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.

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.