Okay so I've been thinking about this for the past couple of weeks especially as I meticulously plan out and work on my own backrooms-inspired thing that'll tell the story of the supernatural, abandoned government contractors, exploitation of innocent people and the careless abandon given to prisoners, and in the midst of doing that I opted to look into how backrooms content is as a whole and my god is it just
bad.
My points aren't coherent I admit goes everywhere here and I made it while dealing with a headache, a stomach ache, and with no pre-thought-out plan other than "A rant on the backrooms" and my problems i've had with it. It's not organized but whatever
okay so for some people on here who use youtube and browse horror stories often, they should know what the Backrooms are but for those who don't it was a spooky thing of internet media that started on 4chan after someone posted this to one of the boards:
It's a simple yet horrifying concept, reminiscent of classic video game stories where you get out of bounds and enter a place you're not supposed to be in, applied to real life. The idea of being in a endless maze of nothing but you, yourself, and the distant hums of the lights above you. Oh, and the implication that there's something else in there with you.
I fucking love this concept, especially after having grown up enjoying the idea of game glitches and stuff.
At first it wasn't too bad, with people contributing by making up multiple different areas of The Backrooms-- although in hindsight this could've been what led to a lot of the problems it has now.
Ya had shit like the pool rooms...
... people taking liminal places like this and making them into backrooms places...
and cool things like that. It especially took off after Kane Pixels, a 17(!!!) year old dude decided on a whim that he'll make some backrooms content and basically made the best shit starting with this and it's own series involving the horrors done by people to exploit the backrooms and that within it.
So what's the problem?
Sigh
Well as is the norm with the internet, it becomes popular and everyone learns about it. If you've been on the internet long enough, you know how this tends to go. While there were some good things to come out of it, you got... Many horrible things. People taking the concept and throwing whatever at it.
Like slides, seriously, there are so many fucking videos that have people just, going inside slides, and I'm sorry but when I see a fucking yellow suited guy (that im also pretty sure was just taken from Kane Pixels videos, everyone latched onto them and everyone's using them instead of being even a little bit derivative) going into a slide, horror is the last thing on my mind. Especially when half the videos I've seen of them include either bad camera shit with the screen shaking, annoying goddamn audio, and oftentimes just lame attempts at scares and, oftentimes, the fucking unity default skybox.
Then you have apparent machines in the backrooms, like it's a goddamn cartoon trap factory where you'd have stuff like "SPIN THE WHEEL TO WIN" where you press a button and a wall spins and you either get another backrooms place or death, random signs everywhere that are "apparently" placed by the backrooms being a fucking trickster, and did I mention there are a lot of apparent fucking slides?
Oh and don't get me started on the monsters. Such highlights include... Spindly Johnny...
Okay he doesn't actually have a name and all things considered I don't have too much of a problem with him since he was used pretty well in the Kane Pixels things, not to mention it fit the bill of "something else in there with you".
Do wish it was more than a badly drawn stick figure though but whatever. It's fine.
BUT THEN YOU HAVE THIS SHIT
The... Bone thief.
Okay i don't want this to come off as me like, dissing people for making content, i don't mind, hell i like seeing people make things but. I just don't like this thing. It looks... not scary. And also got yassified into just being a fucking yellow cone with eyes in it by everyone else. Because of course.
Then you have 'Smilers' and i just
ITS JUST A FUCKING FACE THATS ALL IT IS
im sorry i just see it and i can't take it seriously
SO why do i bring these three up? Because apparently aside from the occasional other monster that I rarely see brought up (I think I've only seen one other fr), these are the most common monsters people have in The Backrooms.
I'm sorry. I just, don't get it. People have latched onto these and they're just... not scary at all, to me.
But then there's the problem I have with how people protray the backrooms itself. This malvolent fucking hellhole that'll constantly bring you to various traps and dangers where the walls will change and crush you, you'll get dropped into death pits and crushers and taken to rooms where a bunch of fucking Spindly Johnnies or Bone thieves or whatever the fuck are.
As a whole my problem is that people are utilizing the Backrooms in a weird and frustrating way that takes away from what should be the whole horror of the place. I mean for fucks sake you had people saying "TO SURVIVE YOU GOTTA DRINK ALMOND WATER" and not to mention you also had like, people organizing it methodically, like it's an SCP thing.
My problem is that it shouldn't be a place of logic where you can map it out easily, where you can label each place as a level, where you can make sense of a map, where you can easily assign a name that everyone can use for a monster.
I don't like the categorization of it being individual levels and how apparently you can meet an evil smile ghost or bone stealing mofo after riding a minecart or something.
What I'm basically saying is that the power of the backrooms should be a terrifying location but that's it. It makes no sense to be in. You shouldn't be here. But it's not malevolent. The horror comes from how little explaination there is to me. How you can enter it just by being unlucky, how you're forced to traverse it until the end of time or until you get lucky.
I think that's my main problem honestly now that I'm thinking about it: The horror of the backrooms and what it could mean if applied to reality, and the stories that can be told with them, are not being fully realized by a lot of people.
Kane Pixel's stuff has the spooky backrooms stuff, yeah, but there's also the horror in what people do to access the backrooms, what they want to exploit it for, and the costs of that, especially the human cost and the deaths and horrors involved with conspiracy stuff.
tl;dr: The Backrooms should embrace the mysteriousness and bizarreness of it, but also should be used to augment the stories told. It shouldn't just be weird monsters, it should be unexplainable. It should be incoherent. It should embrace the madness. I want madness. I want that feeling you get when you're a little kid lost in a mall, no where to go, I want that fear of being lost. I want that fear of something unexplainable.
This is just the outcome of the fannish obsession with Lore, which is completely at odds with horror. The backrooms as a creepypasta concept is cosmic horror: What if the universe just had a fucking backlot you could accidentally fall into with no way back? Why does it look like a disused hotel? What else is there? Is there anything there? The universe just broke for you and it's going to kill you not out of any malevolent intent or anything but because it doesn't care. It's not something you can weigh or measure. It's vacuum collapse but for you, personally, in short story form.
Cosmic horror breaks down if you can measure it, if you can impose Science and human understanding on it. A big part of the horror of the SCP Foundation was the Foundation itself and its futile attempts to control the universe, to explain away the inexplicable and put it in a box. The Backrooms gets it worse because there's not even a way to keep it horrifying on a human level: Even in boring fucking SCPs that are all Scranton Boxes and technobabble explaining exactly how the wonder was drained from whatever horror the document describes, the Foundation itself becomes even more horrific, fascism imposing itself not just on us but on everything that exists and everything that doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, can't exist. There's nothing like that in the Backrooms, they're just a fucked up place that isn't a place and as soon as you explain it away it might as well be the Midwest. Cataloguing levels and filling them full of categorized monsters just makes it seem like a bad video game.
That's lore in a nutshell, right? We can't just have a story, it must be Explained and Explainable. It has to be able to boiled down to a list of facts that people can memorize because a story can't just be a story. Wonder is no good, we can't turn that into a monetizable franchise!
And this is the current state of western liberal ideology and Science-as-religion and the way it kills stories: Everything must be explained, everything must be put in a box, everything can and must be conquered and made mundane and turned into a properly monetizable Property. All those Backrooms videos are like shitty Instagram videos of rich shitheads who go to Hawaii and take selfies of themselves standing on stolen and poisoned land, or Darth Vader Vadering around Disneyland shaking hands and taking photos with every random person who dropped a grand to be there. There's nothing horrific about that except for capitalism itself, which is not the fun kind of horror.
Honestly you've summed it up a fair bit better than I could, one of my biggest problems with The Backrooms content. I don't want it to be explained, I want it to confuse the hell out of me and make me feel nothing but fear and questions that I know probably won't get answered. I don't want to have it categorized. If there absolutely has to be any then hey, i'll accept "this is the poolrooms and this is the caverooms" or fucking something arbritary like that, and no i dont want to know about every little detail about smilley-face mcgee and the seven shitters or something like that.
Did people just forget that one of the biggest fun things of horror is a mix of either "You will never get your questions to this horror answered" and "Leaving it up to the imagination is a lot more fun than telling you what it is" or something
Somewhat related, this whole thing is reminding me of what the creator of Ultrakill had to say about lore vs "Lore"
Which is definitely something people need to keep in mind. Lore is good but "lore" is not. And a lot of the backrooms content just feels like "lore" and pointless and contributes nothing but waste creatively.
(also on a side note, curious about the mention of western liberal idealogy and what that has to do with the obsession people have with wanting things explained. Though I can definitely see the comparison to those bad instagram videos, those are just horrible in the reminder of capitalism sucking lmao. As said I have a headache rn so the connection might just not be 100% clicking with me)
Ah, this old chestnut in horror discourse again. Seems like every ten years it comes back with a new subject--as it has for a long time now, maybe ever since people first started telling spooky stories. "The known isn't scary."
So I know this guy is super cancelled now, but I have to bring it back to H.P. Lovecraft, since he's the writer most responsible for popularizing the idea that the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all (and thus the only fear that is truly scary). The stories that keep coming back in service of this point are the ones that eventually comprised the Cthulhu Mythos, tales of ancient gods like Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu and Azathoth that make you go insane just by being around them. (Who, if you overanalyze them enough, reduce to a cosmic mummy, squid, and octopus respectively, defanging them of all their terror--affirming this belief that nothing is really scary if you throw details at it.)
That analysis really misses the point of what makes the Elder Gods so terrifying in Lovecraft's original work, precisely because they have ceased to be his characters and are now a sort of spooky Halloween monster mash fandom that lives on beyond his weird xenophobic mindset. A canon of rules have been imposed on the madness they induce, reducing it to a quantifiable superpower they possess instead of an inherent quality of how far beyond human understanding they are, and that does downgrade them from unknowable terror to ordinary danger. But if you really want to understand the fear of the unknown in horror fiction, the story you should be looking at is "The Colour Out of Space".
The thing modern horror fans tend to forget about "The Colour Out Of Space"--despite it still being the canonical "fear of the unknown" story--is that unlike unknowable terrors in modern horror, it is not just a sequence of weird creepy shit happening, and an unseen narrator loudly shushing you if you ask too many questions. The scary thing is not a secret, there is no tiny cabal of protagonists who no one believes. The thing makes the news. There are scientists. They successfully gather samples and look at the thing under a microscope. There are people cataloguing the thing, experiments being run, cultural and political repercussions, symposiums held to understand the thing. The thing is not mysteriously immune to order and categorization and analysis; humanity throws science at the problem like any other mystery of nature. The reaction to this cosmic horror is rational, organized, and predictable, and there are many productive findings.
And you know what? They still can't figure out what the damned thing is. Science's search for answers--as it does for any real-world natural phenomenon--just makes the thing ever weirder, more irrational, more impossible, as each new bit of data just raises more baffling questions. Humanity seeks to control their fear of how little they know about this weird impossible to describe thing by understanding it, only to see the scale of what they don't understand grow ever larger, and challenge what they already thought they knew. The quest for knowledge makes the thing more creepy, not less. It almost makes sense! Almost! It's consistent enough that if you only knew a little more, you could figure it out....but you can't.
There is an entire genre of Silver Age science fiction written around this premise (weird but harmless-seeming object mysteriously appears and the entirety of human civilization can't figure it out), a substantial subset of the post-/x/ collaborative horror fandom is completely unfamiliar with it, and it irritates me, because that kind of story is fascinating. You want something to be scary because it defies understanding, it's scary because it defies understanding, not because the author nerfed the collective human capacity for rational understanding beyond the suspension of disbelief, and sicced black helicopters or the time assassins or slendermen or whatever on any characters who try to puzzle it out.
Getting to the SCP Foundation: this is what made the 5000-7000 era of the SCP wiki fascinating to me, in that there were finally numerous contributors who got it. For a scip to be nightmare-inducing, the Foundation doesn't have to be scarier than the scip, nor does the scip have to be so dangerous that the Foundation backs off from trying to comprehend it. It suffices that the Foundation figures out some new fact about the thing, and it has ominous implications that don't make any sense. And that is often far creepier than the original mystery around the scip itself.
That works great for the wiki format, and the natural reaction of fandom to respond to their fear of what's beyond the text by filling the space beyond the text with lore. The hard part is writing it in a way that encourages contributors adding to the work to play along, so that the lore creates more unknowns than it answers, with those unknowns actually being scary and interesting.
You know what's not scary? Cthulhu being just a mind-altering cosmic squid, with a detailed description and catalog of where it lives, what and how it eats, what the limits of its abilities are, and so on. You know what's really scary? Cthulhu being just a mind-altering cosmic squid, just like our terrestrial squids, and therefore we don't understand what squids even are anymore.
Which brings me to The Backrooms, and the two competing wikis for new Backrooms content. Both wikis are full of young contributors who are eager to help make something bigger than themselves, and are just make-believing weird cool places--I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But one wiki wants it to be nothing but a catalog of weird cool places, and the other wants it to be a consistent setting, with named characters and factions and history, and an underlying internal logic, and a puzzle-like numbering scheme for the rooms to figure out and worldbuilding about what a society that dwells within a place would look like. And I get how both of those approaches annoy purists who just want "it's a weird place like in the original photo and that's it" because they get bogged down in the details and stop being about the fear of the unknown.
I am turned off by all three takes. The entire original creepiness of the Backrooms was that you can analyze it, you can make try to sense of it, but in doing so you just find weirder and weirder things about it and you end up bothered by more unknowns than you were aware of before, just this limitless House of Leaves of more kinds of weird shit than any one author could ever come up with alone. Exploring the Backrooms to map them out just reveals more Backrooms. That's entirely within the spirit of the pool room, or that fully enclosed hotel courtyard, or any of the other mundane but inscrutable real places that have worked their way into the lore. I love that kind of content in the wikis and it's why I read them at all.
For that to exist in a big collaborative setting, there has to be a cat and mouse between people who explore the space and people who produce space that begs to be explored--to use a classic terrible creepypasta example, the contributors who are like my dad is ded, and the contributors who are like ok then BUT WHO WAS PHONE??. And then we're back to the timeless horror storytelling creative dynamic of a bunch of people sitting around a little flickering campfire in the vast and endless dark, one of them gesticulating a barely uninterpretable shape with trembling hands to their wild-eyed friends, whispering, "But to his surprise, the floor....was made of butts."
they both seem to really get that you can lean into 'deep lore' purposefully and sort of sensory overload people. both give you kind of TOO MUCH detail which overstimulated the audience until they return to Vibes. people just want a podcast that can ASMR them into submission and distract their wandering minds from the very real horrors around us.
we don't understand the economy, we don't understand sociopolitical conditions, we don't understand climate change and the news tells us rapidly conflicting things and our leadership is unpredictable except for one thing: we know they predictably fail us and that something terrible might be coming in the future except the only thing we've known is that terrible future defining our whole lives.
we keep fucking up horror because we're drowning in it, we over define these settings because it gives us a sense of control in a world where we don't often get agency over our lives, relationships, futures, dreams, desires, or just our fucking attention spans. like the environment, we're perpetually exploited to a point we don't even know who we are anymore.
those two settings? they not only acknowledge this but they LET us map things out, while also showing us the futility of understanding. it's the sensation you get when you read an article summarizing a hunch you had, or when a friend tells you you WEREN'T imagining how fucked up that thing you saw happen was & vindicates you with a newspaper.
