Logindisquieting images that just feel 'off'
If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, 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. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.So stated an anonymous 2019 thread on 4chan's /x/ imageboard -- a potent encapsulation of liminal-space horror that gave rise to a complex mythos, exploratory video games, and an acclaimed web series (previously; soon to become a major motion picture from A24!). In the five years since, the evolving "Backrooms" fandom has canonized a number of other dreamlike settings, from CGI creations like The Poolrooms and a darkened suburb with wrong stars to real places like the interior atrium of Heathrow's Terminal 4 Holliday Inn and a shuttered Borders bookstore. But the image that inspired the founding text -- an anonymous photo of a vaguely unnerving yellow room -- remained a mystery... until now.
...turns out it's from a 2003 blog post about renovating for an RC car race track in Oshkosh! Not quite as fun a reveal as for certain other longstanding internet mysteries, but still satisfying, especially since it includes another equally-unsettling photo (and serendipitously refers to a "back room"). Also, due credit to Black August, the SomethingAwful goon who quietly claims to have written the original Backrooms text. Liminal spaces previously on MeFi:
Discussing the Kane Pixels production (plus an inspired-by series, A-Sync Research). Note that as the Backrooms movie takes shape, Kane is continuing work on an intriguing spiritual successor: The Oldest View The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces A Twitter thread on being lost in a real-life Backrooms space Inside the world's largest underground shopping complex A 2010 post about Hondo, an enigmatic Half-Life map designer who incorporated "enormous hidden areas that in some cases dwarfed the actual level" MyHouse.WAD, a sprawling, reality-warping Doom mod that went viral last year AskMe: Seeking fiction books with labyrinths and other interminable buildingsMy personal favorite liminal space: the unnervingly cheerful indoor playground KidsFun from '90s-era Tampa -- if only because I've actually been there as a kid (and talked about its eeriness on the blue before). Do you have any liminal spaces that have left an impression on you?
