The terrifying original story of Backrooms explained, as film trailer is released

We’re finally getting a feature film based on Backrooms, so here’s the eerie original creepypasta story that inspired so much online discourse.

A24 is producing Backrooms, a sci-fi horror starring Chiwetel Ejiofor about an ominous, never-ending liminal space with mysterious creatures. The movie is based on the short film by Kane Parsons, who is now directing the A24 adaptation. The nine-minute short film follows a found footage style and has 43 million views on YouTube.

In 2019, the original Backrooms post was shared on 4chan…

Infamous internet image board 4chan is the origin of the backrooms story. At some point in 2019, an anonymous user posted the now viral picture of the backrooms, adding this creepy caption:

The origin of the backrooms was a post on 4chan [2019]
byu/BetterPay5749 inbackrooms

“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 six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

The caption concluded: “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

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Understandably, the story quickly went viral. It taps into kenophobia, the fear of vast open spaces, and many people started adding their own lore details about the mysterious Backrooms as the 4chan thread grew.

It soon spread beyond the forum to Reddit and the rest of the internet. Since it’s all user-generated, there’s basically endless “levels” and “sub-levels” to the Backrooms, thousands of creepy entities and more. It’ll be interesting to see what Kane decides to include in the official movie.

The actual Backrooms location was found in 2023

For a long time, part of the eerie mystique of the Backrooms was that the iconic picture couldn’t be reverse-image searched. Anyone who tried would pull up a blank. But in 2023, Reddit users found a buried 2019 tweet that identified the original location. The Backrooms was actually a Hobbytown shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The blog site where the image was originally shared is down now, which is why people couldn’t find it after 2019.

How the Backrooms were ACTUALLY found: a timeline
byu/Wide_Development7608 inbackrooms

Even with all that context, there’s still something unnerving about that original photo.

Featured image via 4chan