The backrooms remains eternal. C’est fini. Did you know I have behind-the-scenes content over on my Patreon? Check it out to get a unique look at my process and support my future videos: www.patreon.com/ClarkElieson
Do you know Backrooms has 9282772377289228377 levels and 9281827729198272781928 negative levels and you would atleast need 32 years and in the Backrooms time stops so if you noclip in the Backrooms and you escape you would end up on the same place where you noclip and in the same time. WEIRD
The Backrooms feels like if someone saw a picture of humanity's structures but knew nothing about what they are or their function, and tried to recreate them based on nothing but what he saw in the picture. It *looks* like human structures, but it feels alien and otherworldly. This combination of very familiar and extremely unfamiliar is what makes The Backrooms as uncanny as it is.
This is the type of thing that fascinates me the most about the backrooms. The creepy-pasta, expansive catalogue of monsters and the SCP type accounts of the backrooms are cool. But the feeling that you get from looking at these liminal spaces is, in my opinion, much more fascinating than the infinitely detailed lore. Edit: What I originally meant from this comment was that I am fascinated by the lonely nostalgic feeling of the backrooms and I was looking for content like this. I don't mean to put down the creative writing people have done of the backrooms lore.
I definitely agree. While the expansive lore and levels are cool, but the creepiest part of the original backrooms is best because of the fear of the unknown, suffocating monotony of seeing the same room and soul crushing loneliness. With all the information about different levels, you just know too much about something that is supposed to be a mystery.
Yeah, 100%. The fact that everyone here feels this fear. I remember such a room at my dad's work in the early 2000's. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I did find it a certain thing I don't have any words for. I cannot put my finger on every place I saw a backroom at. It's a vague, uncomfortable, uncanny and horrifying in a way no other fear is horrifying
I think the "levels" thing kinda destroys what makes the Backrooms so terrifying. The never ending monotony of a liminal space that never ends. To me that's diminished if there is, in fact, a huge diversity of locations and vistas.
i agree, but i do think there is a separate element of fear to these levels that can be explored in a different context. while the backrooms in of itself is an already horrifying concept, what if there were never ending ‘levels’ to the backrooms? slowly slipping further and further down, further away from your point of entry, slowly destroying your mind as you process all these seemingly endless and random levels. but then again, i dont think these levels are ‘necessary’ :]
@Jordanxkun Yeah I know, but the way they're made out doesen't appeal to me or cause dread in the same way as the ugly, yellow liminal space that is the OG dimension.
I agree that the "additional levels" or the "weird creatures" just take away from the creepiness of what made the backrooms creepy in the first place. I think what makes it really scary for me is the feeling of isolation and entrapment, being stuck in a never-ending hallway where each room looks the same as the previous one. No windows or contact to the outside world. I also think the fact these rooms look like they were made by human hands (walls, lights etc.) yet no soul is to be found adds to the creepiness of it.
@@seregris1557 the lane pixels video works because it doesn’t give context. There are variations to the architecture but they feel just as unsettling and alone as everything else. Most additions of levels make it sound as if it’s some game where you’re getting closer to escaping and the entire idea of factions and settlements in the backrooms is so backward for what makes it work. The lane pixels video doesn’t frame it as if it’s different levels but rather just different things in this randomly generated endless world. As for the monster personally I feel a couple of them works well but many things over do it heavily. I feel as if the monsters enhance the feeling of isolation as you’re not alone on a technical level but something you can’t communicate with and only want to kill you is hardly companionship.
@Shizumi yeah I know I’m just saying why I feel his videos work better despite incorporating elements of some of the extra stuff. I also now realize every single time I typed Kane I accidentally typed lane
Should be just one level that covers 3 times the surface of earth. With an unknowable horror lurking somewhere. Just like the original backrooms post states. Levels and the classes of monsters does kind of ruin it. I liked Kane Pixels version when the ystarted where the monster is horrible and unknowable but there and murderous.
@@plugshirt1762 Minecraft's Hell has it's own “nature”, and so does the Backrooms. When you're in either of those places, you're back to being an animal at the lower end of the food chain. That's why I think SOME of the entities work, it just gives off that extra anomalous feeling.
I had an experience in something like a “liminal space” in real life once before. For my job I was sent to work in Norfolk, Virginia area for a few days. It was in the late autumn, so not exactly a tropical getaway. Despite that, I decided to go visit Virginia Beach, a popular tourist trap, just to check it out. Being a cold November weekday in the US East Coast, the place was absolutely deserted. But there I was… on the beach, with my jeans, shirt and tie and a winter bomber jacket, standing with my work books sinking into the sand. The beach stretched far, and all you could hear was the wind and the waves. Not a soul in sight. The boardwalk behind me, with all its walkways and bike paths, was empty. It actually didn’t feel strange to me at the time. I just felt like… whatever, you know, what did I expect? Beach season was long gone. It was actually very peaceful to explore. But it wasn’t until later when I showed photos I took of myself there, did people point out the strange feeling they got from looking at the photos. The sun was out on the day that I took the photos, so in the picture, it looked like it could have been a beautiful, warm sunny day. But seeing me in that bright weather, decked out in my engineer attire… standing happily in the sands of an empty tourist trap… was just really odd to them. I must have looked like a lost astronaut trekking through shores of a faraway planet.
Honestly the Backrooms is the most emotionally and mentally immersive horror piece I've ever encountered. Every aspect of fear comes from within. There's nothing inherent about the horror. It's not something purged onto you with the label of being scary. It's empty and devoid of anything concrete; there's no horror to distinguish. Therefore everything scary comes from your own mind, giving the sense of dread and horror to you from what you fear in your own mind. It's a horror story you've essentially created. The familiarity and isolation comes from your association with memory and recognition of the objects and spaces in the backrooms. It's not someone else's horror that you may or may not find scary, it's nothing objectively scary, and so everyone's mind fills in the horror individually. It's why it'd so universally terrifying. Clowns are scary to some, not to others. The backrooms doesn't single out one item or idea to scare you, they take your subjective SENSE of fear itself and evoke that. Everyone fears it using themselves as the catalyst. The emptiness is a template for you the viewer to fill in and scare yourself with, using the ambiguity and uncertainty as a tool to help those feelings arise out of you. Traditional horror feeds the horror into you, but this is horror you feed into it. That's why it's so immersive: it's personal. You feel personal and oddly nostalgic about the liminal spaces because they're banking off your foggy memories. It isn't someone else's ideas flooding your synapses, it's your own. The fear and danger is all inside of you, which is why it feels so close, personal, intrusive, and terrifying. There's truly nothing like it I've ever encountered but it's so brilliant in its freeform and subjective design that i can't control being immersed and attached to it. After all, it IS a part of me. The horror is of my own creation. We give those empty walls and buzzing white lights power, and damn does the fear the evoke project powerfully.
Honestly the Backrooms is the most emotionally and mentally immersive horror piece I've ever encountered. Every aspect of fear comes from within. There's nothing inherent about the horror. It's not something purged onto you with the label of being scary. It's empty and devoid of anything concrete; there's no horror to distinguish. Therefore everything scary comes from your own mind, giving the sense of dread and horror to you from what you fear in your own mind. It's a horror story you've essentially created. The familiarity and isolation comes from your association with memory and recognition of the objects and spaces in the backrooms. It's not someone else's horror that you may or may not find scary, it's nothing objectively scary, and so everyone's mind fills in the horror individually. It's why it'd so universally terrifying. Clowns are scary to some, not to others. The backrooms doesn't single out one item or idea to scare you, they take your subjective SENSE of fear itself and evoke that. Everyone fears it using themselves as the catalyst. The emptiness is a template for you the viewer to fill in and scare yourself with, using the ambiguity and uncertainty as a tool to help those feelings arise out of you. Traditional horror feeds the horror into you, but this is horror you feed into it. That's why it's so immersive: it's personal. You feel personal and oddly nostalgic about the liminal spaces because they're banking off your foggy memories. It isn't someone else's ideas flooding your synapses, it's your own. The fear and danger is all inside of you, which is why it feels so close, personal, intrusive, and terrifying. There's truly nothing like it I've ever encountered but it's so brilliant in its freeform and subjective design that i can't control being immersed and attached to it. After all, it IS a part of me. The horror is of my own creation. We give those empty walls and buzzing white lights power, and damn does the fear the evoke project powerfully.
This is why I fully agree with the "Too many cooks" concept. The premise is a wonderful cosmic horror in that the victim is just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there is nothing they can do. Adding monsters and the like quickly moves it from wonderful cosmic horror to generic movie monster horror. It makes it too personal and targeted.
Half agree half disagree. I don’t love the whole “shadowy science entity studying the Backrooms” concept, but the monsters themselves are actually quite neat. Especially the ones that tap into the aesthetic of the uncanny valley themselves. The Smilers are a great example, especially when done right. I’ll leave an example below. To me, part of the fear that monsters like these tap into is like that fear of something watching me, like when the lights were off in the attic, or in my Grandparents’ basement at midnight. I love that kind of horror. Example: ua-cam.com/video/rWwgg74I4po/v-deo.html
To add to that, though, the Backrooms are an internet meme, not an independent property. You can draw whatever horror you want out of this, and that’s great! I just think that the addition of monsters isn’t as detrimental as some people think, especially with the content creators who do it very well.
I love the personal and targeted part. The entire point of the backrooms or at least their core concept is that they’re not at all personal. It’s a space that doesn’t care about you. Your presence in the space is unperceived. No monsters will be there to care enough to chase or kill you. You are not with anyone or anything, as that’d be too high of a luxury. The environment will not support your life. It doesn’t need to. It wasn’t made for you. It’s old and still young. It has existed infinitely before you and will exist infinitely after you.
@@cklounge2096 This worded and explained my favorite part of this comment exquisitely. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to put the exact fascination into words. Thank you.
@@miahshontell360 I think the existence of entities can also be a mirror to the real world; there are things that happen, organically caused or not, which are unaware of you and never think of you. They just happen.
In my comment I addressed how the fear for me is not only being transported to a confused childlike sense but also that the backrooms illustrate a fear of loss of control. For me, since that’s what I suffer with the most, it is the fear of not being able to dictate what to do next or even where I am. It’s that helplessness that gets to me.
Psychosis runs in my family and I possibly triggered a psychotic episode after taking an edible and I went to a place like this. It was the single most terrifying and disturbing experience of my life. I felt like I had gotten trapped in an in-between place of nothingness and that I would be there forever.
when you mentioned blame! i nearly jumped out of my seat. such a criminally underrated series. also, as a person who somewhat lacks the capability to articulate my thoughts in the way i want to, your videos have been really helpful and entertaining during quarantine as i've been forced to face my mental illness more than usual. there only being a present in the backrooms, feels a lot like my psychosis, and the terrifying way it seemingly deletes my memories and melts my days together. i didn't realize that until now! it's truly fascinating being able to step back and look at these experiences from a viewers perspective rather than being caught in the middle of it. thank you, i'm definitely going to give some of the referenced books a try as well!
@@julianslayden7895 there's a movie on netflix but it doesn't really do justice to the vibe of the manga, worth watching after you read the manga maybe
@@julianslayden7895 i agree with BestAtNothing's response. there's a netflix film but like many others i'm not a fan of the CGI style. it's an entertaining watch but doesn't do justice to Nihei's style in my opinion!
I haven’t read it, or even heard of it before, but I’m so glad he mentioned it. That is TOTALLY the style of horror I like, and I’m already sure I’m going to love it.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more people connect this concept to The Cube movies. They had the same idea of ever-expanding, similarly structured rooms with hauntingly foreboding feelings.
Maybe I’m weird but I always find big empty “back rooms” like malls or airports etc as peaceful, I can sleep and have slept in big empty conference halls as peacefully as my own home. You put shaky cam and creepy sounds in a mundane hallway and it sure is creepy, but a mundane hallway by itself is the opposite, calming and relaxing, reminds me of being a happy kid in the 90s.
Sort of feel like that if a room is empty I don’t get any feeling of it other than peaceful and calm could sleep in on but what can make it unsettling if you play music that are old and goes on and on could make me feel uncomfortable to it the fact is this video is very interesting.
@@umbreon5946 right, my mind would play tricks with me to fill in the void, something like a head poking round the corner and going back when I look at it. Would fuck me up so much
The amount of research and work put into this video is extraordinery. These 15 minutes felt like 1.5 hour profesisonal documentary. Keep doing your work man, your takes are unusual but also very well argued which makes you one of the most entertaining creators I've ever watched.
Theres a horror story from 1892 called The Yellow Wallpaper, it's really disturbing because although The Backrooms first image came out in 2019, The Yellow Wallpaper story pretty much details this whole place. The narrator even describes the room smelling of damp, maybe The Backrooms has been around longer than we think!
The Yellow Wallpaper was a story about a woman diagnosed with “hysteria” (really, depression). She was kept isolated by her husband and doctor but longed to escape.. yet there was nowhere to go. She eventually commits suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning herself.
@@beautyintheskies thank you for the recap on the story, however, you got the ending wrong. The woman's husband comes back into the room to find that the his wife is crawling around the room along the wallpaper and she yells 'I got out, in spite of you and Jane!' and then her husband faints.
omg i read that during school once, and it was really scary lol. she imagined all the horrible things within that wallpaper and that room BECAUSE she was stuck there, and she was there for so long that her mind started to evoke fears that weren’t actually there. that’s why it’s so scary, because even though it wasn’t really there it probably felt more real than if it were.
I've always felt like when it says "noclip out of reality" it doesn't mean something like pushing your arm through a wall. You have to break the boundaries of reality itself, wether that be by breaking the laws of physics or some other method that shouldn't be possible, you will end up in a different dimension.
Its like how you can “catch atoms lacking” or that theory where you can, in an impossibley rare chance, put your body through solid atoms. It would be terrifying, and most definitely accidental. But the backrooms adds to it. you have no way to, in the atom example” take your arm out”. You cant leave. You are there. Alone, scared, and there is no place to hide. Its open. Yet, nothing is in that wide, infinetely wide open space.
@@podlodialgilap3490 >major case of breaking the laws of physics Not exactly. The chances of all of the atoms in your body suddenly and randomly teleporting through a wall (as you try to put your hand through it) is not zero. These events, albeit on infinitely smaller scales, do happen, atoms sometimes randomly phase in and out of existence, or suddenly teleport. There is a non-zero chance that you will one day wake up and fall through the ground, physics wise, its possible, the chances of it happening are just infinitesimally small.
It’s very interesting seeing the 2 ways people interact with the backrooms. On one side you have people brainstorming, evaluating, and expanding the lore and concept creating an insane collectively told dimensional horror story kind of about human survival and hope within utter hopelessness while the other side lets it sit as is with nothing else but the somber and melancholic notes of nostalgia and memory at its most raw, and uncontrolled form. Neither is wrong in their style of perception, but it is interesting to see the two expressions of it be so different.
Yeah some people are trying to add on to the backrooms and supposedly try and create some sort of story behind it but the other ones are just leaving it as it is and leaving it how it’s supposed to be, just an endless random generated offices with no explanation behind it, it’s just there. That’s the original backrooms that I like. But I feel like the reason why people are creating and adding more stuff to it is probably because they don’t want to see the backrooms as a random place with random generated yellow walls with no explanation behind it, it gives them a very uneasy and anxious feeling and they think that they have to make up something in order to make that feeling go away. They want explanation and meaning behind it but since they can’t get it, they decide and do the only thing that they can do, and that is to make up their own story and add more and more to it. This is why I hate the current backrooms, not everything has to have a story behind it, we don’t have to know who made the backrooms or where it came from, It’s just better of if they leave it how it is.
@@Viewer89000 The person who brought the backrooms is also the one who added monster and lore. If you're talking about mere images that existed before these uploads, then you are not talking about backrooms but simply "uncanny/nostalgic" pictures. I can relate your opinion, but you sound like an elitist douchebag. The Backrooms are a new concept, are those short films exploring uncanny places and recording those monsters that anyone can make.
As a fan of BLAME! I personally think we should leave it as is not for the sake of a somber nostalgia but for the sake of a great and terrible isolated wandering through a place never designed to know you, one entirely familiar in an unfamiliar way. Have you seen the painting “Nighthawks?” You’ll most likely have at least seen it parodied. I yearn for a space like that, like the world which surrounds it and in which it is a single point of light and habitation, one that should be familiar but entirely isn’t and was never designed for the presence of humans, simply designed for the idea of human presence. In BLAME! the builders still make somewhat standard things, staircases, apartment blocks, but they are all mad and it has been so long for a human to show them how they are supposed to be used that any purpose has been lost beyond their construction and existence as part of The City
I think adding so much lore and so many monsters did ruin the Backrooms a bit, but I think the concept of a seemingly infinitely large and empty space where the only things in the Backrooms is you and a monster is terrifying. It plays on both a person’s fear and anxiety, the fear of a monster coming to murder you, something that you cannot stop or defeat, and the anxiety that such a creature could be anywhere, it could be miles away or right behind you, it could be stalking you at any moment, it could be around a corner or on the other side of a wall. Just the knowledge that you’re trapped in such a large space with such a powerful and mysterious creature is so fear inducing to me.
It works even better if it’s not clear whether the monster is real or imagined. The character sees something out of the corner of their eye, or hears a vague, human-but-inhuman noise and can’t tell if it originated close-by or far away (a place like the Backrooms would likely distort our perception of space, including how echoes work). I’m also haunted by the idea of a person losing their mind and deliberately shouting for the entity to take them so their suffering can end, but it doesn’t - either because it’s not real at all, or because it doesn’t want to kill them.
The problem is the monster gave an obvious finality when in reality the backrooms is far more about the absurd abstract context. Adding the monster cheapen the sensation by making it like other typical "place with monster that will kill you"
@@faizalf119 But what I understand from the comments above is that this monster, if it even exists, would in fact never kill you. It's like the infinite torture of the mind. Not only would you be wondering forever in empty halls that look like something you once knew, but feel alien, you would also be in a perpetuous state of anxiousness from the idea that something is out to get you, or not ? You'll just never know
I watched the Backrooms' "Found Footage" video not too longa ago for the first time, and I was a bit shocked, it's very creepy, almost unsettling. But what really got under my skin was the fact it seemed to have tapped into the majority of my childhood fears in such a way that it's almost a feeling of Deja Vu. The familiarity may have been THAT overpowering to the point that i believe i've had multiple nightmares of this place. Just a different room from the same level 1. Has anyone else got that notion?
In the beginning there was only fog and gray and then there was fire and so they came you see Lord Gwyn banished the dark by sacrificing himself as fuel to the First Flame. How is this relevant to the video and your comment? It’s not. Why did I bother typing all this? A good question that is. Am I wording myself carefully to make myself seem more intelligent than I actually am? Perhaps. The word I would use to sum this all up is Depression. Why? Well I shot myself a little over a year ago and this video and the Backrooms strangely sum up what I was feeling when I chose to do what I did. It comforts me oddly I can’t get enough of it. I bid you farewell comment reader. Are you going to read all of this…I don’t think so. Edit: changed the word Should to Shot
Did you ever used to get these intense fever dreams as a child where your nightmares would become almost...indescribable? It's hard to explain, but everytime I was sick/had a fever, the reality of my nightmares would warp. There would be no perception of scale or time, and occassionally I'd be chased by something. But more often than not, I always got the notion of being watched accompanied by a very specific feeling that could only be described as "something's not right" and "I shouldn't be here". And it's not the same feeling you get if you were in a haunted house or something, no it literally feels like you've entered another dimension/reality you have no place being in, like some non-euclidean world. The found footage Backrooms series sent chills down my spine because it was exactly how those nightmares felt.
@@CelestialDraconis I know what you mean, except I still have those dreams. Unfortunately they are a common occurrence for me. I’m usually not chased by anything though.
The Backrooms pushed me into a terrifying headspace reminiscent of getting lost in a Walmart Supercenter as 6 years old. I wandered off and my eyes glazed over aisles and aisles of products that suddenly had no meaning to me as the fear of losing my parents forever drowned out each item's normally scintillating and garish scheme. About to watch this video, but I always click to hear different takes!
When I was a kid my grandparents’ house had this huge finished basement. The walls were that same color yellow and the floors were carpeted with the same color carpet. It had those same kinda office lights. It also had a couple unfinished storage rooms behind closet doors that always terrified me. But the rest of the basement never bothered me. It had personality, it wasn’t eery or empty. When we stayed with them it was the part of the house we were allowed to run wild in and play in. Our bedroom was down there. It was a very comforting place for me in my childhood, aside from the creepy unfinished storage rooms. When I was 12, we moved further away from them. We stopped seeing them as often, and when we did, it never lasted long enough that we’d go down to the basement. It was like I forgot it existed. Then, about two years ago, my grandmother died very suddenly and we had to sell the house and all of their things. It was heartbreaking and a very painful experience for me with such a nostalgic place that was symbolic of a person I love who I lost. When all was said and done, I did one last walk-over of the house, and I went into the basement. It was complete empty. Stripped of everything that made it welcoming and nostalgic and comfortable. It looked just like that original 4chan picture of the backrooms and even though I had not yet seen that picture I was suddenly completely overcome by grief and terror and sadness. I just started wailing and crying as I walked through and I felt like a vulnerable child while also being painfully aware that that childhood is gone. Someone I love is gone. Those good memories are gone. All that was left was this terrifying shell of a place that felt like you might get lost in it and never find your way out. I think it’s part of why this is especially haunting and scary for me. I’m sure nobody will read this but if you did, thanks for listening.
@@dimitrigainsborough3477 Wow. Thank you. What a kind thing to say. I won’t be forgetting that anytime soon myself. I am so glad this resonated with someone who’s not just me lol
I think the connection to the past has something to do with liminal spaces. As kids, living in the 2000s or early 2010s, memories of textures and areas lodged themselves deep into our brains, and images like the original backrooms photo and other liminal spaces in different backrooms levels resurge the memories. It gives a weird feeling of nostalgia but also the uncanny
agreed. nostalgia can be a pretty weird thing lol. a few months ago i showed my mother some popular liminal space images i found online and she said that they didnt make her feel any certain kind of way. however when i showed the same images to some of my friends we all agreed that the locations felt eerily familiar, as if we had somehow been in these spaces before. i wonder what kind of images would invoke a similar feeling in my mom. life is strange.
@@Hyperion4K I think since we as children perceive things differently from adults at the time. Many of the images have a 80’s- 2000 etc quality that we have experienced then but our parents don’t. But the newer generation will probably have something else. It’s just how it goes
I love being forgotten! Love the end of world aesthetics! Finally no one expects anything from me. The worst is not being forgotten, it is being forgotten when convenient, and only remembered when I’m expected to give.
@@mmecharlotte I see what you mean. And Even if you’re not famous, Anyone can videotape you in public and post it and you can get made fun of, death threats and harassment, like what happened with the autistic boy who tried to help a lady with her groceries or that girl at the game with the hot dog. There’s also the danger of people misidentifying you- like internet sleuths who incorrectly identified a random college student online as the Boston bomber, and he later killed himself from all the harassment. These days, anyone can become “internet famous” or “infamous” against their will, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Embarrassing or even photoshopped pictures, intimate photos can start circulating. I’m not saying celebrities have it easier, and I absolutely feel for them, but At least they have bodyguards and lawyers so they can sue to get damaging media off the internet. But my heart especially breaks for all the regular people who’s lives get ruined by internet mobs
i’ve always just had a creeping suspicion that the backrooms was just a large symbolism for someone with dementia, as the themes fit and people tend to use everywhere at the end of time, a 6 album project about dementia, to give the backrooms a more “only present” feel
I never saw any video or post that blended both the backrooms and EATEOT, so I don't really know if that theory is valid in any way. And in any case, dementia is famous for not making you feel an "eerie sensation of something being wrong" because you simply don't remember it being wrong. The backroom instead, clealry makes you feel like you know the place, but also that you clealry don't, and that it feels human, even when it clearly is not
@@yasininn76There are different types of dementia and different stages, so can't really write off OP'S observation. It is a common account of dementia patients who feel guilt and shame for their actions but can't wrap their heads around why they did it. They do however remember the moment, the environment, the people and feel guilt/shame so I would assume they know it's unfavorable behavior.
wow, this concept is really scary, this is my biggest fear, just being forgotten, literally left alone in spaces that are too huge and empty, precisely like the backrooms, almost infinite, and then hearing unrecognizable noises increases the fear; these places and these feelings are undoubtedly alienating, and the fact that they are familiar makes them truly disturbing and uncanny
This is why the inclusion of monsters actually make the backrooms less scary. When there are monsters chasing you, at least you know your fear came from them. However, when there's only a never-ending empty office stretching into oblivion. You're your own monster.
for me, I think knowing that something may appear all of sudden is what creeps me the most about the backrooms, roaming the place for hours if not days all alone, hearing just your foot steps and breathing then you start hearing something getting closer to you is hella terrifying to me, it is like you knew that the time will come but you are never ready for it.
Well it’s also creepier because you haven’t seen any monsters but you can’t be sure that there aren’t any. It’s like how you can’t prove that something does not exist because you can’t search the whole universe and come to that conclusion. You can’t search all of the back rooms and confirm that you are alone and safe. Every time you pass a corner there’s a risk that you will run into something dangerous, but if you don’t keep moving there may be something on your tail that will catch up with you.
I think the Backrooms work on several different levels. 1) it’s like a modern, updated version of being lost in the Labyrinth with the Minotaur. 2) being stuck at work… FOREVER.
The backrooms to me speaks to the experience I had as a kid when I lost my parents in a large department store when I was like 7 or 8 years old. Alone in a large space surrounded by what felt like infinite racks of similar-looking budget clothing. I recall thinking if my parents even knew I was missing! If they did, they would have found me by now etc etc. Being alone in a place I really didn't want to be in in the first place was quite terrifying to me. I was very upset and so relieved when I eventually did find my parents who, as it turns out, did notice I was gone and were looking for me too lol.
Imma be honest, I do believe the universe is forgetting about every one of us, but that's because there are infinite things out there. This reality is so small compared to every other, especially if you believe in god. (Waiting for those special atheist's that need attention in the comments)
@@hyperv1016 I'm an atheist because, why would i want to believe at something strong, invincible that can snap and end me right now n' there? And i just don't like being controlled in general
@@alexanderyt4610 you don't understand the full lore. Are you thinking thats what religion is all about? Fear? No that's a cult. if any religion makes you fear God, it's a cult. All you need to do in life is do you best, love your neighborhood, and don't kill, torture, etc. Literally that's what it says in the bible. So technically, all religions are both wrong and right.
I'd say that my fear of the backrooms is not the fear of being forgotten, but rather the fear of being stuck in an endless increasingly fatal yet not lethal dimension where life is essentially endless as there is no escape from the backrooms and death is still an escape and therefore not plausible in that dimension.
Backrooms is the most terrifying yet alone interesting creepypasta ever There is no main monsters that are tryna kill you or haunt you You are just stuck on a endless isolation Forever
@@kyarumomochi5146 Kane pixel lore is the nearest canon story that we have, everything else are just head canons. The backrooms as a concept doesn't need lore in order to be understand, just as a wars as a concept, but that doesn't mean that the backrooms series doesn't have one.
@@mado-wh4jv Main canon one is the endless halls without any shitty scp enemies in it People should preserve this instead of turning it into a crappy creepypasta That's why kane is amazing
@@kyarumomochi5146 I don't know what you're talking about, Kane has put monsters in his films, and most people try to recreate them . I've not seen any scp backroom video yet
Thank you for doing this. I actually have, shall we say, slightly disturbing dreams, if not nightmares, about being in vast, yet empty malls, airport terminals, and mansions. They all seem vaguely familiar, but when I awake, I realize I had never been there, at all. And now, the concept of "backrooms" pervades my inner mind, and distorts my perception of imagination.
so I usually dont react to jump scares... but this one.. the one at around 11:30 I only saw out of the corner of my eye... got me good. Literally let the room to walk it off haha.
Whenever a backrooms game pops up on the internet, I personally think it fails for one particular reason; they try to have a goal, they try to be scary. The vision I've had but have been unable to put into code, is the idea of just wandering a seemingly-endless facility. Not one that procedurally generates walls endlessly, no. Instead, its just a really large map that, at some point, loops you back to the opposite end of the map without you even knowing. There would be staircases, large empty rooms that look like they may have been convention centers, or maybe even libraries. Long halls that suddenly open up to cubicle spaces. All drenched in a dull yellow. There is no monster hunting you down. There is no goal to this game, no game over nor victory screen. Just you, in the infinite liminality that haunts you through this labyrinth. I wish I could make a game, I really do, but for now its just here in writing.
It should feel dangerous, feeling like anything could pop up at any second so you are constantly on the edge and also feel like u are constantly almost somewhere safe but cant seem to get to that point no matter how long u walk
I think the Kane pixels videos do a good job of conveying that, yes there is a monster but that’s not what it relies on. It’s more the shifting nature of the backrooms, and the very normal people observing it. That’s what makes it stand out for me. The human characters are so well defined and realistic that it makes viewing this nonsensical labyrinth even more terrifying
That's actually a 'backrooms' style game I'm thinking of making as my first 3D game, with huge maps designed to lead you from one place to another, but with an element of procedural generation to make it semi-random. Perhaps with spartan audio-visual clues, anomalies and disconserting shifts in place. No visible monsters, no real peril. Just exploration of a series of unsettling locations.
This was before the Backrooms' time, but you might be interested in Yume Nikki (and its many fan games). It's a game all about exploring a weird incomprehensible dream world, with very little in the way of traditional horror. Some of the environments even do the exact thing you describe, having a finite size but infinitely looping without telling you.
I have been very interested in types of horror outside the standard monster/gore of my past. Trying to find buttons to push that cause me unease with no names. I found your video on Liminal Space and LOVED it, subbed to you, and now find myself just as fascinated by this essay. Amazing work. Thank you.
modern horror isn't that good in my opinion I don't wanna scream I wanna think about the things said and have them truly affect them so much that its... well... scary
I love your point about a future that forgot us/ cultural stagnation. We’re ever searching but never finding, ever believing that the “good” future is just around the next corner, but never realized once we get there. We are a lot of single minds groping desperately through a maze of corridors and hallways we call life/civilization/society, always looking for an exit. And the fear that something, or someone could destroy it all immediately is ever present
I just discovered your videos and I´ve got to say that they´re marvellous. Not only the way you express but the topics and editions, I really think they´re all amazing and make a brilliant job; congrats!!
I really don't comment much on youtube, but I really wanted to say this video really made me look at backrooms in a whole new way. Kinda feels like you helped me articulate my thoughts about them! Also great music choices haha
Honestly, the internet creepypasta made me realize that the older civilizations back then maybe also treated myths like we do with creepypastas. We know it's not real, we made it up but we still kinda pretend it is real. As a kid I always thought the ancient greeks actually belived every story in the greek mythology, but maybe these were just the OG "creepypastas"
I also think that, of course it was a religion, but who says that it wasn't also their entertainment? Like, someone make a story and while it spreads no one could say if it was real because the one who make it share it first is long dead or was a liar
@@mado-wh4jv oh no, for sure it was entertainment as well. At the end of the day the basis for all religions is story telling and nobody listens to a boring story.
The backrooms and the feelings of dread and empty eternity that come from liminal spaces is the best way for me to describe how I feel when, as a person with BPD (borderline personality disorder), I say I feel empty inside. It's all these feeling you describe except the liminal space is inside my heart. It is a truly scary place to be.
I honestly find the expansive, uncanny and limitness nature of the backrooms claustrophobic. Just like when you decide to sleep in one day and you wake up in the dark, without ever seeing the peace of sunlight and the sweet fresh oxygen. You just want to go back, escape.
What scares me the most about the backrooms would be the idea of being stuck there without dying. Just wandering around until my own mind collapses, with no escape, nothing anywhere to seek, just the same rooms other and other again. Wandering around until I forget my own name, slowly losing any fragment of who I was before getting stuck there. I don't fear being forgotten, but what frightens me is to forget my own self to demancia.
I mean, how would you even find that out if they don't remember anything? Unless you want to make it like a traumatic event that they've suppressed majorly? Even if something like that happened to any of us, no memory of it would render the experience null unless there was some sort of change (a new unexplained scar, a change in behavior that no one can parse, or maybe even dreams). But why even worry about that when your brain hasn't recorded any of the new information at all? xD
Using songs from Silent Hill 2 was a master stroke my friend!! I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story but the bittersweet nostalgia and experiences the protagonist, James, endures/causes are entirely reminiscent of inescapable reality quite similar to the backrooms phenomena. Such haunting yet beautiful music, accompanied your video PERFECTLY! Bravo!
The fear of loss, forgetting, and being forgotten, is much scarier than any monster, and one point that comes up is that loss could happen any moment, you could lose something as small as a Lego piece, to a loved one, but it could happen any moment, you don't hear it, you don't see it, but after, you feel it.
This is an incredibly thoughtful and poignant piece of work. I got here by searching for the back rooms. I wonder how many other great creators I'll never see by simply not searching for the right terms at the right time
i did a vr backrooms with my friends and it was honestly really terrifying being stuck in a dark maze and only hearing far off calls from my friends while we where looking for each other
"The idea of a brighter future failed to materialize and now haunts our dreams as a half.embodied entity " 😢I had to pause the video for a moment. i don't know why but that hit me.
As a student of philosophy and Heidegger, I was so pleasantly surprised to see you reference his early work! I love to see philosophy applied in this way, especially with cultural phenomena like concepts of horror
The time in the back rooms part really got to me, the fact the it’s always the present, no future, and the only signs of the past fade away into nothingness is really scary to think about. I think this might be a coincidence but I really like how you put an everywhere at the end of time song in that segment, that song in my opinion of what I know about dementia is haunting, there is no future and the only signs of the past fading away as you’re struggling to keep your identity with you, but it’s too strong and you eventually give up. The beast has won, turning you into an empty shell of what you once were forever alone, with nobody there to help you, the only memories you have are of the present, but hey, even those don’t stick around too long. It’s really sad to think about that, someone that used to be someone you loved is now gone.
I've been to a bunch of conventions and shows, when setting up we get to go through many back rooms and "secret" hallways. They have this creepiness' and loneliness that you refer too. I've gotten used to it. Once walked through a 200 year old tunnel, my friend was loosing it, I was fine. Took forever to get him to settle down and come out.
Whenever I see something about the backrooms, especially the harsher and more inhumane levels, my mind is always brought to think of Naissancee, a game that seems pretty easy to forget, entirely because it was made that way. The architecture in that game is, of course, designed to be playable, but just barely so. Staircases that almost don't exist, random step heights, and an eerie silence that practically screams at you
For me it's like being a ghost, witnessing everything happening. But can't participate, interact, just being a spectator of the being. Backroom gives me this kind of chill. Something is happening with me, but without me (as a person).
I really dislike how the backrooms have developed, what made it special was how simple they were, not how many levels of deepness it has, not the creatures that live in them Sure, finding a monster in a familiar yet unsettling place is terrifying, but that monster means something is able to live there, and if that something tries to kill you, means it likely wants to eat you, so there's also more humans there, and even if it doesn't want to eat you, then it sees you as a threat for some reason. The monster can give you hope, or at the very least, end it all soon. But what is unique about being in an unsettling place with a monster trying to kill you? Isn't that the same as the Infinite Ikea, or the Slenderman game? What is scary about an unknown place where you can actually advance, find new levels, some are even peaceful, with other people living there, with food and water to live? In my opinion, that's not scary, having a source of hope isn't scary. What is scary is being on that familiar, unsettling and infinite room, totally alone, expecting to either escape, find someone, something, yet never being able to do so, not having control of your situation, with you only option being to walk endlessly until you can't anymore, hoping for that thing you feel following you to end it all, yet the thing won't do it, because it was never there, it was just your mind playing games, trying to give you something to hold on to, only managing to get you more desperate by the second
I must thank you. I watched your video at like 2 am on a school night, and I remember when you brought up BLAME and how fascinating it was. When I finally read BLAME, it was one of the greatest Mangas I've read yet. Because of that I must thank you.
In my opinion, The backrooms is a metaphor for our life nowadays. It’s an unending corridor of boring work offices that we are trapped in, with no escape. Humanity expects us all to sit at a desk and just type things on our computer. This monotonous lifestyle is more creepy than anything, really.
I'm interested in this type of thing because sometimes I get scared when I think about how everyday is the exact same for me over and over and over again. It's scary. This whole 'liminal space' thing for me is a representation of the relentless sameness of everyday that basically amounts to emptiness that threatens to go on forever. That's why I'm so fascinated by this stuff. And what is scary about the backrooms is that it is designed yet has no purpose. Something about that is sinister to me.
I came here expecting you to deeply analyze Kane’s video, I ended up getting a psychological lesson on how missing one part of a picture destroys the entire composition. I am also at awe that I, somehow, randomly came across a video that completely summarized the exact train of thoughts I’ve been having since years but never got the chance to explain it to anyone without coming across as an insane individual. The wonders of the internet - I love it. Consider a new subscriber sir!
Well approached, written and produced. I'm only getting more interested in the phenomenon and plan to write about it myself. All the best and keep up the superb work.
i like how in these videos clark will do things like throw a clip from the shining in there without feeling a need to justify/explain it (not until later anyway). I want to do that too if I ever eventually end up making my video essay ideas
11:37 i remember when i was a kid and had recurring nightmares, I would get the feeling of dread and terror that i just felt after getting jumpscared even when i was expecting it. I wasn't however expecting it to look like the creatures i vaguely remember from those previously mentioned nightmares.
7:41. I got a creepy sense of deja vu when looking at this empty room. Took me only a second to place it. It looks almost identical to the room used in the Incubus "Warning" video, where the girl tries to warn everyone that their lives are about to all cease, and they're all just cluelessly going about their days. The windows are slightly different, and the lights on the ceiling are placed lengthwise instead of the opposite direction, but the room shape and pillar setup look the same. Thought it was interesting that this video about being forgotten, and their video about wasting the time you have left both hit that same chord with the imagery though. (If you fast-forward to around the 3 minute mark of the Incubus video, you can see the room empty to compare the two.)
I loved the concept of the back rooms before people started adding unnecessary levels and creatures and “lore” to it. It’s far more interesting as an empty, mysterious space.
They did because obviously they wanted to try to explain it, to make it real, tangible, not so scary. That's what happened with every scary thing. Ghosts, vampires, eldritch horrors
Everywhere at the end of time. Both my fears in one video. To be eternally trapped in a place outside space and to be eternally trapped in the spiral of dementia, until time itself erodes whatever I was. Thanks
This is very interesting to me, as this concept of non places fascinate me very much. The idea of familiarity, but so empty, so void of life and so repetitive, that it becomes unfamiliar. The uneasy feeling of being forgotten. Being nothing.
Everything at the End of Time was a perfect addition for this, both tonally and topically. Sick video. This definitely freaked me out (in the best sort of way).
In a way, you could say the lore expansion of this is an example of this fear. Because by adding in meaning to something, by adding in the potential for adventure, it becomes something memorable, that if you end up in this situation that you can at least ingrain yourself in the memories of those whom you've been surviving with.
Being in the back rooms with absolutely nothing there to entertain you or scare you to keep you on your toes constantly would genuinely be more horrifying than having demons or creatures chasing you, a endless space with no seen conclusion just seems like a good way to speedrun going crazy
This is a seriously high quality video, and had some great talking points. I love the Backrooms and I'm in the process of making a large scale VR environment that I'll be able to explore with my friends in VRChat. I'll be stalking people in a Stalker avatar. >:D
It may not be right or even correct. We experience our own backrooms especially in this world. There are days where we feel lost, we look at the skyscrapers and the wide boulevards, it made us clueless for a while on where we want to go. The creepy-pasta video is scary as it challenges us to see the state of our minds. It is a deep video that encourages open interpretation as we have our own story such as the Backrooms.
Just... imagine being locked inside a huge labyrinth of hallways. Nobody else but you, blind corners everywhere, no food, no water, nobody answering your screams for help. Like somekind of strange surrealsist desert. This is absolute horror. Horror from being alone, lost, left to wander arond, left to die.
I find this type of thing fascinating. The best example of the “back rooms” or the feeling of which was when I was a young man in the 1980’s and my friend and I entered an empty Mall that was closed for about 15yrs. Everything looked like an apocalyptic scene. Everything looked as if it was frozen in time. It was completely silent, the feeling of all the people who shopped there and their family memories made it feel like a transient space. Just something so strange about it. Thanks for sharing the unique perspective in your video. Cheers 😊
Interesting. I always saw the backrooms as a fear of something akin to being forgotten but not quite : Monotony. The backrooms feel like an unending office space, the tan carpet and tan walls, the lack of perosnality in an unending spinning labyrinth of walls, It spells the tedium you feel with day to day scenery. It's an infinite liminal space. No destination , no objective , no end goal. Just wandering about aimlessly going about a routine that stretches indefinitely , but in the years you've done it, you haven't even seen days of progress. I see it as an artistic interpretation of the utter psychological torment a meaningless existence can bring
Many years ago, I came home from a term at University to find my childhood home packed up in boxes and wrapped in bubble wrap and cellophane. It was the house I came to just days after I was born. When the moving truck had been packed, I wander through the house again: to this day it was the most profound liminal space I have ever been inside. All of my memories were there, all of my safety and familiarity, all of the warmth, all of the security of having a real "home", all striped bare and now hollow. I haven't had a real "home" since then, nowhere I felt that I strongly belonged, I have been the one haunting the world, a nomad while the decades have raced by effortlessly. Because of that severance, from a space and from time itself it seems, I already do feel "forgotten" but perhaps forgotten none more than by myself.
It is just so weird. I played The Backrooms game that someone made a long time ago and even though I didn't hear anything about creatures I was still super scared. I usually don't get scared by horror movies and such, but there was just something about that game that made my heart race. The more I played, the more hesitant I became to travel around yet another corner. Later, (recently) came a minecraft version of the Backrooms. It wasn't quite as bad, but I was still scared. I played Minecraft all my life. I know what it has in store, but even so it was still scary. I wonder if this means somewhere inside I am scared of being lost.
At my job there is a building you have to go into to get to HR and it’s a separate building you have to go outside and cross over to get there. That definitely gave me this effect because nobody was there and it was so unusual. That’s what makes the backrooms so interesting is because anyone can come across areas that make them feel the same way, that “where am I?” feeling.
I’ve been to hotels where I’ve been trying to find my room and for a moment, I’ve had this weird eerie warm feeling of being entirely alone and in a space that seemed never ending, with permanent, winding hallways. It’s odd; freaky but peaceful.
So strange, this video, randomly suggested to me, just so happened to include everything I'm currently obsessing about or working with: The Backrooms, Hauntology, The Shining, Futuristic Worlds and Anime/Manga Architecture I'll definitely be getting those books you mentioned, they're right up my alley as a student of underground worlds and haunted spaces ❤
i bought the Blame! mangas because of this video. Its so weird... i love it but i cant explain why.... the story is basically non-existant... the characters are meh at best... and the art is ... well... "special". And yet still... i couldnt stop reading. Its a weird "i want to see whats behind the next corner"-feeling constantly.
@@PriestessOfSlaanesh that sounds very intriguing! I really want to get my hands on the manga too, even if it's only to admire its art..you might enjoy the anime "Angel's Egg" too if you like this style and atmosphere
The backrooms give me a different haunting nostalgia that always comes to my brain over and over during day and night. There was this mall that was knocked down in 2015 called great mall of the Great Plains. That mall was my childhood nostalgia… For some reason the backrooms gives this haunting nostalgia of that location and a very similar comparison to the back rooms of great mall. They looks so similar. Yellow walls and buzzing lights… When great mall was shutting down… The mall was empty and echoey. With buzzing lights… every retail store was empty. The place was forgotten… I used to have dreams about that place being abandoned for years even thought it was knocked down. But, I would get re accruing dreams of vines growing on the walls with broken glass and rotting walls and ceilings… Backrooms level ??? Great mall Search up great mall of the Great Plains and you will find photos of the place.
All of your videos are really well edited, well planned and easy to understand. I really enjoy questioning and hearing the philosophy and reasoning behind my thinking being well constructed and in a comprehensive way.
Thanks to this video i realized that backrooms remind me of how I imagined hell, if it existed. Neverending maze without any sense or ending, overwhelming loneliness and uneasiness, crushing feeling of being left alone and being forgotten. It gives me shivers when I think about that. Places like backrooms whould be much more terrifying then the lake of fire.
i find it interesting how there is a specific type of "audio" or "music" that accompanies these shots of liminal spaces. Almost as if you can encompass all the same feelings and philosophies in auditory form as well. Ambient, low quality, distortion, atonal etc..
The backrooms remains eternal. C’est fini.
Did you know I have behind-the-scenes content over on my Patreon? Check it out to get a unique look at my process and support my future videos: www.patreon.com/ClarkElieson
Cool
Do you know Backrooms has 9282772377289228377 levels and 9281827729198272781928 negative levels and you would atleast need 32 years and in the Backrooms time stops so if you noclip in the Backrooms and you escape you would end up on the same place where you noclip and in the same time. WEIRD
Man you were high while making this video💀💀💀
@@czasillo lol
Awesome video man
The Backrooms feels like if someone saw a picture of humanity's structures but knew nothing about what they are or their function, and tried to recreate them based on nothing but what he saw in the picture. It *looks* like human structures, but it feels alien and otherworldly. This combination of very familiar and extremely unfamiliar is what makes The Backrooms as uncanny as it is.
So like China and Christmas decor
@@drwatson32bit never saw chinese christmas decor but yes
So almost like the backrooms are AI-generated.
This is beautifully put.
An inhuman approximation of a human world
This is the type of thing that fascinates me the most about the backrooms. The creepy-pasta, expansive catalogue of monsters and the SCP type accounts of the backrooms are cool. But the feeling that you get from looking at these liminal spaces is, in my opinion, much more fascinating than the infinitely detailed lore.
Edit: What I originally meant from this comment was that I am fascinated by the lonely nostalgic feeling of the backrooms and I was looking for content like this. I don't mean to put down the creative writing people have done of the backrooms lore.
Yeah, it's way more interesting as just some unconventional architecture. I don't mean that ironically
I definitely agree. While the expansive lore and levels are cool, but the creepiest part of the original backrooms is best because of the fear of the unknown, suffocating monotony of seeing the same room and soul crushing loneliness.
With all the information about different levels, you just know too much about something that is supposed to be a mystery.
This.
Yeah, 100%. The fact that everyone here feels this fear. I remember such a room at my dad's work in the early 2000's. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I did find it a certain thing I don't have any words for. I cannot put my finger on every place I saw a backroom at. It's a vague, uncomfortable, uncanny and horrifying in a way no other fear is horrifying
The expansive levels are, for the most part, written very very poorly
I think the "levels" thing kinda destroys what makes the Backrooms so terrifying. The never ending monotony of a liminal space that never ends. To me that's diminished if there is, in fact, a huge diversity of locations and vistas.
i agree, but i do think there is a separate element of fear to these levels that can be explored in a different context. while the backrooms in of itself is an already horrifying concept, what if there were never ending ‘levels’ to the backrooms? slowly slipping further and further down, further away from your point of entry, slowly destroying your mind as you process all these seemingly endless and random levels. but then again, i dont think these levels are ‘necessary’ :]
@Jordanxkun Yeah I know, but the way they're made out doesen't appeal to me or cause dread in the same way as the ugly, yellow liminal space that is the OG dimension.
@jordanxkun that's actually a pretty good idea to incorporate those different places. I too hate the level system
It's just a totally different experience, and not "The Backrooms". The Backrooms is monolithic...and endless
Right, and adding creatures to the backrooms, it doesnt make sense the premise is that you're alone and stuck in the never ending backrooms.
I agree that the "additional levels" or the "weird creatures" just take away from the creepiness of what made the backrooms creepy in the first place.
I think what makes it really scary for me is the feeling of isolation and entrapment, being stuck in a never-ending hallway where each room looks the same as the previous one. No windows or contact to the outside world. I also think the fact these rooms look like they were made by human hands (walls, lights etc.) yet no soul is to be found adds to the creepiness of it.
Watch Kane Pixels backroom vids, it might change on how you see the backrooms
@@seregris1557 the lane pixels video works because it doesn’t give context. There are variations to the architecture but they feel just as unsettling and alone as everything else. Most additions of levels make it sound as if it’s some game where you’re getting closer to escaping and the entire idea of factions and settlements in the backrooms is so backward for what makes it work. The lane pixels video doesn’t frame it as if it’s different levels but rather just different things in this randomly generated endless world.
As for the monster personally I feel a couple of them works well but many things over do it heavily. I feel as if the monsters enhance the feeling of isolation as you’re not alone on a technical level but something you can’t communicate with and only want to kill you is hardly companionship.
@Shizumi yeah I know I’m just saying why I feel his videos work better despite incorporating elements of some of the extra stuff.
I also now realize every single time I typed Kane I accidentally typed lane
Should be just one level that covers 3 times the surface of earth. With an unknowable horror lurking somewhere. Just like the original backrooms post states. Levels and the classes of monsters does kind of ruin it. I liked Kane Pixels version when the ystarted where the monster is horrible and unknowable but there and murderous.
@@plugshirt1762 Minecraft's Hell has it's own “nature”, and so does the Backrooms. When you're in either of those places, you're back to being an animal at the lower end of the food chain. That's why I think SOME of the entities work, it just gives off that extra anomalous feeling.
I had an experience in something like a “liminal space” in real life once before.
For my job I was sent to work in Norfolk, Virginia area for a few days. It was in the late autumn, so not exactly a tropical getaway.
Despite that, I decided to go visit Virginia Beach, a popular tourist trap, just to check it out. Being a cold November weekday in the US East Coast, the place was absolutely deserted.
But there I was… on the beach, with my jeans, shirt and tie and a winter bomber jacket, standing with my work books sinking into the sand. The beach stretched far, and all you could hear was the wind and the waves. Not a soul in sight. The boardwalk behind me, with all its walkways and bike paths, was empty.
It actually didn’t feel strange to me at the time. I just felt like… whatever, you know, what did I expect? Beach season was long gone. It was actually very peaceful to explore.
But it wasn’t until later when I showed photos I took of myself there, did people point out the strange feeling they got from looking at the photos.
The sun was out on the day that I took the photos, so in the picture, it looked like it could have been a beautiful, warm sunny day.
But seeing me in that bright weather, decked out in my engineer attire… standing happily in the sands of an empty tourist trap… was just really odd to them.
I must have looked like a lost astronaut trekking through shores of a faraway planet.
you needa post these pictures bro wtf
@@destroymarcy fr i'd love to see them
I'd love to see those pictures
I've been to VA Beach countless times, and I totally agree with you on how it's much more relaxing off-season without the crowds.
Where pictures???
Honestly the Backrooms is the most emotionally and mentally immersive horror piece I've ever encountered. Every aspect of fear comes from within. There's nothing inherent about the horror. It's not something purged onto you with the label of being scary. It's empty and devoid of anything concrete; there's no horror to distinguish. Therefore everything scary comes from your own mind, giving the sense of dread and horror to you from what you fear in your own mind. It's a horror story you've essentially created. The familiarity and isolation comes from your association with memory and recognition of the objects and spaces in the backrooms. It's not someone else's horror that you may or may not find scary, it's nothing objectively scary, and so everyone's mind fills in the horror individually. It's why it'd so universally terrifying. Clowns are scary to some, not to others. The backrooms doesn't single out one item or idea to scare you, they take your subjective SENSE of fear itself and evoke that. Everyone fears it using themselves as the catalyst. The emptiness is a template for you the viewer to fill in and scare yourself with, using the ambiguity and uncertainty as a tool to help those feelings arise out of you. Traditional horror feeds the horror into you, but this is horror you feed into it. That's why it's so immersive: it's personal. You feel personal and oddly nostalgic about the liminal spaces because they're banking off your foggy memories. It isn't someone else's ideas flooding your synapses, it's your own. The fear and danger is all inside of you, which is why it feels so close, personal, intrusive, and terrifying. There's truly nothing like it I've ever encountered but it's so brilliant in its freeform and subjective design that i can't control being immersed and attached to it. After all, it IS a part of me. The horror is of my own creation. We give those empty walls and buzzing white lights power, and damn does the fear the evoke project powerfully.
It’s empty office spaces.
@@Senza_1 I love the internet
Honestly the Backrooms is the most emotionally and mentally immersive horror piece I've ever encountered. Every aspect of fear comes from within. There's nothing inherent about the horror. It's not something purged onto you with the label of being scary. It's empty and devoid of anything concrete; there's no horror to distinguish. Therefore everything scary comes from your own mind, giving the sense of dread and horror to you from what you fear in your own mind. It's a horror story you've essentially created. The familiarity and isolation comes from your association with memory and recognition of the objects and spaces in the backrooms. It's not someone else's horror that you may or may not find scary, it's nothing objectively scary, and so everyone's mind fills in the horror individually. It's why it'd so universally terrifying. Clowns are scary to some, not to others. The backrooms doesn't single out one item or idea to scare you, they take your subjective SENSE of fear itself and evoke that. Everyone fears it using themselves as the catalyst. The emptiness is a template for you the viewer to fill in and scare yourself with, using the ambiguity and uncertainty as a tool to help those feelings arise out of you. Traditional horror feeds the horror into you, but this is horror you feed into it. That's why it's so immersive: it's personal. You feel personal and oddly nostalgic about the liminal spaces because they're banking off your foggy memories. It isn't someone else's ideas flooding your synapses, it's your own. The fear and danger is all inside of you, which is why it feels so close, personal, intrusive, and terrifying. There's truly nothing like it I've ever encountered but it's so brilliant in its freeform and subjective design that i can't control being immersed and attached to it. After all, it IS a part of me. The horror is of my own creation. We give those empty walls and buzzing white lights power, and damn does the fear the evoke project powerfully.
i agree tbh
@@Kosmicant Well said
This is why I fully agree with the "Too many cooks" concept. The premise is a wonderful cosmic horror in that the victim is just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there is nothing they can do. Adding monsters and the like quickly moves it from wonderful cosmic horror to generic movie monster horror. It makes it too personal and targeted.
Half agree half disagree. I don’t love the whole “shadowy science entity studying the Backrooms” concept, but the monsters themselves are actually quite neat. Especially the ones that tap into the aesthetic of the uncanny valley themselves. The Smilers are a great example, especially when done right. I’ll leave an example below. To me, part of the fear that monsters like these tap into is like that fear of something watching me, like when the lights were off in the attic, or in my Grandparents’ basement at midnight. I love that kind of horror.
Example:
ua-cam.com/video/rWwgg74I4po/v-deo.html
To add to that, though, the Backrooms are an internet meme, not an independent property. You can draw whatever horror you want out of this, and that’s great! I just think that the addition of monsters isn’t as detrimental as some people think, especially with the content creators who do it very well.
I love the personal and targeted part. The entire point of the backrooms or at least their core concept is that they’re not at all personal. It’s a space that doesn’t care about you. Your presence in the space is unperceived. No monsters will be there to care enough to chase or kill you. You are not with anyone or anything, as that’d be too high of a luxury. The environment will not support your life. It doesn’t need to. It wasn’t made for you. It’s old and still young. It has existed infinitely before you and will exist infinitely after you.
@@cklounge2096 This worded and explained my favorite part of this comment exquisitely. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to put the exact fascination into words. Thank you.
@@miahshontell360 I think the existence of entities can also be a mirror to the real world; there are things that happen, organically caused or not, which are unaware of you and never think of you. They just happen.
Being forgotten would be the least of my problems if I got sent into the backrooms
In my comment I addressed how the fear for me is not only being transported to a confused childlike sense but also that the backrooms illustrate a fear of loss of control. For me, since that’s what I suffer with the most, it is the fear of not being able to dictate what to do next or even where I am. It’s that helplessness that gets to me.
@@FeyPax same here man
I fear of being unable to escape
@KYLE RITTENHOUSE - COMMUNIST EXTERMINATOR I never thought of that until now...
Welp, im having nightmares tonight :)
Ikr
Psychosis runs in my family and I possibly triggered a psychotic episode after taking an edible and I went to a place like this. It was the single most terrifying and disturbing experience of my life. I felt like I had gotten trapped in an in-between place of nothingness and that I would be there forever.
You went into the great void beyond time and space
That happen to me on Cid and edibles
Scary.... I thought I was infinitely lost
Just another indication not to do drugs.
Nah they gave bro the evil edibles 💀💀💀
It runs in the family and yet you take drugs??
when you mentioned blame! i nearly jumped out of my seat. such a criminally underrated series. also, as a person who somewhat lacks the capability to articulate my thoughts in the way i want to, your videos have been really helpful and entertaining during quarantine as i've been forced to face my mental illness more than usual. there only being a present in the backrooms, feels a lot like my psychosis, and the terrifying way it seemingly deletes my memories and melts my days together. i didn't realize that until now! it's truly fascinating being able to step back and look at these experiences from a viewers perspective rather than being caught in the middle of it. thank you, i'm definitely going to give some of the referenced books a try as well!
is there a tv series for it? I found a movie, but it looks sick and id like to watch a series if there is one.
@@julianslayden7895 there's a movie on netflix but it doesn't really do justice to the vibe of the manga, worth watching after you read the manga maybe
💖
@@julianslayden7895 i agree with BestAtNothing's response. there's a netflix film but like many others i'm not a fan of the CGI style. it's an entertaining watch but doesn't do justice to Nihei's style in my opinion!
I haven’t read it, or even heard of it before, but I’m so glad he mentioned it. That is TOTALLY the style of horror I like, and I’m already sure I’m going to love it.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more people connect this concept to The Cube movies. They had the same idea of ever-expanding, similarly structured rooms with hauntingly foreboding feelings.
Good point, I liked the movie and this might be part of the reason why. It's not just horror because it is gore.
Because the cube movies sucked💀
@@Ballzniffa the first cube movie was great.
@@ruefullysage no. No it wasnt💀
@@Ballzniffa you have your opinion, I have mine
I like the backrooms where it is just... purgatory. No monsters, no levels, no escape, just an endless, off-yellow maze that you explore till you die.
It still is, there's just more too it. It's endless places that are endless and liminal, not just one. Barring a few exceptions
IF. If, you die
What lol. Isnt it a video game
I remember the church basement in my hometown was definitely a liminal space.
it's not truly endless if there are 'levels' to them. This implies that the end lies somewhere in every level, even if they go to infinity@@MMO10216
Maybe I’m weird but I always find big empty “back rooms” like malls or airports etc as peaceful, I can sleep and have slept in big empty conference halls as peacefully as my own home. You put shaky cam and creepy sounds in a mundane hallway and it sure is creepy, but a mundane hallway by itself is the opposite, calming and relaxing, reminds me of being a happy kid in the 90s.
For me, with the hallway, it feels like anything could come around the corner if i got too settled in.
Sort of feel like that if a room is empty I don’t get any feeling of it other than peaceful and calm could sleep in on but what can make it unsettling if you play music that are old and goes on and on could make me feel uncomfortable to it the fact is this video is very interesting.
@@umbreon5946 right, my mind would play tricks with me to fill in the void, something like a head poking round the corner and going back when I look at it. Would fuck me up so much
I think it’s kinda boring but would make a cool horror game
Never thought I’d encounter someone who can relate to this feeling. Reminds me of being a kid in the 90’s too.
The amount of research and work put into this video is extraordinery. These 15 minutes felt like 1.5 hour profesisonal documentary.
Keep doing your work man, your takes are unusual but also very well argued which makes you one of the most entertaining creators I've ever watched.
@@ehrgeiz5649 thats what it is lmao. studying topics, learning.smh
@@ehrgeiz5649 look whose talking
Omgosh the likes are at 666-
I have no clue what the shit this man is talking about.
@@ehrgeiz5649 he is not commenting trash
Theres a horror story from 1892 called The Yellow Wallpaper, it's really disturbing because although The Backrooms first image came out in 2019, The Yellow Wallpaper story pretty much details this whole place. The narrator even describes the room smelling of damp, maybe The Backrooms has been around longer than we think!
Ayoooooooooo
The core of what it was has been with us a long time.
The Yellow Wallpaper was a story about a woman diagnosed with “hysteria” (really, depression). She was kept isolated by her husband and doctor but longed to escape.. yet there was nowhere to go. She eventually commits suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning herself.
@@beautyintheskies thank you for the recap on the story, however, you got the ending wrong. The woman's husband comes back into the room to find that the his wife is crawling around the room along the wallpaper and she yells 'I got out, in spite of you and Jane!' and then her husband faints.
omg i read that during school once, and it was really scary lol. she imagined all the horrible things within that wallpaper and that room BECAUSE she was stuck there, and she was there for so long that her mind started to evoke fears that weren’t actually there. that’s why it’s so scary, because even though it wasn’t really there it probably felt more real than if it were.
I've always felt like when it says "noclip out of reality" it doesn't mean something like pushing your arm through a wall. You have to break the boundaries of reality itself, wether that be by breaking the laws of physics or some other method that shouldn't be possible, you will end up in a different dimension.
Yea we all know
@@dosomestuff1949 I didnt.
Technically, pushing your arm through a wall(without breaking either either the wall or your hand ), is a major case of breaking the laws of physics
Its like how you can “catch atoms lacking” or that theory where you can, in an impossibley rare chance, put your body through solid atoms. It would be terrifying, and most definitely accidental. But the backrooms adds to it. you have no way to, in the atom example” take your arm out”. You cant leave. You are there. Alone, scared, and there is no place to hide. Its open. Yet, nothing is in that wide, infinetely wide open space.
@@podlodialgilap3490 >major case of breaking the laws of physics
Not exactly. The chances of all of the atoms in your body suddenly and randomly teleporting through a wall (as you try to put your hand through it) is not zero. These events, albeit on infinitely smaller scales, do happen, atoms sometimes randomly phase in and out of existence, or suddenly teleport. There is a non-zero chance that you will one day wake up and fall through the ground, physics wise, its possible, the chances of it happening are just infinitesimally small.
It’s very interesting seeing the 2 ways people interact with the backrooms. On one side you have people brainstorming, evaluating, and expanding the lore and concept creating an insane collectively told dimensional horror story kind of about human survival and hope within utter hopelessness while the other side lets it sit as is with nothing else but the somber and melancholic notes of nostalgia and memory at its most raw, and uncontrolled form. Neither is wrong in their style of perception, but it is interesting to see the two expressions of it be so different.
Yeah some people are trying to add on to the backrooms and supposedly try and create some sort of story behind it but the other ones are just leaving it as it is and leaving it how it’s supposed to be, just an endless random generated offices with no explanation behind it, it’s just there. That’s the original backrooms that I like. But I feel like the reason why people are creating and adding more stuff to it is probably because they don’t want to see the backrooms as a random place with random generated yellow walls with no explanation behind it, it gives them a very uneasy and anxious feeling and they think that they have to make up something in order to make that feeling go away. They want explanation and meaning behind it but since they can’t get it, they decide and do the only thing that they can do, and that is to make up their own story and add more and more to it. This is why I hate the current backrooms, not everything has to have a story behind it, we don’t have to know who made the backrooms or where it came from, It’s just better of if they leave it how it is.
@@Viewer89000 The person who brought the backrooms is also the one who added monster and lore.
If you're talking about mere images that existed before these uploads, then you are not talking about backrooms but simply "uncanny/nostalgic" pictures.
I can relate your opinion, but you sound like an elitist douchebag. The Backrooms are a new concept, are those short films exploring uncanny places and recording those monsters that anyone can make.
As a fan of BLAME! I personally think we should leave it as is not for the sake of a somber nostalgia but for the sake of a great and terrible isolated wandering through a place never designed to know you, one entirely familiar in an unfamiliar way. Have you seen the painting “Nighthawks?” You’ll most likely have at least seen it parodied. I yearn for a space like that, like the world which surrounds it and in which it is a single point of light and habitation, one that should be familiar but entirely isn’t and was never designed for the presence of humans, simply designed for the idea of human presence. In BLAME! the builders still make somewhat standard things, staircases, apartment blocks, but they are all mad and it has been so long for a human to show them how they are supposed to be used that any purpose has been lost beyond their construction and existence as part of The City
@@lazydroidproductions1087 have you ever payed the game NaissanceE? You might really like it
@@metronicmagician1816 I only haven’t because It’s not on Mac. I have heard of it. Very much directly inspired by BLAME!
I think adding so much lore and so many monsters did ruin the Backrooms a bit, but I think the concept of a seemingly infinitely large and empty space where the only things in the Backrooms is you and a monster is terrifying. It plays on both a person’s fear and anxiety, the fear of a monster coming to murder you, something that you cannot stop or defeat, and the anxiety that such a creature could be anywhere, it could be miles away or right behind you, it could be stalking you at any moment, it could be around a corner or on the other side of a wall. Just the knowledge that you’re trapped in such a large space with such a powerful and mysterious creature is so fear inducing to me.
It works even better if it’s not clear whether the monster is real or imagined. The character sees something out of the corner of their eye, or hears a vague, human-but-inhuman noise and can’t tell if it originated close-by or far away (a place like the Backrooms would likely distort our perception of space, including how echoes work). I’m also haunted by the idea of a person losing their mind and deliberately shouting for the entity to take them so their suffering can end, but it doesn’t - either because it’s not real at all, or because it doesn’t want to kill them.
The problem is the monster gave an obvious finality when in reality the backrooms is far more about the absurd abstract context. Adding the monster cheapen the sensation by making it like other typical "place with monster that will kill you"
😅
I
Ml
Mi m😅m mmm ka
@@faizalf119 But what I understand from the comments above is that this monster, if it even exists, would in fact never kill you. It's like the infinite torture of the mind. Not only would you be wondering forever in empty halls that look like something you once knew, but feel alien, you would also be in a perpetuous state of anxiousness from the idea that something is out to get you, or not ? You'll just never know
@@sarahk9306 it's still a monster and it's boring
I watched the Backrooms' "Found Footage" video not too longa ago for the first time, and I was a bit shocked, it's very creepy, almost unsettling. But what really got under my skin was the fact it seemed to have tapped into the majority of my childhood fears in such a way that it's almost a feeling of Deja Vu. The familiarity may have been THAT overpowering to the point that i believe i've had multiple nightmares of this place. Just a different room from the same level 1. Has anyone else got that notion?
In the beginning there was only fog and gray and then there was fire and so they came you see Lord Gwyn banished the dark by sacrificing himself as fuel to the First Flame. How is this relevant to the video and your comment? It’s not. Why did I bother typing all this? A good question that is. Am I wording myself carefully to make myself seem more intelligent than I actually am? Perhaps.
The word I would use to sum this all up is Depression. Why? Well I shot myself a little over a year ago and this video and the Backrooms strangely sum up what I was feeling when I chose to do what I did. It comforts me oddly I can’t get enough of it. I bid you farewell comment reader. Are you going to read all of this…I don’t think so.
Edit: changed the word Should to Shot
I definitely agree with you on the childhood fears part.
Did you ever used to get these intense fever dreams as a child where your nightmares would become almost...indescribable? It's hard to explain, but everytime I was sick/had a fever, the reality of my nightmares would warp. There would be no perception of scale or time, and occassionally I'd be chased by something. But more often than not, I always got the notion of being watched accompanied by a very specific feeling that could only be described as "something's not right" and "I shouldn't be here". And it's not the same feeling you get if you were in a haunted house or something, no it literally feels like you've entered another dimension/reality you have no place being in, like some non-euclidean world. The found footage Backrooms series sent chills down my spine because it was exactly how those nightmares felt.
@@CelestialDraconis I know what you mean, except I still have those dreams. Unfortunately they are a common occurrence for me. I’m usually not chased by anything though.
@@bill7759 what drug are you on because i want some of it
The Backrooms pushed me into a terrifying headspace reminiscent of getting lost in a Walmart Supercenter as 6 years old. I wandered off and my eyes glazed over aisles and aisles of products that suddenly had no meaning to me as the fear of losing my parents forever drowned out each item's normally scintillating and garish scheme. About to watch this video, but I always click to hear different takes!
When I was a kid my grandparents’ house had this huge finished basement. The walls were that same color yellow and the floors were carpeted with the same color carpet. It had those same kinda office lights. It also had a couple unfinished storage rooms behind closet doors that always terrified me. But the rest of the basement never bothered me. It had personality, it wasn’t eery or empty. When we stayed with them it was the part of the house we were allowed to run wild in and play in. Our bedroom was down there. It was a very comforting place for me in my childhood, aside from the creepy unfinished storage rooms. When I was 12, we moved further away from them. We stopped seeing them as often, and when we did, it never lasted long enough that we’d go down to the basement. It was like I forgot it existed. Then, about two years ago, my grandmother died very suddenly and we had to sell the house and all of their things. It was heartbreaking and a very painful experience for me with such a nostalgic place that was symbolic of a person I love who I lost. When all was said and done, I did one last walk-over of the house, and I went into the basement. It was complete empty. Stripped of everything that made it welcoming and nostalgic and comfortable. It looked just like that original 4chan picture of the backrooms and even though I had not yet seen that picture I was suddenly completely overcome by grief and terror and sadness. I just started wailing and crying as I walked through and I felt like a vulnerable child while also being painfully aware that that childhood is gone. Someone I love is gone. Those good memories are gone. All that was left was this terrifying shell of a place that felt like you might get lost in it and never find your way out. I think it’s part of why this is especially haunting and scary for me. I’m sure nobody will read this but if you did, thanks for listening.
I read this and I will always remember it - thank you for writing it! You write so well, too.
@@dimitrigainsborough3477 Wow. Thank you. What a kind thing to say. I won’t be forgetting that anytime soon myself. I am so glad this resonated with someone who’s not just me lol
i read it 😊
This is so sweet❤
@@nicolebro8399 Thank you for saying that :’)
I think the connection to the past has something to do with liminal spaces. As kids, living in the 2000s or early 2010s, memories of textures and areas lodged themselves deep into our brains, and images like the original backrooms photo and other liminal spaces in different backrooms levels resurge the memories. It gives a weird feeling of nostalgia but also the uncanny
agreed. nostalgia can be a pretty weird thing lol. a few months ago i showed my mother some popular liminal space images i found online and she said that they didnt make her feel any certain kind of way. however when i showed the same images to some of my friends we all agreed that the locations felt eerily familiar, as if we had somehow been in these spaces before. i wonder what kind of images would invoke a similar feeling in my mom. life is strange.
Yeah. These places seem oddly familiar, yet we've never been there before.
_Or have we?_
@@Hyperion4K I think since we as children perceive things differently from adults at the time. Many of the images have a 80’s- 2000 etc quality that we have experienced then but our parents don’t. But the newer generation will probably have something else.
It’s just how it goes
@@RedstoneMiner18 _Vsauce music plays_
@@silent-witching el em ay o
I love being forgotten! Love the end of world aesthetics! Finally no one expects anything from me. The worst is not being forgotten, it is being forgotten when convenient, and only remembered when I’m expected to give.
i will screenshot this, so everytime i check my gallery, ill be reminded of you, L Bozo
Ok bozo
@@mmecharlotte or you can simply not care what others say and think. There will always be haters
Stick around for my video on the desire to not exist (similar vibes)
@@mmecharlotte I see what you mean. And Even if you’re not famous, Anyone can videotape you in public and post it and you can get made fun of, death threats and harassment, like what happened with the autistic boy who tried to help a lady with her groceries or that girl at the game with the hot dog.
There’s also the danger of people misidentifying you- like internet sleuths who incorrectly identified a random college student online as the Boston bomber, and he later killed himself from all the harassment.
These days, anyone can become “internet famous” or “infamous” against their will, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Embarrassing or even photoshopped pictures, intimate photos can start circulating.
I’m not saying celebrities have it easier, and I absolutely feel for them, but At least they have bodyguards and lawyers so they can sue to get damaging media off the internet. But my heart especially breaks for all the regular people who’s lives get ruined by internet mobs
i’ve always just had a creeping suspicion that the backrooms was just a large symbolism for someone with dementia, as the themes fit and people tend to use everywhere at the end of time, a 6 album project about dementia, to give the backrooms a more “only present” feel
I never saw any video or post that blended both the backrooms and EATEOT, so I don't really know if that theory is valid in any way. And in any case, dementia is famous for not making you feel an "eerie sensation of something being wrong" because you simply don't remember it being wrong. The backroom instead, clealry makes you feel like you know the place, but also that you clealry don't, and that it feels human, even when it clearly is not
@@yasininn76There are different types of dementia and different stages, so can't really write off OP'S observation. It is a common account of dementia patients who feel guilt and shame for their actions but can't wrap their heads around why they did it. They do however remember the moment, the environment, the people and feel guilt/shame so I would assume they know it's unfavorable behavior.
wow, this concept is really scary, this is my biggest fear, just being forgotten, literally left alone in spaces that are too huge and empty, precisely like the backrooms, almost infinite, and then hearing unrecognizable noises increases the fear; these places and these feelings are undoubtedly alienating, and the fact that they are familiar makes them truly disturbing and uncanny
Those unrecognizable noises would only be from monsters, the original/real backrooms are silent and almost empty except for a few lights
It's called hell, and it's not a bunch of empty rooms. There is no gravity or hard surface that exists. You would beg to be in the backrooms.
This is why the inclusion of monsters actually make the backrooms less scary.
When there are monsters chasing you, at least you know your fear came from them.
However, when there's only a never-ending empty office stretching into oblivion.
You're your own monster.
exactly
I'm not scared of myself so... Not scary
@@statesofbeing888 he meant that you go insane
for me, I think knowing that something may appear all of sudden is what creeps me the most about the backrooms, roaming the place for hours if not days all alone, hearing just your foot steps and breathing then you start hearing something getting closer to you is hella terrifying to me, it is like you knew that the time will come but you are never ready for it.
Well it’s also creepier because you haven’t seen any monsters but you can’t be sure that there aren’t any. It’s like how you can’t prove that something does not exist because you can’t search the whole universe and come to that conclusion. You can’t search all of the back rooms and confirm that you are alone and safe. Every time you pass a corner there’s a risk that you will run into something dangerous, but if you don’t keep moving there may be something on your tail that will catch up with you.
I think the Backrooms work on several different levels.
1) it’s like a modern, updated version of being lost in the Labyrinth with the Minotaur.
2) being stuck at work… FOREVER.
backroom levels ruin the actual beauty of the real backrooms
The backrooms to me speaks to the experience I had as a kid when I lost my parents in a large department store when I was like 7 or 8 years old. Alone in a large space surrounded by what felt like infinite racks of similar-looking budget clothing. I recall thinking if my parents even knew I was missing! If they did, they would have found me by now etc etc. Being alone in a place I really didn't want to be in in the first place was quite terrifying to me. I was very upset and so relieved when I eventually did find my parents who, as it turns out, did notice I was gone and were looking for me too lol.
I wonder if The Backrooms was inspired by that childhood experience
Imma be honest, I do believe the universe is forgetting about every one of us, but that's because there are infinite things out there. This reality is so small compared to every other, especially if you believe in god.
(Waiting for those special atheist's that need attention in the comments)
@@hyperv1016 I'm an atheist because, why would i want to believe at something strong, invincible that can snap and end me right now n' there? And i just don't like being controlled in general
@@alexanderyt4610 you don't understand the full lore. Are you thinking thats what religion is all about? Fear? No that's a cult. if any religion makes you fear God, it's a cult. All you need to do in life is do you best, love your neighborhood, and don't kill, torture, etc. Literally that's what it says in the bible. So technically, all religions are both wrong and right.
@@hyperv1016 Thanks 👍
I'd say that my fear of the backrooms is not the fear of being forgotten, but rather the fear of being stuck in an endless increasingly fatal yet not lethal dimension where life is essentially endless as there is no escape from the backrooms and death is still an escape and therefore not plausible in that dimension.
You got issues man. Lmao it's a video game
@@Iceyicez ok
@@IceyicezNope, it's a single image, an image which can be interpreted.
Fear of decay is more present than the fear of death I guess
@@itsthomasreimer thats also true, because you can't die the decay would essentially be endless too
Backrooms is the most terrifying yet alone interesting creepypasta ever
There is no main monsters that are tryna kill you or haunt you
You are just stuck on a endless isolation
Forever
welp, that changed
@@PhantomGato-v- no it didnt
None of the made up lore is canon
@@kyarumomochi5146 Kane pixel lore is the nearest canon story that we have, everything else are just head canons. The backrooms as a concept doesn't need lore in order to be understand, just as a wars as a concept, but that doesn't mean that the backrooms series doesn't have one.
@@mado-wh4jv Main canon one is the endless halls without any shitty scp enemies in it
People should preserve this instead of turning it into a crappy creepypasta
That's why kane is amazing
@@kyarumomochi5146 I don't know what you're talking about, Kane has put monsters in his films, and most people try to recreate them . I've not seen any scp backroom video yet
Thank you for doing this. I actually have, shall we say, slightly disturbing dreams, if not nightmares, about being in vast, yet empty malls, airport terminals, and mansions. They all seem vaguely familiar, but when I awake, I realize I had never been there, at all. And now, the concept of "backrooms" pervades my inner mind, and distorts my perception of imagination.
Them creepy dreams of empty places like fascinate me
The suspense that built up inside me for 11 mins knowing there’s gonna be a jump scare is insane… and then I got caught off guard my heart hurts😂😂😂😂😂
so I usually dont react to jump scares... but this one.. the one at around 11:30 I only saw out of the corner of my eye... got me good. Literally let the room to walk it off haha.
@@ronjonmojo my heart couldn’t handle that one😭😭😭😭😭
Well I'm a minute in, guess I'll be on edge the whole time
@@lukethompson7740 let me know if you got caught off guard too
@@jackyes3699 It got me 😢
Whenever a backrooms game pops up on the internet, I personally think it fails for one particular reason; they try to have a goal, they try to be scary. The vision I've had but have been unable to put into code, is the idea of just wandering a seemingly-endless facility. Not one that procedurally generates walls endlessly, no. Instead, its just a really large map that, at some point, loops you back to the opposite end of the map without you even knowing. There would be staircases, large empty rooms that look like they may have been convention centers, or maybe even libraries. Long halls that suddenly open up to cubicle spaces. All drenched in a dull yellow.
There is no monster hunting you down. There is no goal to this game, no game over nor victory screen. Just you, in the infinite liminality that haunts you through this labyrinth. I wish I could make a game, I really do, but for now its just here in writing.
You could try making a source level like for Half Life or Gmod
It should feel dangerous, feeling like anything could pop up at any second so you are constantly on the edge and also feel like u are constantly almost somewhere safe but cant seem to get to that point no matter how long u walk
I think the Kane pixels videos do a good job of conveying that, yes there is a monster but that’s not what it relies on. It’s more the shifting nature of the backrooms, and the very normal people observing it. That’s what makes it stand out for me. The human characters are so well defined and realistic that it makes viewing this nonsensical labyrinth even more terrifying
That's actually a 'backrooms' style game I'm thinking of making as my first 3D game, with huge maps designed to lead you from one place to another, but with an element of procedural generation to make it semi-random. Perhaps with spartan audio-visual clues, anomalies and disconserting shifts in place. No visible monsters, no real peril. Just exploration of a series of unsettling locations.
This was before the Backrooms' time, but you might be interested in Yume Nikki (and its many fan games). It's a game all about exploring a weird incomprehensible dream world, with very little in the way of traditional horror. Some of the environments even do the exact thing you describe, having a finite size but infinitely looping without telling you.
I have been very interested in types of horror outside the standard monster/gore of my past. Trying to find buttons to push that cause me unease with no names. I found your video on Liminal Space and LOVED it, subbed to you, and now find myself just as fascinated by this essay. Amazing work. Thank you.
modern horror isn't that good in my opinion I don't wanna scream I wanna think about the things said and have them truly affect them so much that its... well... scary
yess! look up existential horror and cosmic horror, it's a lot more about the fear that we are meaningless in the grand scheme of things
@@darlenedarlene4560 thats not even scary just depressing
You DID NOT just casually drop Everywhere at the end of Time into this video. Instant chills, brilliant editing
I love your point about a future that forgot us/ cultural stagnation. We’re ever searching but never finding, ever believing that the “good” future is just around the next corner, but never realized once we get there. We are a lot of single minds groping desperately through a maze of corridors and hallways we call life/civilization/society, always looking for an exit. And the fear that something, or someone could destroy it all immediately is ever present
I just discovered your videos and I´ve got to say that they´re marvellous. Not only the way you express but the topics and editions, I really think they´re all amazing and make a brilliant job; congrats!!
11:32 that actually scared the shit out of me, and to think that that is pretty much what dementia is like just makes it so disturbing
I really don't comment much on youtube, but I really wanted to say this video really made me look at backrooms in a whole new way. Kinda feels like you helped me articulate my thoughts about them! Also great music choices haha
I also picked up on the music ^^
What a good comment!
@@zachdunphy6412 I hate you Zachary
Honestly, the internet creepypasta made me realize that the older civilizations back then maybe also treated myths like we do with creepypastas. We know it's not real, we made it up but we still kinda pretend it is real. As a kid I always thought the ancient greeks actually belived every story in the greek mythology, but maybe these were just the OG "creepypastas"
Nah, ancient civilizations genuinely did believe. Some segments of history had this, but most didn’t.
Nah myths are all real or based upon a real thing
Greek mythology is part of the Hellenistic religion. They believed in it, and those who practice the religion today still do.
I also think that, of course it was a religion, but who says that it wasn't also their entertainment? Like, someone make a story and while it spreads no one could say if it was real because the one who make it share it first is long dead or was a liar
@@mado-wh4jv oh no, for sure it was entertainment as well. At the end of the day the basis for all religions is story telling and nobody listens to a boring story.
The backrooms and the feelings of dread and empty eternity that come from liminal spaces is the best way for me to describe how I feel when, as a person with BPD (borderline personality disorder), I say I feel empty inside. It's all these feeling you describe except the liminal space is inside my heart. It is a truly scary place to be.
Ok when you said "it's memory that doesn't exist there" at 7:20 and you showed the cover of "everywhere at the end of time", i felt that
I honestly find the expansive, uncanny and limitness nature of the backrooms claustrophobic. Just like when you decide to sleep in one day and you wake up in the dark, without ever seeing the peace of sunlight and the sweet fresh oxygen. You just want to go back, escape.
Lmfao oxygen still exists at night
What scares me the most about the backrooms would be the idea of being stuck there without dying.
Just wandering around until my own mind collapses, with no escape, nothing anywhere to seek, just the same rooms other and other again. Wandering around until I forget my own name, slowly losing any fragment of who I was before getting stuck there.
I don't fear being forgotten, but what frightens me is to forget my own self to demancia.
Dying would be better than wandering forever
What if people that went missing and found after years actually went through and escaped the backrooms? Except they can't remember anything?
Dumb
how about no.
@@Danuxsy how about YES
I mean, how would you even find that out if they don't remember anything?
Unless you want to make it like a traumatic event that they've suppressed majorly?
Even if something like that happened to any of us, no memory of it would render the experience null unless there was some sort of change (a new unexplained scar, a change in behavior that no one can parse, or maybe even dreams). But why even worry about that when your brain hasn't recorded any of the new information at all? xD
Pablo
Using songs from Silent Hill 2 was a master stroke my friend!! I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story but the bittersweet nostalgia and experiences the protagonist, James, endures/causes are entirely reminiscent of inescapable reality quite similar to the backrooms phenomena. Such haunting yet beautiful music, accompanied your video PERFECTLY! Bravo!
The fear of loss, forgetting, and being forgotten, is much scarier than any monster, and one point that comes up is that loss could happen any moment, you could lose something as small as a Lego piece, to a loved one, but it could happen any moment, you don't hear it, you don't see it, but after, you feel it.
This is an incredibly thoughtful and poignant piece of work. I got here by searching for the back rooms. I wonder how many other great creators I'll never see by simply not searching for the right terms at the right time
i did a vr backrooms with my friends and it was honestly really terrifying being stuck in a dark maze and only hearing far off calls from my friends while we where looking for each other
"The idea of a brighter future failed to materialize and now haunts our dreams as a half.embodied entity " 😢I had to pause the video for a moment. i don't know why but that hit me.
As a student of philosophy and Heidegger, I was so pleasantly surprised to see you reference his early work! I love to see philosophy applied in this way, especially with cultural phenomena like concepts of horror
The time in the back rooms part really got to me, the fact the it’s always the present, no future, and the only signs of the past fade away into nothingness is really scary to think about. I think this might be a coincidence but I really like how you put an everywhere at the end of time song in that segment, that song in my opinion of what I know about dementia is haunting, there is no future and the only signs of the past fading away as you’re struggling to keep your identity with you, but it’s too strong and you eventually give up. The beast has won, turning you into an empty shell of what you once were forever alone, with nobody there to help you, the only memories you have are of the present, but hey, even those don’t stick around too long. It’s really sad to think about that, someone that used to be someone you loved is now gone.
as a french speaking person, the word "ontologie" was actually really well pronounced
I've been to a bunch of conventions and shows, when setting up we get to go through many back rooms and "secret" hallways. They have this creepiness' and loneliness that you refer too. I've gotten used to it. Once walked through a 200 year old tunnel, my friend was loosing it, I was fine. Took forever to get him to settle down and come out.
imo the backrooms are probably the coolest and most interesting piece of internet lore that’s blown up as big as it has.
i remember when it was just an image
Less a fear of being forgotten, more a discomfort with the inevitability of being consumed by the decaying entropy of time.
Kane Pixels really brought the world of the backrooms to life. Amazing he's only what like 16?!
Well, he might be a bit older now, since that bio is a couple years old.
@@foxlyticalxd2562 still pretty damned impressive
@@foxlyticalxd2562 check his first video
@@ImaPizzaK why
.?
@@foxlyticalxd2562 just check it
Whenever I see something about the backrooms, especially the harsher and more inhumane levels, my mind is always brought to think of Naissancee, a game that seems pretty easy to forget, entirely because it was made that way. The architecture in that game is, of course, designed to be playable, but just barely so. Staircases that almost don't exist, random step heights, and an eerie silence that practically screams at you
For me it's like being a ghost, witnessing everything happening. But can't participate, interact, just being a spectator of the being. Backroom gives me this kind of chill. Something is happening with me, but without me (as a person).
I really dislike how the backrooms have developed, what made it special was how simple they were, not how many levels of deepness it has, not the creatures that live in them
Sure, finding a monster in a familiar yet unsettling place is terrifying, but that monster means something is able to live there, and if that something tries to kill you, means it likely wants to eat you, so there's also more humans there, and even if it doesn't want to eat you, then it sees you as a threat for some reason. The monster can give you hope, or at the very least, end it all soon. But what is unique about being in an unsettling place with a monster trying to kill you? Isn't that the same as the Infinite Ikea, or the Slenderman game? What is scary about an unknown place where you can actually advance, find new levels, some are even peaceful, with other people living there, with food and water to live? In my opinion, that's not scary, having a source of hope isn't scary.
What is scary is being on that familiar, unsettling and infinite room, totally alone, expecting to either escape, find someone, something, yet never being able to do so, not having control of your situation, with you only option being to walk endlessly until you can't anymore, hoping for that thing you feel following you to end it all, yet the thing won't do it, because it was never there, it was just your mind playing games, trying to give you something to hold on to, only managing to get you more desperate by the second
This is the most amazing analysis of the backrooms I've watched yet... idk maybe i'm just high, but seriously great video!
I must thank you. I watched your video at like 2 am on a school night, and I remember when you brought up BLAME and how fascinating it was. When I finally read BLAME, it was one of the greatest Mangas I've read yet. Because of that I must thank you.
your explanation makes it even more scarier, love it
In my opinion, The backrooms is a metaphor for our life nowadays. It’s an unending corridor of boring work offices that we are trapped in, with no escape. Humanity expects us all to sit at a desk and just type things on our computer. This monotonous lifestyle is more creepy than anything, really.
I'm interested in this type of thing because sometimes I get scared when I think about how everyday is the exact same for me over and over and over again. It's scary. This whole 'liminal space' thing for me is a representation of the relentless sameness of everyday that basically amounts to emptiness that threatens to go on forever. That's why I'm so fascinated by this stuff. And what is scary about the backrooms is that it is designed yet has no purpose. Something about that is sinister to me.
I came here expecting you to deeply analyze Kane’s video, I ended up getting a psychological lesson on how missing one part of a picture destroys the entire composition.
I am also at awe that I, somehow, randomly came across a video that completely summarized the exact train of thoughts I’ve been having since years but never got the chance to explain it to anyone without coming across as an insane individual. The wonders of the internet - I love it. Consider a new subscriber sir!
Well approached, written and produced. I'm only getting more interested in the phenomenon and plan to write about it myself. All the best and keep up the superb work.
i like how in these videos clark will do things like throw a clip from the shining in there without feeling a need to justify/explain it (not until later anyway). I want to do that too if I ever eventually end up making my video essay ideas
11:37 i remember when i was a kid and had recurring nightmares, I would get the feeling of dread and terror that i just felt after getting jumpscared even when i was expecting it. I wasn't however expecting it to look like the creatures i vaguely remember from those previously mentioned nightmares.
7:41. I got a creepy sense of deja vu when looking at this empty room. Took me only a second to place it. It looks almost identical to the room used in the Incubus "Warning" video, where the girl tries to warn everyone that their lives are about to all cease, and they're all just cluelessly going about their days. The windows are slightly different, and the lights on the ceiling are placed lengthwise instead of the opposite direction, but the room shape and pillar setup look the same. Thought it was interesting that this video about being forgotten, and their video about wasting the time you have left both hit that same chord with the imagery though. (If you fast-forward to around the 3 minute mark of the Incubus video, you can see the room empty to compare the two.)
I loved the concept of the back rooms before people started adding unnecessary levels and creatures and “lore” to it. It’s far more interesting as an empty, mysterious space.
I like the levels that are devoid of entities and are just different spaces
They did because obviously they wanted to try to explain it, to make it real, tangible, not so scary. That's what happened with every scary thing. Ghosts, vampires, eldritch horrors
Everywhere at the end of time. Both my fears in one video. To be eternally trapped in a place outside space and to be eternally trapped in the spiral of dementia, until time itself erodes whatever I was.
Thanks
This is very interesting to me, as this concept of non places fascinate me very much. The idea of familiarity, but so empty, so void of life and so repetitive, that it becomes unfamiliar. The uneasy feeling of being forgotten. Being nothing.
Everything at the End of Time was a perfect addition for this, both tonally and topically. Sick video. This definitely freaked me out (in the best sort of way).
15 minutes that ended up feeling like an hour, amazing job my dude!
5:26
Awesome sound. I had never heard of this movie until now. I'm definitely gonna watch it.
This was fascinating! I am especially thankful for making me aware of Tsutomu Nihei's work, which i have come to enjoy immensely.
Cheers!
In a way, you could say the lore expansion of this is an example of this fear. Because by adding in meaning to something, by adding in the potential for adventure, it becomes something memorable, that if you end up in this situation that you can at least ingrain yourself in the memories of those whom you've been surviving with.
Being in the back rooms with absolutely nothing there to entertain you or scare you to keep you on your toes constantly would genuinely be more horrifying than having demons or creatures chasing you, a endless space with no seen conclusion just seems like a good way to speedrun going crazy
This is a seriously high quality video, and had some great talking points. I love the Backrooms and I'm in the process of making a large scale VR environment that I'll be able to explore with my friends in VRChat. I'll be stalking people in a Stalker avatar. >:D
ohhhh awesome and epic
Yoo if you make it make sure to tell us!
It may not be right or even correct. We experience our own backrooms especially in this world. There are days where we feel lost, we look at the skyscrapers and the wide boulevards, it made us clueless for a while on where we want to go. The creepy-pasta video is scary as it challenges us to see the state of our minds. It is a deep video that encourages open interpretation as we have our own story such as the Backrooms.
Just... imagine being locked inside a huge labyrinth of hallways. Nobody else but you, blind corners everywhere, no food, no water, nobody answering your screams for help. Like somekind of strange surrealsist desert. This is absolute horror. Horror from being alone, lost, left to wander arond, left to die.
I find this type of thing fascinating. The best example of the “back rooms” or the feeling of which was when I was a young man in the 1980’s and my friend and I entered an empty Mall that was closed for about 15yrs. Everything looked like an apocalyptic scene. Everything looked as if it was frozen in time. It was completely silent, the feeling of all the people who shopped there and their family memories made it feel like a transient space. Just something so strange about it. Thanks for sharing the unique perspective in your video. Cheers 😊
Me: This video messes with my brain
11:37 : *heartattack* ( i was laying in bed with the lights off)
Kane is very good at vfx
7:31 That’s why “It’s just a burning memory” by the caretaker works so well with the backrooms
Interesting. I always saw the backrooms as a fear of something akin to being forgotten but not quite : Monotony. The backrooms feel like an unending office space, the tan carpet and tan walls, the lack of perosnality in an unending spinning labyrinth of walls, It spells the tedium you feel with day to day scenery. It's an infinite liminal space. No destination , no objective , no end goal. Just wandering about aimlessly going about a routine that stretches indefinitely , but in the years you've done it, you haven't even seen days of progress. I see it as an artistic interpretation of the utter psychological torment a meaningless existence can bring
Many years ago, I came home from a term at University to find my childhood home packed up in boxes and wrapped in bubble wrap and cellophane. It was the house I came to just days after I was born. When the moving truck had been packed, I wander through the house again: to this day it was the most profound liminal space I have ever been inside. All of my memories were there, all of my safety and familiarity, all of the warmth, all of the security of having a real "home", all striped bare and now hollow. I haven't had a real "home" since then, nowhere I felt that I strongly belonged, I have been the one haunting the world, a nomad while the decades have raced by effortlessly. Because of that severance, from a space and from time itself it seems, I already do feel "forgotten" but perhaps forgotten none more than by myself.
It is just so weird. I played The Backrooms game that someone made a long time ago and even though I didn't hear anything about creatures I was still super scared. I usually don't get scared by horror movies and such, but there was just something about that game that made my heart race. The more I played, the more hesitant I became to travel around yet another corner. Later, (recently) came a minecraft version of the Backrooms. It wasn't quite as bad, but I was still scared. I played Minecraft all my life. I know what it has in store, but even so it was still scary. I wonder if this means somewhere inside I am scared of being lost.
At my job there is a building you have to go into to get to HR and it’s a separate building you have to go outside and cross over to get there. That definitely gave me this effect because nobody was there and it was so unusual. That’s what makes the backrooms so interesting is because anyone can come across areas that make them feel the same way, that “where am I?” feeling.
I’ve been to hotels where I’ve been trying to find my room and for a moment, I’ve had this weird eerie warm feeling of being entirely alone and in a space that seemed never ending, with permanent, winding hallways. It’s odd; freaky but peaceful.
So strange, this video, randomly suggested to me, just so happened to include everything I'm currently obsessing about or working with: The Backrooms, Hauntology, The Shining, Futuristic Worlds and Anime/Manga Architecture
I'll definitely be getting those books you mentioned, they're right up my alley as a student of underground worlds and haunted spaces ❤
i bought the Blame! mangas because of this video. Its so weird... i love it but i cant explain why.... the story is basically non-existant... the characters are meh at best... and the art is ... well... "special". And yet still... i couldnt stop reading. Its a weird "i want to see whats behind the next corner"-feeling constantly.
@@PriestessOfSlaanesh that sounds very intriguing! I really want to get my hands on the manga too, even if it's only to admire its art..you might enjoy the anime "Angel's Egg" too if you like this style and atmosphere
there is a movie called 1408, you should check it out
This was way deeper than I was expecting for a video about what is essentially a creepypasta. Well done sir.
never saw the backrooms this way- thanks for making this video! it was really interesting
Ye
But this is the original concept of the backrooms, not the one that's essentially an scp clone
The backrooms give me a different haunting nostalgia that always comes to my brain over and over during day and night. There was this mall that was knocked down in 2015 called great mall of the Great Plains. That mall was my childhood nostalgia… For some reason the backrooms gives this haunting nostalgia of that location and a very similar comparison to the back rooms of great mall. They looks so similar. Yellow walls and buzzing lights… When great mall was shutting down… The mall was empty and echoey. With buzzing lights… every retail store was empty. The place was forgotten… I used to have dreams about that place being abandoned for years even thought it was knocked down. But, I would get re accruing dreams of vines growing on the walls with broken glass and rotting walls and ceilings…
Backrooms level ??? Great mall
Search up great mall of the Great Plains and you will find photos of the place.
All of your videos are really well edited, well planned and easy to understand. I really enjoy questioning and hearing the philosophy and reasoning behind my thinking being well constructed and in a comprehensive way.
Thanks to this video i realized that backrooms remind me of how I imagined hell, if it existed. Neverending maze without any sense or ending, overwhelming loneliness and uneasiness, crushing feeling of being left alone and being forgotten. It gives me shivers when I think about that. Places like backrooms whould be much more terrifying then the lake of fire.
Infinite psychological torture...yeah, that sounds like hell to me, as well.
i find it interesting how there is a specific type of "audio" or "music" that accompanies these shots of liminal spaces. Almost as if you can encompass all the same feelings and philosophies in auditory form as well. Ambient, low quality, distortion, atonal etc..
Insane video!!! This made me remember some wild dreams I had of liminal spaces well before they were "created"
Jumpscare got me at 11:35. Goddddddangit
Edit: Nevermind the ending lines terrified me even more than any horror monster could
This was really cool, and thanks for defining what these forms and spaces are that give me that feeling. It’s fascinating.