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How "backrooms" became an urban legend of the digital age

The endless fascination of the places that disturb us

How backrooms became an urban legend of the digital age The endless fascination of the places that disturb us
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006)
Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Restlessness, anxiety, the feeling of living in an eternal déjà-vu. These are the emotions described by those who say they have found themselves, at least once in their lives, in a "backroom": a place, or rather infinite liminal places, characterized by an aesthetic as disturbing as it is paradoxically familiar. A disused warehouse, an empty swimming pool, a monochromatic office with flashing lights. The imagery of backrooms feeds on non-places that evoke a strong sense of uncertainty in the observer and is one of the latest chilling products of internet folklore, which has gained strength thanks to the numerous speculations of web communities (just think of the fame of the legends that orbit around the Cecil Hotel or the terrifying character of Slender Man). The theory of the existence of these rooms was born on 4chan, an imageboard site where users post content of all kinds anonymously, following a post depicting a monochromatic room, with white carpeting and lights, accompanied by this caption:

«If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in».

Practically a "creepypasta", a fictional tale aimed at terrorizing anyone who reads it, which in no time at all has spread an infinite number of images of empty and gloomy rooms on platforms such as Reddit and YouTube, under the tag #liminalplaces. But what is it that attracts us so much that a phenomenon born completely anonymously on the web becomes pop? 

@lights.are.off The backrooms #backrooms #thebackrooms #horrortok #vhs original sound - LIGHTS ARE OFF

Our existence is studded with indecipherable events, which by nature we are induced to explain. When we don't find the key and the right meaning to give to what happens around us, we find ourselves immersed in a tangle of confusion and uncertainty. The imagery of the backrooms perfectly embodies this state of mind and gives it form through a seductive creepy aesthetic, reminiscent of the post-vaporwave world and abstractionism. The reasons why these locations are strangely familiar to us lies in the visual inputs that have been bombarding us for years through the media, from cult films like The Shining, shot in a dilapidated, labyrinthine hotel, to video games of the caliber of Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto and Rayman. We have collected and stored in the drawer of memory (and fear) a series of remote places that our mind goes to fish out when we are less alert, turning them into the background of our worst nightmares. The dark and foggy neighborhoods of Stranger Things (or even before, Twin Peaks), Freddy's dream world in the Nightmare saga, the surreal infinite prison of Cube and the corridors and pools where the demons of It Follows roam, the loading zones between one level and another of a game, the menacing presences that watch us in the dark like the clown Pennywise. The horror imagery of our era reworks the most cryptic scenarios of horror cinema and gaming, transforming them into metaphors of a more current and intangible fear. 

Twin Peaks (David Lynch, 1990)
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006)
Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001)
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Backrooms are waiting areas with a strong symbolic meaning that perfectly represent the main fears of our century: social anxiety and horror vacui. It is no coincidence that many artists choose these transition zones as the subject of their representations, to express in the best possible way these abstract concepts: from the canvases of Ferdinanda Florence, a painter originally from Washington D.C., to the famous 3D illustrator Jared Pike and the cryptoartist Hanieh Masoumi, liminal places redefine the social anxiety of the twenty-first century with surreal landscapes, excluded from space and time, looking threatening but equally bewitching. On the web there are endless theories that orbit around the existence of backrooms in the real world. It would be mostly hallucinations in which ends up trapped during phenomena such as sleep paralysis, or degenerative conditions for our brain, such as Alzheimer's. The Caretaker, an experimental British musician, between 2016 and 2019 has made an entire album inspired by these neuro-cognitive disorders: Everywhere at the End of Time is composed of melancholic and disturbing melodies, some sampled from the soundtrack of The Shining, which are repeated in an endless and disruptive loop. In this regard it is interesting to note how the hypothesis of the existence of these places goes hand in hand with the divergence between mind and body, becoming a vehicle for another common fear, widespread on a large scale: the loss of control. 

Since ancient times we have been fascinated by what is unknown to us and what escapes our reasoning, and we have tried to give shape to our fears in order to contain and overcome them. The supposition that in a place, apparently vacant and uninhabited, an occult secret can be hidden, only increases the degree of alarm and seduction that that place exerts on us. Liminal spaces creep into our artistic imagination paraphrasing the role of Dante's Purgatory: they frighten us, even more than Hell, precisely because they seem real.