The Backrooms Talk: Creepypasta and Liminal Spaces

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The Backrooms (The Backstores) is a creepypasta that describes an endless maze of offices and other randomly generated environments. The creepypasta has also been cited as the origin of the Internet aesthetic of liminal spaces*. Saturday 31st at 8:00 p.m. The Backrooms originated from a 4chan post in 2019, where an anonymous user shared the first related image, a photograph of a large carpeted room with yellow walls and fluorescent lighting. At the age of 16, Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels) uploaded a horror short film to YouTube in 2022 titled The Backrooms (Found Footage), presenting it as a 1996 recording of a young cameraman who accidentally enters the place. The production company A24 offered Parsons the chance to direct a film based on his original creepypasta. The Backrooms premiered worldwide in June 2026, grossing 118 million dollars in its first few days. Driven by a mass of young viewers who filled theaters around the globe, the film dethroned the major Hollywood franchises. With this milestone, Parsons enters film history as the youngest director ever to top the worldwide box office. *Liminal spaces are transition zones between an origin and a destination (corridors, waiting rooms, parking lots, airports…). The aesthetic arises from feelings of unease, tension and even nostalgia that people experience when encountering these places in a state of abandonment or emptiness. This is usually achieved through visual elements such as poor lighting, compression artifacts, image noise and an outdated decor that evokes the 1990s and early 2000s (Vaporwave, psychedelic and glitch aesthetics). Due to their nostalgic appeal and dreamlike atmosphere, liminal spaces are also closely linked to Traumacore, Hauntology, Dreamcore and other similar aesthetics.