Have you ever walked into a place you swear you’ve seen before, even though you know you haven’t? Maybe it’s an empty hotel corridor, a playground after dark or the blue glow of an indoor pool with nobody in it. There’s nothing obviously scary about it. It might even feel weirdly comforting. Still, something’s off. Stay too long and the comfort starts to curdle.
Backrooms – the lowdown
If you’ve spent enough time online, you’ve probably seen places like this described as liminal spaces, dreamcore or the Backrooms. These terms overlap, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. In architecture and anthropology, ‘liminal’ describes a threshold, or the space between one place and another. Online, the definition has become a lot looser. It can mean an actual transitional space, like a hallway, waiting room or station, but it can also be somewhere familiar made uncanny by the absence of the people who should be there.
Dreamcore leans more into hazy childhood memories and the strange logic of dreams, like playrooms, artificial clouds, endless fields and old images that feel nostalgic even when you don’t remember living through them. The Backrooms takes that same feeling and turns it into somewhere you might never escape.
Of course, what counts as a Backrooms level is subjective. One person’s Backrooms is another person’s rundown community centre. It’s less about following one strict formula and more about the feeling: something familiar that you can’t quite remember, comfort mixed with unease and the suspicion that the room continues beyond what you can see.
The Backrooms itself began with a photograph of a windowless room. Its stained carpet, yellow wallpaper and fluorescent ceiling lights are aggressively ordinary, but its empty partitions lead nowhere obvious. The image had already circulated online, but in May 2019 it appeared in a 4chan thread asking users to post ‘disquieting images that just feel off’. An anonymous reply gave the room its story. If you accidentally ‘noclip’ out of reality, it said, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, trapped among millions of miles of damp carpet and buzzing lights. Worse still, you might not be alone.
Like the best internet folklore, nobody owned the story, so everybody could add to it. People invented new levels, escape routes and hostile ‘entities’, turning one yellow room into a huge collaborative universe with no real beginning or end. Some levels look like abandoned offices and hotels. Others open into flooded hallways, empty suburbs, impossible fields and indoor play areas that feel reconstructed from a half-remembered childhood.
Then, in January 2022, 16-year-old visual-effects artist Kane Parsons, known then online as Kane Pixels, uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube. Made using Blender and Adobe After Effects, the short follows a camera operator who falls into a seemingly endless maze and slowly realises that silence doesn’t mean safety. Parsons expanded it into a full web series, complete with a shadowy research organisation trying to access and study the space.
This basically gave the lore its own cinema before the actual movie even existed, helping it snowball into a whole TikTok aesthetic and pushing the subculture further into the mainstream.
Tokyo’s Backrooms
Once you know what you’re looking for, Tokyo can feel like a wonderland for this aesthetic. Layers of postwar rebuilding, bubble-era ambition and early-Heisei design still sit beside buildings that look as if they arrived from the future last week. There are many places that preserve colours, signs and materials that have disappeared elsewhere.
Outside central Tokyo, the effect is even stronger. Regional resorts, suburban entertainment centres and ageing shopping complexes have the space, accidental preservation and, most importantly, emptiness that the capital rarely allows. The capital has plenty of the right architecture, but timing it properly is another story. Visit a playground at 4pm and it’s just a playground. Come back before breakfast, when the city is still blue and quiet, and it can feel like the last level of a game you don’t remember starting.
The reason we’re talking about all of this now is that Parsons’ universe is finally reaching Japanese cinemas. A24’s Backrooms follows the discovery of a strange doorway beneath a furniture showroom, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve among its cast. Parsons started developing the film while he was still in his teens and became the youngest filmmaker ever to direct a number-one movie at the North American box office.
By now you’ve probably heard that Backrooms opened to $81.5 million in North America and $118 million worldwide, setting a new opening-weekend record for A24. That’s a ridiculous jump for something that began with an anonymous 4chan post, then grew through YouTube videos, fan wikis and games made by people who couldn’t stop thinking about one ugly yellow room.
It also says a lot about how culture works now. An internet urban legend doesn’t need decades of history or an existing Hollywood franchise behind it. Sometimes, millions of people recognising the exact same uncomfortable feeling is enough.
Backrooms opens in Japan on September 4. Whether your version of the aesthetic leans towards analogue horror, childhood nostalgia or a full technicolour fever dream, these six places around Tokyo should get you in the mood without requiring you to noclip out of reality first.
