Monstrum

(host) Does this picture look familiar to you?

It's likely not a real place, but it looks like it could be, right?

There's just enough familiarity, but there's also something off about it.

Welcome to the Backrooms.

Perhaps the Internet's most notorious liminal-space experiment, it's a world crafted by digital folklore and fueled by real-world anxieties.

And I'm not just talking about the monsters that might stalk some of the spaces, but the physical and fictional space that is itself made monstrous.

Typically busy locations are unnaturally empty, making them feel off-putting and disturbing.

Popular crowd-source sites catalogue and share this virtual reality.

Participants across the globe contribute in real time to a shared creative universe that explores and investigates liminal spaces and the horrors of the human psyche.

[intro music] I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum."

The Backrooms first revealed itself in April, 2018.

An anonymous user posted the now-famous image with no text or explanation on a random board on 4chan.

The thread asked for "disquieting images that just feel 'off.'"

But it wasn't until the next year that the lore of the Backrooms developed.

On May 12, the photo was reposted onto 4chan's Paranormal export.

An anonymous user asked, "What is that?"

And yet another anonymous person responded, "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality "in the wrong areas, "you'll end up in the Backrooms "where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, "the madness of mono-yellow, "the endless background noise of fluorescent lights "at maximum hum-buzz, "and approximately 600 million square miles "of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in."

Which is terrifying enough.

But then the post goes on to say, "God save you if you hear something "wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you."

[creature growling] Two days later, a user paired the photo and that paragraph together as a new thread on X, and with that, the Backrooms was born.

The place was not only made monstrous; it introduced monsters into it with those unnamed "somethings" wandering around.

It became the core of the Backrooms' lore.

You enter the Backrooms by "noclipping."

Noclipping comes from a video-game design practice.

It's a type of cheat code baked into the test game that allows a player to quickly move between levels by passing through solid objects.

Time works differently in the Backrooms.

The space is usually manmade, unfurnished, windowless, and illuminated by fluorescent lighting.

Once you're in, you can't get out.

And there could be something-- a monstrous, malevolent entity--lurking around.

The lore, based on the original post, states that it extends anywhere from 600 million square miles to literal infinity.

Reddit posts on boards like NoSleep and CreepyPasta inspired by this 2009 post pop up.

It even became a meme template.

But largely, the horror aspects of the Backrooms remained niche to the online horror community.

Then something serendipitous and terrible happened-- the Covid19 pandemic.

The increase in social-media use during lockdown saw an uptick in digital folklore, with the Backrooms playing a starring role.

After all, eerie scenes like empty airports, closed restaurants, and seemingly abandoned office buildings were our reality during lockdown.

Video games, short stories, YouTube videos, and a very popular TikTok hashtag skyrocketed discussion of the monstrous space.

And on January 7, 2022, teenage YouTuber Kane Parsons, better known by username Kane Pixels, posted his first episode of "The Backrooms," an analogue-style found-footage horror series that became an instant hit, amassing over 57 million views.

Parsons even signed a movie deal with A24 in 2023.

Fluorescent-lit rooms, dropped ceiling tiles, slightly antiquated wallpaper, cheap carpet, sharp, angled corners, large rectangular indoor pillars-- these elements are combined with sterile, modern spaces, like corporate offices, school classrooms, waiting rooms, and warehouses.

They all appear abandoned, kind of recently.

It's unsettling.

And that's even before considering the possibility of entities stalking through the endless hallways.

Similarly to the SCP Foundation, the Backrooms is a collaborative fiction project.

It's complicated to get into all the differences between the various lore systems of the Backrooms and how different levels work, but you could break it down into three main systems.

In the first system, the entire physical space is all on the same floor, or level, which extends into infinity.

I like to call this approach "Level Infinite."

Then there's the Three Level system.

Imagine an almost endless three-story building.

And finally, we have the Extended Lore system, which I like to call the "Infinity Verse," which is basically a limitless number of levels/ realities that go on forever.

Some people incorporate Backrooms into their reality, for practicing meditations, affirmations, and other relaxation techniques attempting to reality shift.

It's a form of lucid dreaming or self-hypnosis that brings the Backrooms' "noclipping" concept into the real world.

There are multiple Reddit forums, TikTok hashtags, and YouTube channels that foster the community and offer advice on the mental exercises to achieve reality shifting.

Practitioners of reality shifting have different explanations on how it works.

Some say it's possible due to multiverse theory.

Others call it a "trans-liminal" experience.

And some claim it's a technique that emerged from 1980's CIA experimentation and of producing out-of-body consciousness.

If the goal is to access other realities, often fictional ones, then trying to access the Backrooms is a form of escapism at its core.

But I think the overall popularity of the Backrooms as a horror space is more than that.

[creature thumping] Let's talk about the role of boundary lines in labyrinths in older folklore and culture.

Folklore frequently sees territory or boundary markers as significant.

Many deaths, burials, and rituals happen at crossroads, boundary lines, or junctions between water and earth since they were seen as dangerous transition spaces between worlds or realities.

These boundary markers might take form as stones, fences, doorways, gates, windows, or bridges.

But sometimes, they could look more complex, like labyrinths.

Many spaces of the Backrooms incorporate the use of labyrinths.

Unlike mazes, which consist of multiple linked passages, labyrinths are single-path routes.

They disorient time and direction.

Many architectural labyrinths in antiquity were likely designed to mimic the journey of the dead, like the Egyptian Labyrinth of Hawara, the Tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena, or the many Celtic labyrinths.

These labyrinths could also be called boundary markers.

Labyrinths are often used in mythology and art as metaphors for inner journey and growth.

It's about the journey, not the destination.

Even in the famous Minotaur myth, Prince Theseus' escape from the labyrinth prison of the Minotaur marks his journey into adulthood and the throne.

Perhaps the Backrooms are a modern, digital labyrinth that blurs the line between worlds-- the real, physical world, and the nebulous online one.

Even just digging around on the Internet for information on the Backrooms feels very much like a journey into a maze with no clear exit or entrance.

I see the Backrooms as an exploration into both the human unconsciousness and the liminal reality of the Internet itself.

Liminal spaces require a shift in perspective and therefore understanding.

They change as they are experienced.

The Internet does this too.

You feed the algorithm, and what you see changes what information is then presented to you, and so on and so forth.

Metaphorically engaging with folklore of the Backrooms is a transformative experience as well, especially if we account for the labyrinth elements that inform its emotional effects.

A liminal space is a physical space that serves as a metaphorical threshold influenced by ideas of transformation and transition.

To engage with and in these kinds of in-between spaces is to challenge and reformulate one's existing beliefs by exploring boundaries.

So, what does that mean if we think of the Backrooms as a liminal space?

Well, within the lore of the Backrooms, exploring a space requires not only the ability to move through planes of existence, but the very act of doing so is transformative and usually dangerous.

The experience itself changes people.

I also can't help but think about the role of liminal spaces in Gothic literature, where the crossing of a threshold often marks a significant event, usually one supernatural in nature.

Think of all the vampires asking entrance to homes, shadowy figures in mirrors, or ghosts appearing outside windows or seen passing in doorways.

In Backrooms lore, the human is the one who crosses the threshold-- noclipping inside its walls.

The human becomes the dangerous entity, the uninvited interloper.

Outside of the fictional world, the Backrooms spaces are absent of humans-- at least initially-- and we feel compelled to inject humanity back into them.

But because of the importance of the Backrooms as a place, one composed of material and immaterial elements, we are also forced to construct the non-human.

In object-oriented ontology, a facet of post-human theory, we are compelled to consider the experience of non-human entities-- not just animals and plants, but objects and immaterial elements like water or light.

Enter the entities.

While the physical space of the Backrooms appears as non-living and static, the non-human things that stalk its various levels are a manifestation of our subconscious.

Those intrusive, scary thoughts that lurk in the corners of our minds are turned physical in the Backrooms.

[low rumbling] (player) What?

Whoa!

Sure, you may be trying to outrun or avoid a physical creature just outside of view, but metaphorically, you are trying to avoid conflict even with oneself.

But that just reiterates that the modern reinterpretation of the labyrinth archetype as a vast, infinite, unknowable space reflects our continued desire to understand human consciousness and the vibrant matter of all things.

And that's why liminal spaces scare us.

They challenge and confuse our minds in a way that requires introspection.

The Backrooms are haunted by the lack of humans, and we are haunted by the existential dread they evoke.

The expansion of the Backrooms' lore occurs largely through first-person narratives, with people testifying to their supposedly real experience in the liminal space.

Psychologists assert that social groups can form around similar experiences-- real or unreal.

And when we look at the community aspect of the folklore, we are creatively trying to map out this uncomfortable space-- that of being human-- together.

But that's not new to the Backrooms or even digital folklore.

I think that's what we've been trying to do with monsters all along.

You'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the s-- is it the hair?

The Hawara, the tomb of the Etrush-can... Etruscan.

Tomb of the Etruscan... Et-rus-can.

Etruscan?

(crew) Etruscan.

Etruscan.

[sighs]