Loading player
On May 12, 2019, on the /x/paranormal board on 4chan, one of the most thriving digital spaces for the creation and circulation of memes, a user asked others to «post disturbing images that give the idea that something is wrong ». Among the various answers, the photo of a large room with yellowish walls, similar to a large empty office, without any type of further information or identifying sign stood out in particular.
The photo was accompanied by a vaguely threatening comment, difficult to understand: «If you don’t pay attention and leave the field of reality in the wrong direction you will end up in the Backrooms [“le stanze sul retro” in inglese], where there is nothing but the smell of old, damp carpet; a crazy monochrome yellow; the background noise of endlessly buzzing fluorescent lights and about six hundred million square miles of empty rooms that you will be trapped in. Only God can save you if you hear something moving nearby, because surely that thing has heard you too.”
The photo and the text that accompanied it soon began to circulate on other platforms such as Reddit, Twitter and TikTok, attracting the attention of a large community of people passionate about horror stories, often known as creepypasta. In the space of a few months, a whole collective narrative was created around a single photo of a slightly disturbing room, starting from the idea that it was possible to reach a parallel universe: that of the Backrooms. The result was video games, podcasts, communities of tens of thousands of people between Reddit, Discord and YouTube and even a series of videos on YouTube which were so successful that their creator was able to obtain a contract to make a film produced by A24 , one of the most popular independent production companies around.
For five years – since 2019, in fact – a part of this very active group of enthusiasts has used a lot of their energy in identifying the origin of photography from which the entire Backrooms phenomenon started. They did it in a systematic way, as if they were investigators or gamers intent on solving a puzzle to advance to a level, but it seemed particularly difficult to get to the bottom of it. Then, on May 31, 2024, some random user on Twitter announced that he had succeeded.
“The user who discovered it assumed that the original image was older than 2019, even though the oldest post we were aware of so far was from 2019,” explains art historian and digital aesthetics expert Valentina Tanni, who dedicated a long chapter of her essay to the Backrooms Exit reality. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore and other landscapes beyond the threshold (which is also one of the 16 books nominated for the Premio Vero, a prize for non-fiction books organized by the Post and the PeccioliPer Foundation).
“4chan doesn’t have a searchable archive, so it was very difficult to find out if there was a previous post with the same image,” says Tanni. «But there are sites where some backups of the 4chan archives are uploaded, and this person consulted them manually until he found a post from 2011 that contained the same photo. From there he found the original name of the file, which was one of those generic names automatically assigned by cameras, and by searching that name on Twitter he discovered a tweet from 2019 where someone else had already found the source of the image, but no one he had listened to him. And people continued to search for the same image, without finding it, for five years.”
– Read also: Where memes come from
The discovery of the origin of the image was welcomed by users who were interested in it in many different ways: some rejoiced, many others said they would have preferred to continue imagining it as a mysterious photo that appeared out of nowhere. In reality it was a place belonging to the US chain of objects and toys HobbyTown in the town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which has today been converted into a racing track for radio-controlled cars. The photo, taken in 2002, was initially published on the store’s website to show the progress of the renovation work in progress, and then in all likelihood began to circulate on 4chan because it accurately reflected many of the criteria of the so-called “” photos liminal spaces”, or “liminal spaces”.
According to Aesthetics Wiki, a site dedicated to explaining some digital subcultures, those places that appear in a photo as «abandoned, and often empty – a shopping mall at four in the morning, or a school hall during the summer period” and which “appear frozen and slightly disturbing, but also familiar to our minds”. As Tanni explains in Exit reality, «the atmosphere can oscillate between a vague sense of desolation, a strong restlessness and a generic nostalgia»: they are photos «almost always grainy, poor, sometimes even distorted. The light is the invasive and angular one of the automatic flash; the colors are mixed and dull; perspectives are always lopsided and unstable.”
Photographs of liminal spaces crowd sites dedicated to the topic – such as the subreddit r/liminalspace – but are also put together to form long videos with a mysterious atmosphere on YouTube and TikTok. Many of the images are generated through artificial intelligence systems or created digitally, but others portray places that really exist: one of the most famous liminal spaces on the internet, for example, is the courtyard of the Holiday Inn hotel inside London’s airport Heathrow. It depicts an internal courtyard, strangely covered by a ceiling, overlooked by the windows of the rooms, arranged in regular rows.
The Holiday Inn at Heathrow Airport
However, around the photo of Oshkosh’s HobbyTown, a notable digital phenomenon has been created, even if not unique. In one piece on Forbesthe journalist Dani Di Placido writes that the Backrooms should essentially be considered a form of “digital folklore”: a popular myth that was generated through the elaboration and imagination of a group of people who began to tell the same story, like the Yeti, the Latin American chupacabras or the Loch Ness monster.
«Human beings have a narrative aptitude, they tend to create legends», explains Tanni. «Stories created by the community existed well before the internet: just think of urban legends. Even before that, the origins of myths are lost in the past, in the depths of history, but myths were passed down orally, as if they were copied and pasted. Today it happens with online photos, but the process is the same: a given element strikes someone’s imagination, who builds a piece of history, this story grows and slowly becomes a mythology. And we see that it happens a lot with liminal spaces: it must mean that they touch something profound on an unconscious level, even though they are apparently ordinary and uninteresting images. They are infused with meaning after the fact.”
– Read also: The golden age of fandom
