What Are the Backrooms?

The Short Version

The Backrooms are the internet's most famous piece of liminal horror — an imaginary dimension of endless, empty rooms hidden behind normal reality. Yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights, damp carpet, and the constant buzz of electricity. No people. No exits. Just rooms that go on forever.

The concept started as a single anonymous post in 2019 and exploded into a global phenomenon — spawning YouTube series, Roblox games, Minecraft maps, and an entire community-built mythology of "levels," entities, and survival rules. If your kid has mentioned the Backrooms, this guide will tell you everything you need to know. And if you're already deep in the lore, we've got liminal space horror books that hit the same nerve.

Where Did the Backrooms Come From?

In May 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board posted a now-iconic image: a photo of a sprawling, empty office space with yellowish wallpaper, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp, stained carpet. The kind of space you might find behind a closed office building — except it went on forever.

Alongside the image came a short, chilling description: if you're not careful and "noclip out of reality," you'll end up in the Backrooms — roughly 600 million square miles of empty, randomly generated rooms. Nothing there but the stink of old wet carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and the endless background hum of fluorescent lights. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

That was it. A single image and a few sentences. But those few sentences contained everything the internet needed to build an entire horror mythology. The concept of "noclipping" — borrowed from video game terminology for glitching through walls — gave the Backrooms a perfect origin mechanic. You don't choose to go there. You fall there, by accident, and you can't get back.

The Backrooms Mythology

What started as one room became an entire universe. The internet's collaborative storytelling engine kicked in almost immediately, and the Backrooms community built a sprawling cosmology of levels, entities, and factions. Here's the foundation:

Level 0 — The Lobby

The original. The yellow rooms. This is where you arrive when you noclip out of reality — an infinite expanse of identical rooms with buzzing fluorescent lights, damp carpet, and yellow-tinted wallpaper. It's disorienting, monotonous, and deeply wrong. Level 0 is the Backrooms in its purest form, and it's still the most iconic image in the entire mythology.

Level 1 — The Warehouses

Darker and more industrial than Level 0. Concrete floors, exposed pipes, dim lighting, and the occasional puddle of unknown liquid. Level 1 feels like the maintenance corridors of an enormous building that was never meant for people. Entities are more common here.

Level 2 — The Pipes

A labyrinth of dark, cramped utility tunnels. Steam pipes, low ceilings, and intense heat. Level 2 is hostile — both the environment and the things that live there. It's where the Backrooms start to feel genuinely dangerous rather than just eerie.

Entities

The Backrooms aren't empty. The community has created dozens of entities — creatures that inhabit different levels. Some are hostile, some are neutral, and a few are even helpful. The most unsettling thing about Backrooms entities isn't what they look like — it's that they exist in a place that shouldn't have life at all.

Noclipping Between Levels

Movement between levels follows the same logic as entering the Backrooms in the first place: you noclip. A wall gives way. A floor isn't solid. You fall through, and you're somewhere new. There's no map, no elevator, no menu. Navigation in the Backrooms is accidental, disorienting, and terrifying.

Kane Pixels and the YouTube Era

The Backrooms existed as text-and-image internet lore for a few years before everything changed. In January 2022, a teenage filmmaker named Kane Parsons — known online as Kane Pixels — uploaded a short found-footage video to YouTube. It showed a researcher exploring the Backrooms with a handheld camera, and it looked incredible.

Kane Pixels didn't just animate the Backrooms — he gave them a story. His series introduced the A-Sync Research Foundation, a fictional organization that had discovered and was attempting to study the Backrooms. Think of it as the Backrooms' version of the SCP Foundation — a scientific body in way over its head, dealing with something that doesn't follow the rules of reality.

The videos went massively viral. Tens of millions of views. Suddenly the Backrooms weren't just a niche internet horror concept — they were a cinematic experience. Kane Pixels proved that the Backrooms could be genuinely terrifying on screen, and his work inspired an entire wave of creators. He's since been signed to work on a feature film adaptation.

Backrooms Games

For most kids today, the Backrooms aren't a 4chan post or a YouTube video — they're a game. Backrooms games have become one of the most popular horror subgenres in gaming, especially on platforms kids already use.

Roblox Backrooms

Roblox has dozens of Backrooms experiences, from faithful recreations of Level 0 to elaborate multi-level survival games with entities, puzzles, and multiplayer co-op. These are often the first place kids encounter the Backrooms concept. The low-poly Roblox aesthetic actually makes the Backrooms more unsettling — the simplicity amplifies the wrongness.

Steam and Standalone Games

Several standalone Backrooms games have launched on Steam, ranging from atmospheric walking simulators to survival horror with full entity AI. These tend to be more intense than Roblox versions and are aimed at older players.

Minecraft Backrooms Maps

The Minecraft community has built incredible Backrooms maps — endless yellow corridors recreated block by block. Some use redstone and command blocks to simulate entity encounters and level transitions. If your kid plays Minecraft, there's a good chance they've already explored a Backrooms map.

Why the Backrooms Are So Unsettling

The Backrooms work because they exploit a very specific kind of fear — the dread of familiar spaces gone wrong. Everything in the Backrooms is almost normal. Office rooms, hallways, carpet, lights. You've been in places like this before. But here, they go on forever, and you're completely alone.

This is the concept of liminal space — transitional places like hallways, waiting rooms, empty parking lots, and closed shopping malls that feel eerie when stripped of their usual context and people. The Backrooms are the ultimate liminal space: architecture without purpose, stretching into infinity.

There's also the uncanny valley of architecture at play. The rooms look almost right, but something is off. The proportions are slightly wrong. The lights flicker. The carpet is damp for no reason. Your brain recognizes the space as "office" or "hallway" but simultaneously flags it as wrong — and that gap between recognition and wrongness is where the horror lives.

And then there's the fear of infinite emptiness. The Backrooms aren't haunted in the traditional sense. The terror isn't a monster jumping out. It's the idea that you could walk in any direction forever and never find an exit, never see another person, never hear anything but the buzz of fluorescent lights. The mundane, made infinite, made terrifying.

The Backrooms and Liminal Space

The Backrooms are the most famous example of liminal space horror, but the concept goes much deeper. Liminal spaces are transitional environments — places you pass through but never stay. Hallways, stairwells, empty food courts, hotel corridors at 3 AM. They're not meant to be destinations, which is exactly why they feel so wrong when you stop and really look at them.

There's even a word for this specific feeling: kenopsia — the eerie atmosphere of a place that's usually bustling with people but is now empty and quiet. Think of a school hallway during summer break, or a shopping mall after closing time. The space remembers being full. You can almost feel the absence of everyone who should be there.

This concept is at the heart of our Kenopsia Diaries series — standalone horror novels set in familiar public spaces that have gone terrifyingly wrong. An empty mall that won't let you leave. A school building where the hallways rearrange themselves. Spaces that remember being full of people and resent being empty. If the Backrooms gave you chills, the Kenopsia Diaries will feel like home — in the worst possible way.

Explore our full collection of liminal space books for more stories that capture the dread of empty, impossible places. And if you love the intersection of internet horror and fiction, check out our complete guide to creepypasta — the broader genre that gave birth to the Backrooms.

Backrooms Books for Kids

The Backrooms have captured an entire generation's imagination — through YouTube, Roblox, Minecraft, and endless internet lore. But most of that content is fragmented, unmoderated, and varies wildly in quality and intensity. That's where books come in.

At BlockMyth, we publish horror and adventure fiction for middle-grade and young adult readers — stories that tap into the same internet-born horror that kids already love. Our Kenopsia Diaries series delivers liminal space horror in book form: familiar places gone wrong, impossible architecture, and the creeping dread of being somewhere you shouldn't be. All the atmosphere of the Backrooms, crafted into stories with real characters and real stakes.

We're also developing the Level Zero series — horror-comedy set directly inside the Backrooms. The internet's most iconic liminal space, brought to life as full book-length adventures. Stay tuned.

Whether your kid is obsessed with the Backrooms or just discovering liminal horror for the first time, our books are designed to meet them where they are — with chills, humor, and stories that respect how smart young readers are.