The Internet Part Two: The Backrooms and Liminal Spaces; What Are They? Are They Real? Let’s Find The Minotaur!
Read The Internet Part One: Salad Fingers here.
“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
When it comes to urban legends, the origin is often disputed. Not The Backrooms; the fear can be traced back to two 4chan posts from 2019.
The first post is the below image, a fluorescent-lit dingy wallpapered set of rooms, branching off into other rooms, perhaps an infinite amount, with the same stains and wallpapers.
It was originally posted to a thread themed ‘cursed images.’ It then sparked a new thread of ‘disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’’
The second origin to solidify The Backrooms as A Thing is this quote, detached from its original thread, describing these types of images:
“If you're not careful and you noclip1 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”
— Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019)
The legend congealed in the bowels of internet threads, serving as a building block for creepypastas2, but in 2022, it breached text when Kane Pixels uploaded a short film to YouTube, labeled as found footage from 1996.
The camera-holder is filming with friends before ‘noclipping’ into the ground, into a sea of yellow wallpapered-rooms, hallways, and areas that often resemble the useless extra square footage of building; the extra long area after the trash, the strange turns before the mall bathroom, the unused nooks and crannies of office buildings.
Eventually, he is hunted by what fans call an Entity, made of inorganic materials, before tumbling back into reality.
Kane Pixels has uploaded multiple videos since the original, mostly in the yellow-tinged semi-infinite rooms.
The success of the Backrooms has inspired other creators in the form of numerous self-published novels, iterations like The Poolrooms, and an upcoming A24 movie3.
On Liminal Spaces
“Non-place” was coined as a term in 1995, and is a temporary space - think baggage claim at the airport. Nobody’s permanent home, nobody’s source of comfort.
Liminal spaces refer to familiar places presented without their normal context - think a playground at night. This term has become synonymous with the aesthetic of the original 4chan threads, although The Backrooms are also a non-place.
Spaces are built by people, with intent. The Backrooms exemplify the perversion of intent, eliciting that eerie sense of the unheimlech; the familiar gone wrong.
The Backrooms were;
A) created with a purpose that transcends humanity’s current views on architecture or
B) not created, but spawned or
C) created as a labyrinth with an explicit purpose to obfuscate, to lure you into the center, only to be slaughtered by a beast
Let’s find the minotaur!
In Ancient Greek mythology, the Minotaur is the monster at the center of the labyrinth. There are multiple interpretations of the myth, but Minos’ wife Pasiphae bore offspring with a bull, in the shape of a part-man/part-bull. The hybrid, the Minotaur, was imprisoned in a Labyrinth, and survived on sacrificed men and women before it was slaughtered.
Some interpretations depict the Minotaur as bloodthirsty and others are much more sympathetic.4
There are two possible horrors when dealing with the Backrooms:
A) There is a Minotaur in the labyrinth, or
B) There is absolutely nothing and you are completely alone.
The original Backrooms video does have an Entity, but other versions, including the Poolrooms do not.
In the 2000 horror novel House of Leaves, the fictional Will Navidson becomes obsessed with the labyrinth that begins to materialize, continuously expanding and changing inside his Virginia home. Its utter blackness, its emptiness, lack of obvious intent continues to draw him in for all sorts of posited reasons, including that he is a photojournalist and he must capture it, must see it for what it is.
If there’s a labyrinth with no monster and no distinct purpose, horror media tells us we simply cannot live in the emptiness; we will go mad. Faced with a Minotaur, we have a challenge, but faced without, we must become the Minotaur. Bloodthirsty or not, roaming the halls, studying every ceiling tile or carpet fiber to give it meaning.
I am currently writing to you on this Wednesday from a 55+ gated community in South Florida where the backyard faces directly East for the optimal sunrise. There is no inch of land that is not imbued with intent. Yet there is still ‘a disquiet that just feels ‘off.’’ Every house is from a pre-decided list of hues of beige. Everyone plays pickleball or canasta. They even have canned bread.
If the Devil is in the details, the red tape, and bureaucracies of an HOA, there is God in the Backrooms, the fortuitous chaos something mighty to behold.
Recommended
Skinamarink (2022)
My friend recently told me they watched this with two other people; one loved it, one was meh, and one hated it. I’m between love and meh, but if you let it wash over you, hoo boy!
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
The book’s dedication is, “This is not for you.” And it’s not! I can’t in good conscience recommend it to everyone. Only to you, Dr. Stone.
Melancholia (2011)
There’s nothing out there.
Us (2019)
There’s something out there and it’s watching and waiting for you specifically.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson / The Haunting (1963)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
We would have nothing without Shirley Jackson.
Thanks, y’all! See ya next week for reviews and notes on recently watched media.
xo,
the small, but unmistakable sound of a cough, that only could’ve come from your new plant [species unknown] given (or was it burdened?) to you by your genial acquaintance, who now that you think of it was looking a bit worse for wear, allie lembo
A video game term, used to describe falling through solid spaces.
‘Copy and paste,’ as in selecting text and reproducing it directly elsewhere on the Internet, eventually morphed into the term ‘copypasta’ in the mid-2000’s. Creepypasta is a portmanteau of ‘creepy’ and ‘copypasta’ eventually coming to mean anything creepy that is endemic to the Internet. Initially it was used for text-based posts, like r/Two-Sentence Horror, but came to mean any Internet-based horror.
There are few details on the movie, and no release date. I’m curious if A24 is waiting for box office numbers for their upcoming I Saw The TV Glow, the second Internet-influenced horror movie from director Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going To The World’s Fair).
House of Leaves proposes (amid many theories) that the minotaur may’ve been hidden as a metaphor for a disabled child. One of the novel’s major influences is Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote this beautiful tale of the Minotaur, The House of Astarion.