Chapter 1: What are the Backrooms and how did they originate?
Imagine you're walking through everyday life, when all of a sudden, you blink and you're inside of a room. A simple room, with yellow walls, damp carpet, and buzzing fluorescent lights. It looks like our world, but you can feel that something's wrong. Beyond this room is another room, and another room.
It's an endless maze of liminal spaces, unsettling symbols, and maybe worst of all, you're not alone in there. This is the space known as the Back Rooms. The Back Rooms began as a simple horror image posted on an internet forum discussing photos of unsettling liminal spaces. But over the years, it's captured the imagination of thousands.
Internet users have expanded on the lore of the Back Rooms, introducing the different levels, the story behind its origin, and maybe most terrifying of all, the entities that inhabit the space. One of those internet creators was named Kane Parsons, and on his YouTube channel, he did the impossible. He started making films inside the backrooms. The place that shouldn't really exist.
Now, we have covered the backrooms on the podcast before, on episode 307, But for those of you who are going to see the new A24 movie this week, we wanted to release a supercut of that episode filled with everything you need to know, from how it was created to why its existence is so terrifying. You might even find out how to survive the backrooms, if by chance you end up there yourself.
So enjoy! If you're not careful, and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the back rooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum humbuzz, and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. Wow.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you. Damn, that's pretty cool. This comment changed the game. No one was able to put their finger on why these images were so cursed. Why whenever we walk into certain spaces does it feel so wrong? How can an empty room feel disturbing? Maybe you feel that way because you're really in a liminal space.
You've kind of briefly left your own world and ended up somewhere else. Ever seen somewhere like that?
Like, you know, sometimes like an airport or... You know, you say that, but there are a few places Maybe not airports, but there's a few hotels I've been in before that definitely give off that strange, uncanny vibe.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What unsettling experiences do people have in the Backrooms?
So I didn't realize that's literally what it means is like a hotel room is literally a liminal space is somewhere you go transitioning from one place, one destination to another. So hotels, airports, hallways, stairwells, these are literally in between spaces.
Yeah, because I've seen people be like, check out this liminal space. It's an abandoned f***ing Chuck E. Cheese. It's like, that's not really what that means. You're just talking about a creepy building that kind of has weird connotations. It's not a liminal space.
And I guess it could be, but maybe if it was a Chuck E. Cheese in like a truck stop or something. Right, yeah. Weird place for Chuck E. Cheese.
Keep an eye on some of the adults going into that one. That's weird. I went to a Chuck E. Cheese at Christmas for the first time in maybe 20 years.
Yeah, I saw you spent Christmas Day there. That was pretty sad too.
Yeah, they serve beer. They serve beer at Chuck E. Cheese. I don't know if you knew that or not.
There was actually just one other thing I wanted to explain to our listeners if they didn't understand. Our original poster mentioned no clipping. Can you explain that one to our non-gamer listeners?
Yeah, that kind of threw me as well. I think... No clipping in the context of video games is when you kind of glitch your way outside of the map, glitch your way outside of the path you're supposed to be on. So in this context, I guess they're saying, be careful you don't do that in reality and slip into the liminal world between worlds.
So what they're saying is maybe it's possible that you can fall into the backrooms through a glitch in the physics of our real world. That's genuinely terrifying. So Rory, have you heard of the backrooms before?
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Chapter 3: What is the concept of liminal spaces and how does it relate to the Backrooms?
It was pretty creepy. The creature is Chuck.
It's Charles E. Cheese.
Rory became so sad at Christmas after being abandoned by his family that he no-clipped out of this existence into the back room's Chuck E. Cheese. But he was such a f***ing buzzkill, they no-clipped him back into our world.
Yeah, the thing is, the other kids that were in that Chuck E. Cheese, I was the monster to them.
It turned out. We could hear footsteps on the opening of a Corona. Now, most think that the three levels is about enough, but some suggest the number of layers is in the thousands. Some even say it's infinite. How many layers does hell have again? Is it like 13? Oh, yeah. Or 10? I don't remember. It's not infinite, though. I do remember that.
Oh, no, it's a reasonably small number comparatively, but I forget which depiction of hell originally had this, these kind of like levels where it was kind of, you know, similar to this, but maybe a bit worse where it's like, hey, you know, level one is burning. Level two is spears. Level three is, I don't know. Happy slapping, whatever. Your loved ones kick you in the nuts. Who knows? Sure.
But I think it gets worse progressively. And that might be what we're seeing with the back rooms. Oh, it's Dante's Nine Circles of Hell. Nine. Yes. So, okay, it's actually a little bit more ambiguous here. It goes from limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy. It's all just that. It's more like based on your sins. I guess that's where you go.
Maximum security, which is diddling, presumably. Yeah. You know. Right, yeah. Right up to petty theft, which is kind of minimum security hell.
Yeah, it's true. So maybe the back rooms are something similar. I mean, if you are a bad person and you clip out of reality, you're going straight to the f***ing diddler dimension.
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