What “Backrooms” Says About Our Loneliness

Why would a grimy maze of empty office rooms fascinate millions of people, and what does that say about us? We’ve all seen the memes or maybe played the Backrooms video game late at night, wandering those endless yellow corridors with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. It’s a bizarre cultural phenomenon: an internet-born horror story about nothingness – literally just empty rooms – that somehow feels more terrifying (and more relatable) than any ghost or zombie. If you’ve ever felt a twinge of loneliness while staring at your cubicle’s beige walls or walking through a dead mall, you might already sense the appeal. The Backrooms combines that eerie liminal space vibe with the disquieting realization that you’re utterly, hopelessly alone in a place that should be full of life. And strangely enough, we can’t get enough of it.

Imagine you stay late at the office and step into the hallway, only to find it stretching on forever, utterly deserted. That’s the Backrooms in a nutshell – an “alternate dimension” of infinite vacant breakrooms, lobby-like halls, and storage areas that you supposedly slip into if reality glitches out​. The whole idea sprang from an anonymous post on 4chan’s paranormal board in 2019, when someone shared a banal photo of an empty, yellowish office interior and invited others to “post disquieting images that just feel off”​.

Another user replied with the now-famous description: “If you’re not careful and noclip out of reality… you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet… the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz… and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in”​. A legend was born. Within weeks, people on Reddit and YouTube were contributing creepy lore, photoshop edits, and crude indie games set in this uncanny labyrinth. What started as a single surreal image became a crowdsourced mythology – an open-source horror universe, if you will.

A typical depiction of the Backrooms may include endless, fluorescent-lit corridors devoid of life. This viral internet horror setting feels eerily familiar to anyone who’s stayed late in an empty office.​

It’s easy to see the spooky fun of the Backrooms (who doesn’t love a good scare?), but why does it resonate so much beyond cheap thrills? The answer might lie in how this liminal horror reflects real-world feelings of alienation. Psychologists and sociologists have actually studied why places like these make us feel weird. For example, research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests we find liminal spaces eerie because they hit an “uncanny valley” of architecture – they look almost like normal places, but something is just off, triggering our instinctual unease​. Cardiff University researchers Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis concluded that an empty hallway or vacant lobby can unsettle us in the same way a lifelike robot can: it’s familiar yet subtly wrong​. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher called it “a failure of presence” – when you see a school or office that’s normally full of people, suddenly empty, it feels like a ghost world​. In other words, part of our brain is shouting, “There should be folks here!” and their absence creeps us out.

Now, think about modern work culture and daily life. How often do we find ourselves in bland office buildings, anonymous cubicles, long commutes through concrete wastelands, or home alone on Zoom calls? The Backrooms take those everyday spaces and strips away all pretense of purpose. It’s the office without work, a lobby with no destination, a waiting room that waits for no one. Psychologists define workplace alienation as a feeling of powerlessness, isolation, and meaninglessness on the job​. Sound familiar? You don’t need a literal endless office maze to feel that; plenty of us have felt lost in a figurative one at our 9-to-5. Karl Marx bemoaned how workers become estranged from the products of their labor; fast forward to now, and it’s often the sterile corporate environments and bureaucratic routines that make us feel estranged from ourselves and others. It’s hard not to feel like a lone wanderer pacing the same hallways. As writer Nathaniel Metz put it, the Backrooms’ horrifying emptiness mirrors the artificial landscapes of late capitalism – spaces designed more for profit than for human comfort​. The fluorescent office hell is, in a way, already around us. The game just makes the subtext text, trapping you in an endless TPS report nightmare with no co-workers to commiserate with.

Loneliness isn’t just in the workplace. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General even declared a “public health crisis” around loneliness and disconnection​. Our neighborhoods and social lives have a lot to do with that isolation. Urban sociologists like Ray Oldenburg have long warned about the decline of “third places.” A third place is that coffee shop, bar, park, or community center where people actually hang out (not home, not work, but the third social space)​. These informal gathering spots are, as Oldenburg noted, essential for community and democracy​– they’re where friendships form and ideas (or just gossip) are exchanged. Unfortunately, suburban sprawl and car-centric planning have been wiping out third spaces and walkable neighborhoods. Many of us live in bedroom communities where you have to drive to do anything, and there’s nowhere to just stroll and bump into acquaintances. Not surprisingly, researchers at UC San Diego found that adults in more walkable neighborhoods reported socializing more and feeling a stronger sense of community than those in car-dependent areas​. If you live in a sterile apartment complex off a six-lane highway, isolation can creep in just like the shadows in a horror game. No wonder a nightmare of endless empty corridors hits a nerve – it’s playing on a fear that our built environment is already devoid of soul and connection.

Of course, the Backrooms phenomenon isn’t only popular because we’re all secretly sad about strip malls and cubicles. It’s also just cool horror. The internet loves a good spooky tale, and this one came with a memorable visual hook that people ran wild with. In the same way the Slender Man myth blew up a decade earlier – spawning memes, movies, even some regrettable real-life drama​– the Backrooms captured the imagination of a new generation of horror fans. By early 2022, a 16-year-old filmmaker named Kane Parsons was racking up millions of views on YouTube with found-footage style Backrooms short films, effectively the Blair Witch of liminal spaces​. His videos were so popular they even landed him a Hollywood deal to direct a Backrooms feature film produced by A24​. On the gaming front, there’s been an explosion of indie titles: everything from solo exploration games to multiplayer survival experiences set in the Backrooms​. One co-op game, Escape the Backrooms, earned praise for faithfully expanding the Backrooms lore and letting friends experience that dread together (because nothing says bonding like mutual existential terror)​. Even American Horror Stories dedicated an episode to a Backrooms-inspired plot, with a character slipping in and out of mundane liminal spaces while searching for his missing son​. The Backrooms has effectively graduated from internet meme to full-fledged pop culture icon – joining the ranks of other collaborative horror sandboxes like the SCP Foundation and creepypasta legends.

Interestingly, the Backrooms craze spiked right when the world was going into pandemic lockdowns​. Remember those first months of 2020 when downtown streets were empty, offices were closed, and everyone was isolating? The whole world started to feel like a liminal space. Photos of deserted shopping centers and transit stations went viral because they were fascinating and unsettling at the same time – reality looked like a video game level before the NPCs spawn. Some scholars think this timing isn’t an accident: the collective experience of empty public spaces made us more attuned to the emotions liminal spaces evoke​. And boy, did the Backrooms evoke something. For some, it was straight-up fear of being alone forever in a soulless maze. For others, oddly enough, it was nostalgia. Fans on forums have described a strange wistfulness looking at these images​. One person in a Vice interview said it reminded them of childhood – like when you’d wander the empty school halls after class or explore your parent’s workplace after hours​. It’s that familiar emptiness that brings back a memory: you know this place, but it’s wrong that you’re here alone. The Backrooms taps into shared memories of being small in a big, uncanny space. It’s creepy, sure, but it also makes you reflect on times you felt isolated in everyday life, even as a kid.

Not everyone agrees that we should read some grand societal meaning into the Backrooms, of course. There are plenty of folks who say, “Hey, it’s just a spooky meme that got popular – no need to overthink it.” In fact, within the Backrooms community itself there’s a bit of a rift. As the lore got more elaborate (with fan-invented monsters, dozens of “levels,” and elaborate backstory), some enthusiasts felt it drifted away from the simple magic of the original concept​. A splinter group on Reddit even formed r/TrueBackrooms, dedicated to keeping the Backrooms lore minimal – no crazy monsters, just the pure vibe of empty rooms​. For those fans, the power of the Backrooms is in its ambiguity and atmosphere, not in any overt metaphor or detailed story. And skeptics of the “lonely society” interpretation point out that humans have always been drawn to the supernatural unknown. As internet studies professor Tama Leaver notes, part of the fun is imagining what could be lurking just out of sight​. The Backrooms invites endless speculation precisely because it doesn’t spell everything out – it’s like a sandbox for communal creativity and goosebumps. So, maybe we don’t need a dystopian social critique to explain it; maybe it’s popular because it’s a collaborative storytelling playground. Sometimes a meme is just a meme (albeit a really creepy, really clever one).

Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Backrooms phenomenon says something about where we are as a culture. The popularity of this liminal horror trend underscores a longing – or at least a morbid fascination – with spaces and feelings we’re missing in real life. It shines a flickering fluorescent light on the loneliness that can underlie modern life, from the way we work to the way we live. So, what are the future implications if these themes continue? Well, if workplaces stay alienating and our communities stay fragmented, we might see even more art and media that literalize our sense of being trapped in empty, impersonal places. That’s the bleak take. The optimistic take is that recognizing this problem is the first step to fixing it. In a weird way, the Backrooms (and our obsession with it) is like a funhouse mirror reflecting our own social reality. Why are we so drawn to the Backrooms? Maybe because, deep down, we don’t want to be stuck in them.

So here’s the hopeful twist ending to our little analysis. If liminal horror is popular because it highlights our isolation, then perhaps it also nudges us toward its opposite. It reminds us how vital other people are in our spaces. Nobody actually wants to work in a maze of empty cubicles or live in a town with no sidewalks, no parks, and no coffee shops where you can bump into a friend. The eerie allure of the Backrooms can also be a wake-up call about what’s missing in our world and what we cherish. By recognizing that pull, we can push back. We can design offices that encourage interaction, champion urban planning that creates third places and walkable neighborhoods, and prioritize a healthy work-life balance so people aren’t isolated cogs in a machine. In short, we can take steps to ensure the worst fears reflected in the Backrooms remain fiction. We can seek out community and meaning in the real world so that the lonely liminal void holds less power over our imaginations. After all, the best way to escape the Backrooms is to make sure we don’t accidentally build them around ourselves in real life. And that journey out starts with each of us deciding to open a door, step outside, and say hello to whatever – and whomever – is waiting on the other side.