The Backrooms

The Backrooms are a fictional location invented in a 2019 thread on the imageboard website 4chan. The Backrooms are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional complex of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality. They are one of the best known examples of the liminal space aesthetic and the creepypasta genre. The idea was originally accompanied by a photo of a large, empty room with an uncomfortable yellow atmosphere. The photo was taken in 2002 at the former site of an Oshkosh, Wisconsin furniture store while the new tenant was renovating. It was first posted online in 2003 and on 4chan in 2011, but its origin had been forgotten until it was investigated in 2024. Internet users have expanded on the concept of the Backrooms, introducing concepts such as "levels", layers of the Backrooms that are interconnected; and "entities", hostile creatures that inhabit the space. In early 2022, American YouTuber Kane Parsons published the first installment of a series of Backrooms short films on YouTube, ultimately amounting to a web series of 24 episodes, with more potentially planned. The viral videos have been credited with igniting a surge in Backrooms content and taking the concept into the mainstream. Parsons directed a film adaptation of his series produced by A24, which was released in May 2026. Because the Backrooms is a fan-generated collaborative creepypasta with no single official canon, there is no fixed or definitive number of entities. Depending on which community wiki or database you reference, the total number ranges from a few dozen to well over one thousand documented creatures.