Study: Backrooms Are Para-Terrestrial Dark Tourism
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- The Backrooms originated on 4chan in 2019 as an anonymous image of empty yellow, windowless rooms and has since expanded into an infinite fictional labyrinth collectively built by users across Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and gaming platforms.
- Kane Parsons' viral "found footage" YouTube videos transformed the Backrooms from static images into cinematic exploration, and Parsons is now adapting the phenomenon into a feature-length horror thriller.
- The r/backrooms subreddit counts hundreds of thousands of members, TikTok posts tagged #backrooms exceed 500,000, and Instagram fan pages such as @xbackroom have hundreds of thousands of followers.
- Sophie James and James Cronin published peer-reviewed research in Annals of Tourism Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2026.104172) characterizing the Backrooms as a new kind of "para-terrestrial" dark tourism with no physical site, fixed mythology or commemorated tragedy.
- Folklore scholar Michael Kinsella labels the participatory activity "online legend-tripping," in which audiences shift from spectators into contributors, collaborators and world-builders.
- The Backrooms resemble the "overlooked non-places of modern life" — dated hotel-like hallways, ceiling tiles, abandoned office spaces — letting audiences project menace onto spaces they recognize but rarely notice.
Why it matters: Tourism researchers are now formally treating the Backrooms — 500,000+ TikTok posts, a subreddit in the hundreds of thousands — as a legitimate cultural destination. That reframing gives horror IP holders, platform designers and tourism scholars a new scholarly object, and gives Kane Parsons' upcoming feature adaptation a tourist base before release.
