What Are the Backrooms? Origin, Rules and Real Places

The Backrooms is an internet horror story about an endless maze of empty office rooms that you fall into by accident, with buzzing fluorescent lights, beige corridors and nothing else. It began as a single photo on a message board in 2019 and has since become a YouTube series and an A24 movie.

This post is entertainment and general information, not legal or safety advice. The real buildings that look like the Backrooms are closed for reasons, and some of those reasons can make you sick.

Where did the Backrooms come from?

From a request for unsettling pictures. Dread Central says that in May 2019 an anonymous 4chan user asked for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” One reply was a photo of a sickly green and yellow office with chevron wallpaper. The next day another user gave the space a name, the Backrooms, and Reddit users went on to add creatures and numbered levels.

SlashFilm quotes the original comment about the way in. If you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas,” you end up there. The same comment mentions “the endless background noise of fluorescent lights,” and SlashFilm describes the picture as a large, carpeted, empty, yellow room.

It’s the same idea I explain in what a liminal space is, a place built for people with the people removed. The Backrooms is that idea turned into a story.

What are the rules of the Backrooms?

Dread Central does not list formal rules. What it describes are traits from the early posts and the replies.

• You enter by noclipping out of reality, not by walking through a door.
• The rooms are carpeted and yellow, with the smell of old moist carpet.
• The fluorescent lights hum at maximum volume.
• There are levels, with a big first level, a hub and negative levels below it. One poster said the highest was 6, or possibly 8.
• Almond water restores sanity, and fake windows can pull people into madness.

TheWrap sums up the setting as an “endless maze of abandoned office space” with stark fluorescent lighting and beige corridors that either lead nowhere or hide creatures.

Who is Kane Pixels and what is the movie?

Kane Parsons turned the story into a series. Dread Central says he was 16 when he posted a found footage short in 2022. TheWrap describes it as a short film presented as a 1990s VHS tape, showing someone who finds their way into the Backrooms and flees its creatures. A series on his channel followed, building a backstory around a shadowy organization that opened a portal into the Backrooms. Salon says he taught himself the animation program Blender as a teenager, and that the series has 23 more installments after the first, including one that runs 45 minutes.

A24 released the film Backrooms in theaters on May 29, 2026, according to SlashFilm, with Parsons directing. Salon describes the plot. In the 1990s, a discount furniture salesman named Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, finds a crack of light in a wall in his store’s sub basement and walks through it. Salon’s reviewer says hell in this film is wallpaper, beige carpet and drop ceilings.

Why did it spread so far?

Part of the answer is timing. Salon says the series grew out of online interest in liminal spaces, which I explain in the liminal space guide, and that Parsons taught himself Blender as a teenager and released the first episode at 16.

TheWrap reports that A24 will release the film with Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment and 21 Laps Entertainment, and calls Parsons the youngest director in A24 history. SlashFilm describes a budget of $10 million. Dread Central says the film was announced in 2023, four years after the original post.

Salon’s reviewer reads the film as a story about being stuck in nostalgia and unresolved grief, with the Backrooms as the place where Clark finds fragments of his past and makes a bargain with the entities there. That reading makes sense of the setting. A building designed to be passed through becomes a place you can’t leave.

Do real places look like the Backrooms?

Yes, and I said so on camera more than once. In the Allstate headquarters video I describe the place as a maze that’s like the Backrooms but nicer, and near the end I say it again, because every door opened up a new part of the building. In the Blue Island hospital video I say the hospital reminds me of the Backrooms.

The Allstate campus is a good match for the setting. Motivational quotes were printed on the walls of a bunch of hallways, a sign for Building G listed an auditorium, a conference center and a cafeteria, and in the basement studio there were lockers in the hallways that reminded me of the Backrooms, just nicer. Patch reported that it held about 2 million square feet of office space when most of it sold for $232 million in November 2021, and that 95 percent of the company’s workforce was working remotely. Space that size, with the people gone, is what the story describes. The underground parking garage is the frame below.

The Hewitt Associates headquarters near Chicago had the open office floor. The video description says it was a massive office complex full of mold and covered in graffiti, and it has since been demolished.

What is the real version of old moist carpet?

Mold. The story treats the damp smell as part of the scenery. In a real building it’s a health warning.

EPA’s guidance for schools and commercial buildings sets a target of drying carpet and backing within 24 to 48 hours of getting wet. It also says “Even if materials are dried within 48 hours, mold growth may have occurred.” A building with the power and heating off and a leaking roof isn’t being dried by anyone.

Hewitt is the example from my videos. In the video I say the place smelled funny and asked if it was mold. Then I found out it was. I thought I could smell it and I had a mask on, and we skipped the basement because there was so much mold. The respirator on my gear list is the better tool, and staying out of the moldy part beats any filter.

What does it look like when you leave the story?

Less like a monster movie and more like a bad day at work. Allstate had a noise like someone running at us, which turned out to be water leaking through the ceiling and an elevator that sounded like footsteps. The hotel I explored had moldy banquet rooms and guest floors, and the doorframes in the hallway were covered in gray speckles.

I use one good flashlight, since most flashlights, including brand ones, aren’t bright enough for a hallway that goes on that long. Locations stay private on my channel, and how I find places and stay safe is in a $9.99 PDF called How to Find Abandoned Places.

The Backrooms is fiction, but the carpet, the lights and the hallways come from real buildings.