Haberler
Welcome to the terrifying liminal spaces of The Backrooms
J
John Walker
The Backrooms begin with the concept of “liminal spaces." Coined in the early ‘70s, this term describes those transitional, in-between locations that you encounter in everyday life: A hotel hallway, a connecting walkway between airport terminals, or—indeed—the stretching corridors in an office complex that form the setting for The Backrooms.
It began with a photograph posted to 4chan that shows a Dutch-angled view of a yellow-carpeted, yellow-walled office space, with partition walls that don’t quite fit, flock patterns on the wallpaper, and glaring strip lighting in the ceiling tiles. From one perspective, it’s an entirely innocent, empty space. From another, it’s an unsettling, ambiguous place, where everything feels just wrong, in part due to its portentous emptiness. This uncanny feeling has inspired some incredible media, most notably the videos of teenage savant Kane “Pixels” Parsons. This 18-year-old has defined the tone and rules for the fiction with his videos, from its found-footage VHS aesthetic, to the notion of a corporation becoming involved in attempts to create a deliberate portal to the Backrooms. And given its first-person, corridor-based setting, it’s also the perfect setting for video games.
By tradition, a person finds themselves in the Backrooms after falling through a wall or floor from reality. (You might be familiar with the gaming term: "noclipping"). One moment you’re happily walking down the street, but when you lean on a wall to tie a shoelace, you topple right through it. And that’s it—now, you’re stranded in the yellow space, with no visible sign of how you got in. Or, in the case of The Backrooms 1998, it happens while you’re skateboarding. While filming yourself, you bail, hit the ground, and wake up in the Backrooms with just a skateboard and skittering bugs for company.
The Backrooms 1998 describes itself as a “found-footage game"; at first, I was skeptical of the concept, but the game honestly nails it. It's presented as if you’re watching the playback of a VHS tape, despite the fact that you’re controlling the character. When you look down, you can see your own arms and legs, and movement has the camera move in the most peculiarly realistic way. This is entirely like playing a found-footage movie. And good God, it’s so much scarier for it.
There's a crucial piece of Backrooms lore that I haven't mentioned so far: Stuff lives there, if you can call it living. The most traditional monster depicted in this modern folklore—of course, so much of the pleasure of creepypasta is that nothing is determined—is this wiry, scratchy creature that looks like a shadowy scribble come to life. Except it screams; unrelenting roaring screams ring out as it wildly scrambles toward you.
Over time, the mythology of The Backrooms has developed mostly via discussions on Reddit. The space has grown to encompass multiple “levels" and different environs, all of them screamingly liminal. There are parking structures, underground railway tunnels, and abandoned hotels, each containing persistent, uneasy humming noises, and other sounds that really shouldn’t be there. The early access release of another game, The Backrooms Project, has players progress through a selection of such places, including a peculiar factory floor. However, it takes the background lore of the setting much further.
Embracing the Kane Pixels idea that a corporation is involved, The Backrooms Project begins with your arrival at a new job at Siren Facilities, which is presumably an allusion to another creepypasta, Siren Head. You were told to bring a video camera and phone with you, and you follow directions to reach the entrance to the Backrooms. This walk through the facility goes on for an impressively long time, with a bunch of environmental storytelling on the way, before eventually one final elevator ride doesn’t end in an elevator. Eventually, you find yourself stuck in the yellow confines of the Backrooms, and you’re promised that a staff member will recover you if you’re stuck there for too long. Except, as mentioned above, you’re not quite alone.
Oddly, the first monster you’ll likely encounter here is not the scribbly beast of pure terror, but in fact a rather laughable slack-jawed monstrosity that makes a bunch of noise but then pops out of existence. It's not one bit scary, which is a potential cause of concern. However, if anything, it only made things all the more awful when Scribbles did appear—he, or it, is utterly terrifying.
The denizens of Nextbots In The Backrooms are somewhat less terrifying. This is a game that begins in a similar way to the others I've discussed: with your character waking up inside the Backrooms, confused and disoriented. This familiar tone continues right up until you’re attacked by a killer emoji.
“They only look ridiculous at first glance, but they're not!” says the text that accompanies the game. Well, they do look ridiculous. But they’re also very deadly, and they make an awful screeching sound. Running as fast as you can from something entirely not-scary is a peculiar situation, especially in a horror game. While you have your back to it, thanks to the game’s realistic head-bob, it can feel like a proper horror game. However, when you turn around to check how far it is from you, it’s less scary. That's until that peculiar floating smiley-face brutally murders you, of course.
Getting dead is a recurring theme across many Backrooms-based games, but it’s fair to say the less often this happens, the scarier they are. Based on this metric, and indeed many others, the standout game in the micro-genre right now is certainly The Backrooms 1998. Its rendition of the abandoned VHS aesthetic, combined with such realistic movement and sound effects, would likely be enough on their own to create something frightening. But it goes so much further with its tactile interaction and extraordinary levels of tension. In fact, the longer I went without dying, the scarier this game got. Perhaps its cruellest feature is offering you multiple places to hide (lockers, holes in walls, etc) when there's nothing to hide from yet.
1998 goes on to give you tasks as you play, building the concept into a more rounded game, but without compromising on these liminal spaces. Objects are never where they should be; they take on a threatening air, even when they’re just a piece of furniture. And the whispering. Oh, for crying out loud, the whispering. (It’s worth noting the game has a mode to switch off the jump-scares.)
There are dozens of people trying to make games set in this space, and it’s obvious why. The Backrooms so brilliantly lends itself to the first-person format, and its loose structure perfectly matches the level structure of gaming. It's just really scary! I had to stop playing a bunch to write this, because it was all getting a bit too much.
Kane Parsons is already working on a full-length movie based on The Backrooms, with Westworld’s Roberto Patino co-writing, and production (alongside A24) from horror stalwarts Atomic Monster. This suburban myth is only going to spread further—until it eventually consumes us all.