'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic

I am also going to call out House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a really interesting book that explores a house that is slightly larger on the inside than the outside. It explores a lot of liminal spaces and has a really interesting format in print.

That's been done as "The Store is Closed."[1]

IKEA threatened to sue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/sK5wPE-aQwc?autoplay=1&enablej...

The Stanley Parable definitely plays with non-euclidean and liminal spaces - the room in the screenshot being one such example.

I mean if we're trying to source where "liminal space" started, I'd like to add Portal and Portal 2 into the mix. It didn't have the surreal, creepy components because jump scare horror games like Five Nights hadn't been popularized yet but the entire second area of Portal 2 where you're introduced to Cave Johnson and the older Aperture Science HQ is very much "liminal".

If we want to go deeper, then I really think its Earthbound's absurdist take on childhood adventures with cultists, ghosts, dreamscapes, etc. but I think at that point I might as well say dice games influenced things.

Speaking of relevant games, there's also a Roblox game that my son has been into called Backrooms With Guns, and now I understand it a lot more.

https://en.namu.wiki/w/The%20Backrooms%20With%20Guns

I see others have mentioned Superliminal too, which was great.

> which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.

For the 4 people on HN who don't know, "maze of twisty passages" is a reference to the this (the?) text adventure game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

I'm not an SCP expert, but for a long time I have really liked SCP-087. It really nails the sleep paralysis and liminal space vibes.

I really want to play that game but I am bad at the genre and I got whacked by the first boss. I really like that creepy aesthetic.

[dead]

Day vs. Night are what makes the difference. The sprawling suburban office complex from the 70s was, like you said, just boring and a bit oppressive during the day. At night though, a sea of cubicles. Endless hallways. Nothing but blackness outside the windows. Lights are all on motion detectors so only your area is lit. And only lit for a time. Eventually you'd have to stand up to make the lights switch back on. And when you do, you look over the fields of cubes to see a shadowy figure slowly slump its way across the room. Headed vaguely in your direction but never quite reaching you. You think it's Mark from Accounting, but you'll never know for certain.

For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon. The horror, or unsettling feeling, one gets from seeing a place at night that's usually only seen in the day. Had that constantly as a kid when going to school at night for performances or teacher meetings. A place bright and loud that's now quiet and dark. You know where everything is, but it all seems like it's just an inch or two out of place.

I disagree. I too have worked in these environments. As mentioned in the article, and in numerous other references about the Backrooms - the creepiness stems partially from the "liminal" feeling of walking around large, man-made spaces that are totally empty. Think walking around a shopping mall after hours. I had several odd jobs before I was in college where I had to work overnight shifts, sweeping the floors of large department stores. That feeling of "empty watchfullness" was definitely a thing, and it's captured well by a lot of the Backrooms content.

The other aspect of "creepiness" stems from the idea that the Backrooms represent an endless, malevolent labyrinth. One of the scarier aspects of being trapped in the Backrooms (for me) is that you would just wander around until you died for lack of water and food, in a bland corporate office corridor with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.

> The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply doesn’t hold up when you’re actually in a space like this, but only works if you’ve only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it themselves).

I'm not sure if that's true. I've definitely been to places that feel intentionally confusing; the basement of my college, several hospitals, etc. Where you walk between two buildings, and suddenly go from Floor 4 to Floor 6, or where you're sure you entered facing north, but after making three right-hand turns, you exit a building facing south.

> I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.

I developed a fondness for 1970s interior decor/styling even though I was born in 1988 because most of the places in my town, such as the library, were last renovated during that time.

Also, many people in my life, such as uncles & aunts, were still living in the homes they purchased in the 1970s and some design choices just can't be easily/cheaply changed.

I grew up within and around a ghost of 1970s architecture and design. As an adult I wound up moving into a suburb built in 1968 for this reason.

It's less nostalgia and more like a vague sense of familiarity that you can only scratch the surface of in your mind.

I dunno about that. At a previous job, we temporarily relocated to a building that featured a series of identical classrooms that were accessible by connecting doors in the back (it was really one long room with heavy dividers that did a good job of looking like regular walls).

You could look from one end to the other, seeing a series of doorways, and then walk through them all; every time I walked from one room to another, by brain would do a little power cycle as it tried to deal with the sensation of having walked into the room I'd just exited.

The deeper-in I got, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that something was "off" about the whole set-up; there were windows, but looking out them, the view felt... fake? It's hard to describe.

This was a few years after SCP became popular, but before the Backrooms - which was why I immediately understood the appeal.

> I’ve worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and though uncanny, it’s certainly not creepy.

That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a tardis).

> it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.

My teenage daughter is really into this genre but has never actually been in a mostly abandoned 90s mall or fluorescent-lit business park office space herself.

But don't underestimate how much history bleeds forwards in time in various bits of cultural ephemera that can still be absorbed by younger people. She doesn't have much first-had experience with spaces with this vibe, but there is ample second-hand media of it and enough bits and pieces of it still in the real world for it to be both somewhat familiar and enticingly exotic to her.

I never got really super into this subculture thing, or whatever it is, but I vaguely recall skimming things like a subreddit devoted to it, ages ago. I want to say when it was “starting” but then nothing ever really starts or ends. Definitely Pre-Covid though. Anyway, IIRC the focus was not on the horror, maybe a slight unease, but mostly the uncanniness.

I think this is just how things evolve. Creepy is a very strong sentiment that is somewhat aligned with uncanny, so it isn’t that surprising to see uncanny collapse into it over time.

But having spent a lot of time in empty classrooms, auditoriums, and hallways, waiting for students to show up, it’s more of a nostalgic feeling to me.

Feelings of nostalgia can be evoked by things you never experienced first-hand, and that were before your time. It’s not uncommon. There’s also a connection to melancholy that I can’t quite find the right words for.

I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.

Most people haven't been in an abandoned mansion, abandoned mental asylum or abandoned mall either, but they've seen enough from people who have to get the idea. Never mind the urbexers bringing them footage of hidden infrastructure.

I absolutely grew up in the correct time period, and I've been in a ton of abandoned or not-currently-occupied 1970s decor structures, both day and night in my life. Malls, factories, office buildings, schools, churches, workshops, houses, barns, alleyways, warehouses, storage areas, the list goes on.

I have never been creeped out by these kinds of areas or vibes, instead finding them endlessly comforting and wicked fun to explore :D

I think one possible difference about how I view such an area vs the youth of today, is I think they view walls as "the boundaries of a video game map, so sturdy that gunfire and C4 can't even dent them, thus ineffable". But I had seen enough damaged and unfinished drywall and poorly constructed buildings in my youth to instead view the wall as another piece of furniture. Beyond it is something else, possibly "outside". I don't have to bust it down, but I built faith that if you walk around it you will arrive there all the same.

And as far as an environment constructed for humans: chairs, tables, doorways, but no humans present to occupy said environment, I just wind up personifying the furniture or imagining ways to use a space for which it might not have been originally intended. After all I explored these spaces since I was a child, you damn well know my first instinct is "climb up and over all of the things" and "establish a fort" and things like that! :D

"Memoryless" nostalgia is a real effect, and the word for it is anemoia:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/anemoia-nostalgi...

I watched the film Asteroid City last night, and the setting gave me this exact emotion.

I'm old enough to have been in spaces like that, but the aesthetic illusion still works for me if I look at an image that is supposed to depict one.

Also, the infinite corridors is only part of the appeal. There are other ways in which such spaces can become eerie. I remember how I used to often be the only person still working in an open floor plan office in the evening. There was no sense of infinite corridors, but the dimness with one area alone illuminated by motion-detected light was spooky, and so were the sounds of the HVAC system and of doors and elevators somewhere in a different part of the building. There was also an uncanny empty feeling of seeing all the chairs and desks with no humans at them.

Even a regular, non-sprawling office building is creepy as fuck when you're the only one in it, no matter the time of day.

It isn't just offices. Easy to find this stuff exploring hotels, finding the unbooked conference area for example.

Where I grew up, it happened to me with (primary/middle/high) schools.

During the 60s and 70s, in order to accommodate baby boomers, new buildings were built on existing school grounds, and while they were not cookie cutter copies of each other, they followed the same architectural and civil engineering principles: identical ceiling height, same fixtures, same walls, same classroom door arches, same bathroom stalls, toilets, similar fire exit paths, identical heavy steel and steel wired glass external doors, staircase layouts...

But given every location had its own available surface and urban/terrain/attendance needs, they were anywhere from 1 to 4 floors, straight corridors, or in L, or rectangular with inner courtyard, with and without basement, and overall significant practical deviations from some common standard blueprint (though I never found the common denominator) but keeping everything else the same. It was extremely eerie and disorienting visiting a different school, or getting used to another school when you moved, especially after hours when they're empty.

It's probably similar to the khrushchyovki/stalinki residential buildings in post-Soviet countries, though I've only visited them well after the collapse and they've evolved on their own. Meanwhile these schools I mention, look actually frozen in time.

Naw, I'm older and the reason I'm into this sort of thing is that I have nostalgia about being in these sorts of spaces as a young child.

I can only second this. I personally got more out of “The Oldest View” than I did out of maybe half of all commercial shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky.

At a meta level, there’s something amazing about fiction that feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises you in execution.

I think it’s degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and you’ve seen big spiders crawling around? It’s a fear of the unknown and we’re all tuned a little differently, I think we can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending on the person and how much knowledge you have about the environment.

I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check, just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also “black mold” evokes an image of a creeping horror even though rationally I know just going down there once a week isn’t going to give me some horrible respiratory illness.

I grew up in the 90s.

"Backrooms" and liminal spaces take me back to my early nightmares/kid fears, or the way they've stuck in my memory, at least.

I have the same sort of memory reaction/association with chillwave/vaporwave, in part because it's chopped and screwed in a way that suggests memories of vibes.

The teaser trailer narration mentions the spaces as something the place itself is remembering, and misremembering, and that actually made me sit up and listen, because maybe this is an existential Internet horror film which actually gets the existentialism right!

Totally get why it wouldn't click with some people, but man, it does with me.

I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.

But can you “un-un-scare” yourself to enjoy liminal space horror?

Skinamarink worked better as Heck. Shorter, too.

that's definitely how they get you.

I think there's a bit of a convergent evolution

House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming this entity into the real)

I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common with a few SCPs.

To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean very different things across the past thousand years). I think liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so multiple different effective horrors have converged on these feelings of discomfort with spaces.

I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably something about modern society dissassociating people from the space, but don't know much more.

I was thinking of House of Leaves reading the other comments here, mostly because something like an infinitely long tunnel to nowhere hidden in the walls of your house would actually be scary to me, whereas normally occupied spaces being empty and long winding indoor hallways are far more mundane. My wife has gotten into backrooms lore quite a bit in the past few years and it's always struck me as a strange thing to find eery. I've been an early morning runner for much of my life, worked overnight shifts at a theme park, closing at a mall, been in the tunnels beneath Disneyland and downtown Dallas. Worked in stores that hadn't opened yet and had nothing in them. There was nothing scary or eery about any of those things. It seems like an effect of the photographs and presentation more than the reality of the physical places. House of Leaves is scary specifically because it can't be real. Another example is something like the wormhole to 1987 and 1954 at the end of a cave in Dark. Yeah, that's scary, because nothing like that exists and you have no idea what to expect going into it.

Ironically enough, I first read this book when I worked at Disneyland, at an attraction with tunnel access, that no longer exists, and I no longer have the book because I loaned it to a girl I worked with there who never gave it back. She and I hung out in those tunnels during breaks.

Also interesting to me seeing other responses about found footage, given the guy who first recommended this book to me was a friend from college who covered his dorm room in bizarre free-form prose that switched between play style and novel style during a manic episode, then tore it all down later, set it on fire, and pieced together what survived as the strangest pseudo-poetry that somehow still had a lot of real words in it, kind of nature's "found poem." This book was probably written around the same time Blair Witch Project first came out and this guy also lived next to the real Greenway Trail in Burkittsville, which was also not particularly scary to see in person. I kind of doubt that was really the first example of a found footage film but it's the first I'm aware of. Wikipedia is saying The Connection from 1961 is the first.

Are dungeons just medieval backrooms?

For me it's cities—large, empty cities with little, if any, foot or vehicular traffic. Typically in the US or Australia and laid out accordingly, so not like Kowloon Walled City. But it's almost as if they're that way because my brain's "GPU" cannot render that many people or cars moving about. Sonetimes in these dreams I'm able to "teleport" to an interior location where there are people, and I'm fine.

Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed...

For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.

Talk about a blast from the past. I remember those GEMA jump maps. All white tile, some colored water and colored lights. Maybe a false wall somewhere revealing a hidden tunnel to the end or at least a ton of grenades/armor/health and a window to pwn the rest of the server from. The mapmaker was pretty accessible too.