Christopher Nolan, while promoting his forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, positioned Marvel movies as our culture’s closest kin to the Homeric epic. He has a point. Yet its true equivalent was slowly compiled, post by post, in some obscure corner of the internet, in a manner no different to how tales of Ancient Greek heroics were stitched together by generations of travelling performers.
In May 2019, an anonymous post on the online forum 4chan featured an image of a vacated home furnishings store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Its walls were a sickly yellow, its carpet beige and strangely easy to imagine yourself bleeding out on. An accompanying paragraph referenced the concept of “noclipping” in video games, when a player (intentionally or not) breaks beyond the boundaries of a map and into a liminal space not made for human eyes. If that happens in our reality, the post warned, “you’ll end up in the Backrooms”. Users across the internet then slowly began to expand on this world that, as if like Odysseus, one might be cursed to wander in search of a route back home, with monsters at every turn.
