Backrooms: How a 4chan Post Spawned a $262m Horror
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- The Backrooms originated in a May 2019 4chan thread titled "unsettling images," where a 78-word post described noclipping out of reality into an endless yellow-wallpaper labyrinth — the blueprint for a future horror franchise.
- Kane Parsons' A24 Backrooms film cost $262m and draws heavily on Valve's Portal 2 (2011); Parsons has cited it as his biggest influence and uploaded Portal fan videos before posting his first Backrooms clip in 2021.
- Escape the Backrooms, the most prominent fan game, launched in early access in August 2022 — just months after Parsons' first video — because the mythos is open-source and anyone can release Backrooms games using the name and iconography.
- William Chyr's 2025 VR game Hotel Infinity folds impossible architecture into a 2x2m square of living-room floor; "Hotel Liminal" was considered as a title but rejected as "too on the nose."
- Japanese game Exit 8, which traps players in an infinitely looping Tokyo metro station, was also adapted into a film in 2025 alongside the Backrooms movie.
- Batman: Arkham City and Skyrim (both 2011) featured famous noclip glitches — a grenade-spam exploit in Arkham and a wooden-plate bug in Skyrim — that let players escape into hidden, texture-flat backdrop areas of the game world.
- Indie games like Interior Worlds (by developer Sodaraptor) and Pools explore the "liminal photography" side of the phenomenon — the eerie feeling of empty places with no obvious function, a sensation one developer said they had felt but never had a name for until 2020.
Why it matters: The Backrooms' leap from an anonymous 4chan post to a $262m A24 film in roughly five years shows how open-source internet mythologies now scale faster than traditional IP — A24 is buying into a story it doesn't own, while indie developers like William Chyr are building whole games around the liminal-space aesthetic.
