How ‘Backrooms’ All Started With This Photograph

The original Backrooms photograph.

Backrooms has been a box office smash this summer, grossing over $330 million worldwide. The horror flick, with firm roots in creepypasta internet lore, began with a single photograph taken on a Sony Cyber-shot camera in 2002.

Note: No spoilers for the Backrooms movie in this article.

The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark and is directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, who popularized the Backrooms via a series of unsettling YouTube videos. A24 selected Parsons to direct the movie, which has now become the distributor’s highest-grossing film ever.

The Origin of the Backrooms Photo

According to Forbes, the photo of a yellow-tinged, windowless room with fluorescent lighting first appeared on the messaging board website 4chan in 2011, where it was viewed as an “oddly unsettling image.”

In 2019, it was once again included on a 4chan thread, which asked users to “post disquieting images that just feel off.” But this time, an anonymous user responded with a description and gave it its name

The original Backrooms description.

It snowballed from there. But wait, what is the actual photo of? Well, that remained a mystery for years until a Backrooms-dedicated Discord community discovered it on an archived webpage from March 2003.

According to Wikipedia, the photo was taken during a renovation of a water-damaged furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It was being upgraded by the building’s new tenants, Hobbytown, and was posted on the new store’s blog. The original filename was “Dsc00161.jpg.”

This photo was taken at the same Wisconsin furniture store in 2002.

The original photo sparked imaginations to run wild. The Backrooms became a classic example of creepypasta, a genre characterized by short, user-generated horror clips shared on the internet.

The Backrooms concept spread to other platforms and in 2022, then 16-year-old Parsons dropped the first of 24 episodes exploring the Backrooms. Presented as a VHS tape being inserted into a player, it shows a cameraman accidentally falling into the Backrooms, where he meets an awful entity.

Parsons used Blender and Adobe After Effects to create the environment of the Backrooms, and it took him a month to complete the first iteration.

Kane Parsons’ version of the Backrooms in the first YouTube video in 2022.

What are the Backrooms?

The Backrooms is an infinite labyrinth of disquieting rooms that make little sense. The unfortunate characters who fall in often never find their way out again. What’s worse is that the Backrooms are very much alive and will mimic lost humans and steal their memories.

We won’t get too deep into the complex theories of who or what created the Backrooms. But what the series does do is play on the liminal spaces aesthetic, a style that has very much crossed into photography.

Backrooms and Photography

Liminal spaces are empty connecting areas, such as a hallway, that play on our sense of familiarity. It is an aesthetic that has long been deployed by photographers and filmmakers to build atmosphere; think Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the work of David Lynch and his disciple Gregory Crewdson, as well as urban exploration photography.

Modern photographers like Todd Hido also capture places that feel both oddly familiar and slightly uneasy.

Backrooms also influenced Dan Erickson, who created the TV show Severance. Lumon Industries, a never-ending maze of unsettling spaces, pays homage to the original Backrooms photo.

This urban exploration photograph taken by Jason Kane inside an abandoned hospital corridor is a good example of a creepy liminal space.

Liminal spaces have become a photography aesthetic to aspire to — with the #liminalspaces hashtag on TikTok amassing nearly 100 million views.

What started as a simple photo of a renovation of an unusual location has grown into bona-fide online visual culture.