror, the adaptation stars heavyweights like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve and is set to come out in May of this year.

From what we’ve seen from the trailer so far, it looks like the movie will incorporate aspects from the entire history of the Backrooms, not just the series. That’s why I can’t wait to check it out – so long as there’s a way to noclip back out of the experience once the credits roll!