The Backrooms, explained

What is the Backrooms?

The Backrooms is a shared fiction. Its premise is simple: somewhere behind the normal world is a space made of empty rooms, buzzing lights and old damp carpet, and if you slip out of reality in the wrong spot, you land in it. Nobody owns it. Writers, artists, game makers and filmmakers keep adding to it, and a lot of it is written down in fan-built wikis.

That makes it different from a liminal space. A liminal space (the word comes from the Latin for a threshold) is a picture of a real place that feels in-between, like an empty hallway or a pool at night. We cover that idea on what is a liminal space. The Backrooms is a story with rules, set in a place that does not exist.

The closest comparison is the SCP Foundation wiki, a shared horror-fiction site where many authors build one imaginary world. The Backrooms works the same way, and it grew up alongside the liminal-space photo collections.

What was the post that started the Backrooms?

On May 12, 2019, a thread on the paranormal board of 4chan, an anonymous message board, asked users for "disquieting images." One answer was a photograph of an empty room: yellow wallpaper, beige carpet, fluorescent lights. It looked like an office suite between tenants.

The photo and the text that made it famous arrived in the same exchange: the image, and beneath it a reply describing what that room might be. The community remembers it as one anonymous post, a picture with a caption, not two unrelated contributions. As the account is usually retold, paraphrased: if you "noclip" out of reality in the wrong place, you end up in an endless run of yellow rooms with old, damp carpet. Noclipping is a video-game term for passing through walls or floors that should be solid. In the story, the thing you pass through is reality itself.

The reply named the place the Backrooms and gave its size as hundreds of millions of square miles. A big number with no explanation makes people picture the inside, and picturing is what turned one reply into a genre. Within days the idea had spread to other forums, and people were writing stories set there.

The photo gave people a look. The reply gave them a rule for stepping into it.

What are the Levels, and what are the Poolrooms?

The yellow rooms from the original post became Level 0, the first and most famous stage of the Backrooms. Writers then invented more levels beyond it, in the way a video game has stages.

There is no single official list. The Backrooms is documented on more than one wiki, mostly on Fandom and Wikidot, and their versions do not always agree. If a friend says "that is Level 37" and you find something different, you probably looked at a different wiki.

The best-known level after the first is Level 37, the Poolrooms, at least on the Fandom wiki. It is a maze of white-tiled pools, based on the images of Jared Pike. Pike's images were computer renders of imagined pools, not photographs of a real place. That is why the look is so clean, and why people later went looking for real pools that matched it. It gave the genre its second signature look: the same empty, humming quiet as the yellow rooms, but wet and bright instead of dry and dim.

Who is Kane Pixels, and is there a Backrooms movie?

Yes. In early January 2022, a 16-year-old named Kane Parsons, posting as Kane Pixels, uploaded a short found-footage film made in the 3D software Blender. It looked like a 1990s VHS tape. The series that followed gave the Backrooms a fictional research organization, Async, and a corporate history, so it felt less like a campfire story and more like a cover-up.

Found footage suits the genre. You see the place through someone else's camera, for someone else's reason, and there is no clear way in or out.

By early 2023, A24, the studio behind Hereditary, and its partners had announced a feature film with Parsons directing. The feature, Backrooms, reached US theaters in May 2026, when he was 20. If the movie is how you got here, welcome: everything in it grew out of the thread described above.

Where was the original Backrooms photo taken?

For years nobody knew. The photo had been posted with no source, and no one could say where or when it was taken. Then, in May 2024, a group of users on a Discord server called Virtual Carbon found it.

The decisive clue was an entry dated 3/2/03 in the renovation diary on a hobby store's archived website, which showed the same room. The store was in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The building had been a furniture store before it became a hobby shop, and the photo seems to date from about 2002, during the conversion.

So the most famous liminal-looking room on the internet is a renovation snapshot, taken between two businesses. The spot is now a carpeted track for radio-controlled cars. The owner told Wisconsin Public Radio that nothing there resembles the picture anymore. Visitors still ask to see the room, and one person booked a birthday party at the shop.

Why did one cropped photo work so well?

A photograph leaves out most of a place. It records what stood in front of one lens, from one position, after someone decided where the edges would go. The door behind the camera, the window just past the frame and the time of day are all missing. Viewers fill the gaps, and when the clues in the frame are generic, what they imagine tends to be generic too. A corridor with no visible entrance can, in the mind, go on and on. The Backrooms legend built a whole fiction on that effect.

Then the internet removed even more. Two media scholars wrote a well-known paper in 2011 on "context collapse": on social media, a post meant for one audience is seen by many at once, stripped of whatever made it make sense. They were writing about people managing their audiences, not photographs of rooms, so treat it as an analogy. But it fits. A captionless, cropped image of an office suite could be any office suite, anywhere, in any year. That is why it could be passed around so easily and why so many people could project themselves into it.

A picture also asks very little. It takes one glance, needs no translation, and can be cropped, captioned and sent in seconds.

The Oshkosh search ran the process in reverse. Strangers took an image that had lost everything about where it came from and worked backward, through archived web pages, until a building and a date came back. The feeling came from the photograph as much as from the room, and the photograph had been missing its context for years.

How is the Backrooms different from liminal spaces and similar genres?

These terms get mixed up.

• Liminal spaces are photographs of real or real-looking places that feel in-between or abandoned. The main hub for them is the subreddit r/LiminalSpace, founded in August 2019. See our liminal space examples.
• The Backrooms is a fiction with rules and levels, set in an impossible place.
• Dreamcore and weirdcore pull in half-remembered childhood rooms and collage.
• Analog horror borrows the look of old broadcasts and warning tapes. It took off with Kris Straub's Local 58 in 2015.
• Mallsoft is music that sounds like it is playing in a mall after closing.
• The Exit 8 is a game set in a looping Japanese metro passage. It got a live-action film in 2025.

r/LiminalSpace is a photo subreddit, and its members strongly prefer real photographs of real places. In recent years, much of what circulates as "liminal" on other platforms is AI-generated imagery, and the community generally rejects it. Widely observed, rarely measured: an invented hallway has no history, no light that fell there on a particular day, and no one to find out about. That is why this site uses only real photographs.

Most of these overlap, and the same picture can end up in several of them. If it is a photo of a place that exists, it is probably a liminal space. If it comes with lore, rules and levels, it is the Backrooms.

Nostalgia runs through much of this. One TikTok creator told Dazed in 2021, "I also just miss the 2000s," and the article notes how many clips use 1990s and early-2000s footage. That fits the Backrooms too: a photo from around 2002 and a VHS-style short from 2022.

Where can you find real Backrooms-looking places?

The Backrooms has no entrance, but its look is common in ordinary buildings. The recipe is easy to recognize: yellowish light, fluorescent tubes, patterned or worn carpet, plain walls, and the feel of an office suite between tenants. Think of the quiet floors of a building where a business has just left and the next has not arrived.

Some buildings have that feeling without being rooms you could wander into. A door marked Human Resources and Closed is a good example: the sign says the room is for work and the hour says nobody is there.

If you want to look for these places yourself, our guide to how to photograph liminal spaces covers the practical side, including permission and sharing. The short version: stay where the public is allowed, ask before you go beyond that, and never go through a door marked for staff. The Backrooms is a story about getting lost. You do not need to get lost, or get in trouble, to take the picture.

Keep in mind what the Oshkosh room teaches: you see the mood in the image only because the frame left things out. When you shoot a place, the same rule applies, and you can use it on purpose.

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