disquieting images that just feel 'off'

May 30, 2024 1:30 PM

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. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

So stated an anonymous 2019 thread on 4chan's /x/ imageboard -- a potent encapsulation of liminal-space horror that gave rise to a complex mythos, exploratory video games, and an acclaimed web series (previously; soon to become a major motion picture from A24!). In the five years since, the evolving "Backrooms" fandom has canonized a number of other dreamlike settings, from CGI creations like The Poolrooms and a darkened suburb with wrong stars to real places like the interior atrium of Heathrow's Terminal 4 Holliday Inn and a shuttered Borders bookstore. But the image that inspired the founding text -- an anonymous photo of a vaguely unnerving yellow room -- remained a mystery... until now.

...turns out it's from a 2003 blog post about renovating for an RC car race track in Oshkosh! Not quite as fun a reveal as for certain other longstanding internet mysteries, but still satisfying, especially since it includes another equally-unsettling photo (and serendipitously refers to a "back room").

Also, due credit to Black August, the SomethingAwful goon who quietly claims to have written the original Backrooms text.

Liminal spaces previously on MeFi:

Discussing the Kane Pixels production (plus an inspired-by series, A-Sync Research). Note that as the Backrooms movie takes shape, Kane is continuing work on an intriguing spiritual successor: The Oldest View

The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces

A Twitter thread on being lost in a real-life Backrooms space

Inside the world's largest underground shopping complex

A 2010 post about Hondo, an enigmatic Half-Life map designer who incorporated "enormous hidden areas that in some cases dwarfed the actual level"

MyHouse.WAD, a sprawling, reality-warping Doom mod that went viral last year

AskMe: Seeking fiction books with labyrinths and other interminable buildings

My personal favorite liminal space: the unnervingly cheerful indoor playground KidsFun from '90s-era Tampa -- if only because I've actually been there as a kid (and talked about its eeriness on the blue before). Do you have any liminal spaces that have left an impression on you?

posted by Rhaomi (22 comments total)

For comparison, here's a video from 2012 of the Backrooms space being used as an RC racing track.
posted by neuracnu at 1:44 PM on May 30 [1 favorite]

I like how the "Twitter thread on being lost in a real-world Backrooms space" is now only accessible by finding archive.org's copy of a Threadreader archive of deleted tweets.
posted by egypturnash at 1:52 PM on May 30 [9 favorites]

...and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:56 PM on May 30 [4 favorites]

Working in IT for decades, hoo boy have I been in too many of these spaces setting up behind-the-scenes gear. And as a young altar boy I had to go into a convent and help move furniture. It was all liminal space. The horror was real.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:58 PM on May 30

I really liked this post of someone getting into the real backrooms of a conference center a couple years ago.

Twatter is completely broken on my computer such that only the UI loads, so I don't know if the linked thread is still there or is archived somewhere.

edit: nevermind, already posted.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 2:35 PM on May 30 [1 favorite]

I'm 53 and have had disturbing dreams, almost nightmares, that often take place in settings like these. No monster or killer after me, just finding myself in these kinds of environments. The Back Rooms subreddit is interesting to check out once in a while, as sometimes these images fill me with an unsettling feeling of dread. In a fun way!

Obviously my nightmares aren't that bad, as I am attracted to looking at imagery like this. It's like touching a sore in my mouth with my tongue. Some of these spaces make me thing of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings (one of my favorite artists). Other than de Chirico's color palette, his paintings give me similar nightmare feelings. His paintings also evoke a strong feeling of flashback to very early childhood, like before I could speak or grasp language. I'm not claiming I can remember that far back or that early in my development, but it gives me that feeling.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:51 PM on May 30 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: an unsettling feeling of dread. In a fun way!
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:36 PM on May 30 [2 favorites]

The whole Kane Pixels series is worth watching.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:04 PM on May 30 [1 favorite]

Something I love about the internet-- it existed before the internet, of course, but the internet surfaced it-- is when people decide something really, really unimportant is in fact a huge deal that warrants nearly compulsive investigation. "Where was this aggressively unremarkable picture taken" is one of those things. It's the best.
posted by phooky at 5:28 PM on May 30 [8 favorites]

Back in college I would exploit these spaces (they exist in all large medical facilities, and especially so for universities) to go between the Liquor/Drugs District and my dorm.

Usually six floors underground for the main parts, and I once nodded out on a gurney, wasn’t noticed for a few hours, and was allowed to run away.

Nowadays that’d get me a felony for sure.

I miss liminal spaces, and I’m prepared to fucking guarantee that sense is behind much of this.
posted by aramaic at 7:29 PM on May 30 [2 favorites]

Many years ago I played World of Warcraft (it was not good for me). One evening, for whatever reason, I decided to swim along the edge of the continent, which had significant play regions at the north and south ends of the continent, but was just a mountainous coastline with nothing in between. To be clear, the rest of the continent was packed with stuff to do, but this particular coastline was just empty. No quests, no mobs, no NPCs, no paths, just impassible mountains running directly into the coast. The entire thing would take something like 15-30 minutes to traverse if I recall, while taking normal routes would be much faster. This was not a real route to get around and there was literally no reason for me to go this way, but hey, open world game, why not? This was before Let's Plays or streaming were as common as they are now, so I never seen anyone do it and I was bored. I encountered no other players on my journey.

For minute after minute of travel, it was just mountainous cliffs and water, unchanging. No sign of anything. I saw nothing on my world map, so this tedious sameness was what I'd expected. But then, suddenly, about halfway along the continent, I rounded a bend and there was a tiny valley cut into the mountains, with a farmstead and a few buildings. Exactly the sort you'd see in one of the game's various "farmland" regions. Nothing at all unusual about it, except that here it was in the middle of nowhere, at a spot that would take some 20 minutes of tedious travel along boring coastal cliffs to reach. No NPCs, no mobs, no treasure, no hidden message. Just an empty farm, and one that felt special in no way except its location. Someone had taken the trouble to model it up and add it into the game, despite the fact that there was literally no reason to go find it, and almost no one would ever see it. There was something kind of oddly creepy about it being there. Sort of, "I am standing within an artifact of human construction for which I can discern no purpose, either functional or artistic."

I haven't thought of that in a long time, but I think it kind of gave me that backrooms vibe.
posted by biogeo at 8:48 PM on May 30 [17 favorites]

biogeo, I got into World of Warcraft when classic released and that specific thing was the only fun I had playing it. For me, that space was a pier on the coast out in the middle of nowhere.

The further you get from the beaten path, the more the world becomes like the residual thoughts of its designers. Azeroth is really damn immersive, but that immersion begs deep existential questions when the characters of its world leave town in search of nothing and become like words on the edge of a page peering out beyond the impassable border of existence.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 1:37 AM on May 31 [5 favorites]

I visit a lot of county courthouses in the upper midwest; there's a lot of attachment to the classic architecture of these courthouses, built somewhere between the 1860s and 1930s, so despite the changing needs of county government over the past century these buildings got modified and redesigned and walls moved and things changed around rather than tearing it down and building something bigger or more high-tech.

So, there's a lot of walking through nice, modern office space, but then having to walk through a giant door of a now-unused safe to go down a creaky metal staircase into a room with giant windows -- but it feels like you can't actually see that room from the outside, how is this the northwest corner of the building? -- to get to the server room. Or, you go through one door, then down three steps, through a short hallway, then up a ramp, then around a corner to where IT sits in a nice finished area but from the outside you can see the studs and unfinished side of the drywall, then they lead you back out a different direction -- which passes through the jail, but I thought that was on the other side of the building? -- and then a door opens and again you're in a spot you didn't realize was connected.

Speaking of jails: if I have to work on computers in the jail, it is pretty much guaranteed that I will end up trapped in a liminal hallway, universally gray and lined with big steel doors with tiny windows in them, where all the doors are locked and I have no idea which one I'm supposed to buzz through to get myself to freedom. It has happened more than twice. They have cameras everywhere, eventually someone comes to rescue me.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:41 AM on May 31 [7 favorites]

If you're in need of more liminal space material, Dan Bell's Dead Mall video series (Thirty-four 4K remasters and sixty-seven originals) explores fading and empty malls as they slowly vanish from the American landscape.

Some of them have original synthwave ambient music playing to cover the echoing Muzak (probably to prevent a copyright strike).
posted by JDC8 at 9:32 AM on May 31 [2 favorites]

My band needed a long filler track for a recent album (semi-complicated streaming reasons) and I had the (dumb) idea to do a "mallsoft" mix where the songs are washed in pingy mall reverb for that creepy nostalgic feeling. One of the guys went down to a local almost-dead mall and shot some footage for the video and it is so, so creepy. It's all video shot locked off on a tripod, and the only person you see is a security guard who randomly walks through one of the shots and doesn't even glance at the camera. Total NPC behavior, just wonderful.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:26 AM on May 31 [3 favorites]

In high school I was a library aide who also helped out with some A/V and photography stuff, which meant from time to time I had free periods and the librarian's giant keyring. It was a old building that had fallen at least partly into disuse and disrepair by the time I attended, victim of slashed funding and misplaced educational priorities even forty years ago, home to a lot of vacant classrooms and storerooms and back corridors with leaky ceilings.

One day my friend Mike and I were sitting in the school parking lot, talking about nothing, listening to the radio, in one of those lazy ditch day afternoons that would have had hotboxing the car out of boredom if either of us had been the least bit interested in weed in high school, and we noticed a small window, high on the west wall, not close to anything else. Where does that window go? What room is that? I wondered aloud. Mike didn't have the same curiosity for exploration (or the risk tolerance for possibly being caught in places he *really* wasn't supposed to be) so he was my lookout instead, and we set out to try to find the room on the other side of that window.

It took a couple of days of searching, stealing odd hours from lunches and ditched classes and study halls. Finally we ended up in the auditorium, a theater with tiered seats descending to a stage neither of us had ever seen in actual use. (At the rare school-wide assemblies that weren't held in the gym or lunchroom, the speaker stood at a podium placed in front of the stage.) As near as I could reckon the window was somewhere above the stage, so Mike stayed at the door while I went poking around backstage. There was no stairway I could find, at least not behind any door my keys could open, but there was a ladder in the wings that disappeared into shadow about thirty feet up. I didn't have a flashlight but I did have the foolhardy curiosity of a sixteen-year-old, so up I went. The ladder led to a dusty catwalk, and the catwalk led to a corridor along the back wall, and the corridor led to a door on each side that turned out to be locked. But luckily the master key worked on one of these, and there was a small suite of dark rooms that I'm guessing nobody had visited in twenty or thirty years. Presumably offices for people working on stage productions? I assume there was a proper stairwell coming up from one of the locked doors behind the stage though I don't remember finding it. I did however open one door to find sunlight gamely struggling through an extremely dirty window, beyond which I could just make out the parking lot. Mission accomplished.

Mike was pretty freaked out when I finally made my way back down, I guess I'd been gone a lot longer than he expected. Also I was *covered* in dust, which got me some strange looks in the geometry class we were both late for.

Years later I found myself working adjacent to one of the largest convention centers in North America, which had some amazingly creepy vibes when not occupied by a trade show. But they were pretty good at keeping the doors to their backrooms locked and sadly, nobody there trusted me enough to give me one of those massive keyrings.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 12:01 PM on May 31 [8 favorites]

Cool post. Do you have any liminal spaces that have left an impression on you?

There's a water-storage dam in the lower North Island of NZ with a path across the top of the dam. It's not remote, but you do go through forest to get to it. There's a big sign on the dam saying DON'T SWIM, explaining that under the water there's this huge moving plate that periodically opens to let the water out, when there I imagined I heard it grind as it moved.... It provokes a feel of dread whenever it comes to mind.

I used to do lift shaft work from an open (no sides) lift, it was always late at night when the lifts could be stopped as no people. Just me with my gear, and the lift man - in a pool of light spooling up and down in the darkness.With the busyness of the day gone it was always an odd experience.

The earlier 'net sure felt odd at times, like clicking up through the levels of a url and (at least) feeling like you were in someone's desktop (mainly looking for CAD tools and articles).
posted by unearthed at 11:16 PM on May 31 [5 favorites]

Many years ago I got to play at the Sydney Opera House a few times, and the backstage areas are a bit like this. It tended to be busy when performances were on, but late at night as we bumped out (we percussionists tended to be the unofficial roadies for the amateur orchestras I was part of) it was much quieter.

The unusual shape of the Sydney Opera House means the back room corridors common to all performance venues are also unusual shapes. There are some steep and narrow stairwells, especially getting up to the pipe organ manual, and the service access to the pipes.

And it's such a different place compared to front of house. It's very much like you step into a different dimension that has its own geometry. Some places connect in ways that seem much shorter, while others seem to take a lot longer to traverse than back in the real world.

It will always be a part of the magic of theatre for me.
posted by But tomorrow is another day... at 5:41 PM on June 1 [4 favorites]

The hits keep on coming: a Discord user has discovered the location of yet another well-known image, the "liminal stairwell"
posted by Rhaomi at 3:50 PM on June 2 [2 favorites]

Those pool rooms are terrifying.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:57 PM on June 3

Josh from Let's Game It Out has a lot of fun finding ways into the wrong sides of assorted virtual realities.
posted by flabdablet at 3:29 AM on June 4

MeFi's Own Jason Scott writes on the Internet Archive's role in the story:

The Internet Archive’s crawlers moved through the pages of a hobby store multiple times over the years, capturing HTML, photographs, and time-stamping the process, with the equivalent care of an at-risk website, a politician on the national stage, or a legendary and obvious moment in history provided via a PDF file.

This agnostic, wide-ranging crawl likely represented both the original source of the image, and a persistent, dependable URL to reference back to it, as thousands are doing at this very moment.

This is the mission of the Wayback Machine – be the dependable, accessible connection to web history, and therefore all history. Give the Internet its Memory, which would otherwise be lost.

If you mourn the loss of legend and mystery in our quest to keep the truth transparent, available and persistent, don’t worry – the process of internalizing and analyzing the image to give the Backrooms history its full and complete story has already begun:

Here’s to the next mystery, and the next unsettling information being brought into the light and presented for the education, research and entertainment of the Internet, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

posted by Rhaomi at 6:42 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]