https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI

It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008 (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.

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

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).

Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day.

For me, the feeling these “back rooms” evokes is more akin to being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go outside and play.

It’s strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a new generation’s horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from it.

I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course.

Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.

On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.

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

Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm fine.

So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

>suggests a humanity at the brink of becoming digital objects themselves.

>But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century.

Relevant, and as spoiler-free as I can make it: I cannot give a stronger recommendation to play NieR and NieR:Automata.

I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?).

At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years).

There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy.

When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5].

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/...

[2] http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA...

[3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong...

[4] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione

I think that the backrooms are a kind of reaction to the total corporatization of american life. Just like how Pittura Metafisica was a reaction to the futurists. The futurists were obsessed with machines and going fast, their art was full of movement and metallic forms and so on. De Chirico's was the exact opposite, these ancient Greek statues and buildings standing totally still in a weird autumn light, with meaningful things (statues, grand columns, and so on) placed into meaningless landscapes often with perspective or lighting that was purposefully not correct.

I don't really know too much about De Chirico's rationale for making paintings like this but I suspect it had to do with the industrialization and loss of the old ways of life that he experienced and the rapidly changing social attitude of the time. He took these grand imperial symbols and symbols of modernity and made them feel alienating and unsettling. Of course we know what happened historically as a result of the futurists.

So I think this could be what the backrooms are, a purposeful choice to see this totalizing corporatization of everything as opposite of what it is typically portrayed: it is lifeless, dead, meaningless, non-unique. It's taking a form that is treated a certain way in society (the artifacts of corporate america) and totally inverting it.

Has a lot in common with Vaporwave, I really like it. Not a huge fan of the horror part of it although I guess that's artistically relevant, but moreso this feeling of alienation, sadness, disconnection. It's lurking beneath the surface of our daily life. Think of what working at the Meta campus might look like (bright, cheerful, sunny, aesthetically pleasing) and then think of how the app which is created by that work actually makes people feel (alienated, disconnected, sad, enraged). That's the metaphor, it's the contradiction.

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.