Picture it: you’re alone in a windowless room. The floor is carpeted – a couple shades darker than the walls. You can’t quite tell if everything is yellow or if it only looks that way because of the jaundiced glare coming from the fluorescent lights overhead. In the corner of your eye, you see an open doorway; this room leads to another room, which, even though you can’t see it for yourself, you strongly suspect leads to another room and another after that. There is nothing explicitly wrong with where you are, but something is just off.
It’s this setting, or rather the feeling it invokes, that forms the nucleus of this year’s most talked-about horror movie Backrooms – starring Oscar-nominated actors Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and named after a concept that originated in the late 2010s. It was then that a photo of the above scene began circulating on the internet, taking root on the image board 4chan. Thousands riffed on what it was that made the image so eerie, sharing more examples of similarly spooky-adjacent spaces. Others, in turn, wrote short stories about them, then made videos.
