Have you ever been in a place that unsettles you, a setting that gives you a sense of dread and loneliness? A liminal space, a space in-between two destinations, is typically associated with feelings of deja vu and uncanniness. Empty malls, suburbs, and buildings could give off that vibe.
The Backrooms brought liminal spaces into the mainstream, first gaining popularity on 4chan, an internet chat room, as a picture post, where the user shares a photo of a hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Later, another poster would reply with a lore post, setting up the foundations of The Backrooms. The Backrooms is the concept of an out-of-bounds area that exists in real life, where certain spots in the world can cause someone to no-clip (a video game term referring to a bug where players will fall through the map) into the backrooms.
Although originating in 2019, The Backrooms would not become popular until Jan. 7th, 2022, when YouTuber Kane Pixels released the first video in his analog horror series based on The Backrooms. Not only would this propel The Backrooms into mainstream attention, but Kane Pixel’s choice to use analog horror would also boost the subgenre’s popularity, thus creating an era where analog horror, The Backrooms, and liminal spaces became popular in internet horror from 2022-2023. Since The Backrooms is a collaborative fiction project, meaning an internet project with a non-linear universe where anyone can go to the official wiki and add to the story of The Backrooms; a similar project would be the SCP series, another collaborative fiction project about a secret government agency fighting and containing anomalies called SCPs, where users can add SCPs, expanding the series’ universe.
The Backrooms’ influence on analog horror is especially astounding, as it really boosted the subgenre, helping elevate works like “Skinamarink,” an analog horror movie that rarely shows the main characters and instead focuses on the setting and the liminal feeling it invokes.
Another factor is the rise of The Backrooms based video games. Because of widespread popularity, an influx of video games have flooded the market. But, because of the quantity of games, many of them are poorly made and labeled “slop” by the community. Thus, The Backrooms would soon become associated with poorly made games.
However, this period of popularity also brought the downfall of The Backrooms. The main scare factor for a concept like The Backrooms is the fear of the unknown, but because it went mainstream, many people kept adding floors and various explanations, monsters, and anomalies on each floor. This resulted in the scare factor being dumbed down, and the unknown becoming more known. Thus, The Backrooms began to be viewed as a satirized title because of the numerous entries.
Additionally, because of the influx of new fans of The Backrooms, many people who have known liminal spaces longer feel as if the newer fans’ interpretations are not true to the actual definition of a liminal space. People would now post pictures of empty parking lots, bedrooms, and classrooms claiming that they are liminal spaces even when those spaces don’t represent a place in-between.
