Inside the Backrooms: The internet’s creepiest place is becoming a tourist attraction
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- The Backrooms originated in 2019 as an anonymous image posted on 4chan depicting empty, yellow-wallpapered fluorescent-lit rooms, and has since expanded across Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and gaming platforms where users collectively map, narrate and extend its mythology.
- Filmmaker Kane Parsons turned the phenomenon into viral "found footage" YouTube videos and is now adapting the Backrooms into a feature-length horror thriller, pushing the fictional world into mainstream discourse.
- The r/backrooms subreddit has hundreds of thousands of members, TikTok posts tagged #backrooms exceed half a million, and Instagram fan pages such as @xbackroom have hundreds of thousands of followers who expand the mythology through images, edits and speculative storytelling.
- Researchers Sophie James and James Cronin published a study in Annals of Tourism Research (2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2026.104172) arguing the Backrooms represent a new form of digital "dark tourism" in which audiences emotionally inhabit imagined places rather than physically visit heritage sites.
- Folklorist Michael Kinsella describes Backrooms fandom as "online legend-tripping," where users become world-builders through maps, survival guides, found-footage videos and first-person explorations rather than mere spectators.
- Unlike traditional creepypasta such as Slenderman, the Backrooms have no fixed mythology or physical anchor — their dated office and hotel aesthetics tap into the "non-places" of modern life, turning mundane, overlooked environments into something menacing.
Why it matters: For tourism scholars, James and Cronin's paper recasts dark tourism as a digital-native practice where collective imagination replaces physical sites entirely. Kane Parsons' upcoming feature-length adaptation marks participatory horror IP crossing from anonymous forum memes into mainstream theatrical release.
