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The Backrooms: The Horror of a Generation
Every generation has it’s own flavor of horror that goes on to influence the genre for years to come. The 60s had the birth of zombies and religious horror, the 70s and 80s had masked slasher villains, and the 2010s saw the resurgence of found footage tropes and more interesting horror storytelling methods. For millenials and Generation Z, that flavor is split into two known as “digital horror” and “analog horror”, two genres defined by the darker, creepier parts of childhood nostalgia.
There are many aspects to both analog and digital horror, mostly revolving around technology from the 80s and 90s, and the 2000s respectively. Low-quality camera footage, defunct websites, and supposedly haunted old video games are common tropes. The aim is to tap into memories of staying up late into the night, maybe gaming or just surfing the internet unsupervised. Sometimes we saw things that frightened us, whether it was actually sinister in nature or we simply lacked the context to understand something more mundane.
Another important aspect of horror in modern times is the usage of the Internet to share and collaborate on stories. The SCP Foundation is a one such collaborative work with fascinating and complex worldbuilding, characters, and exploration of themes such as scientific ethics and morality in the face of world-ending threats.
One of the most interesting and provocative parts of these recent horror trends is the concept of “The Backrooms”.
The Backrooms started as a single post on the 4chan forums in 2019. It is described as a place that exists as a sort of parallel world to our own, accessed by falling through a gap in reality, consisting of a functionally infinite expanse of hallways that may or may not have things living in it.
As the idea blossomed into popularity, an expansive lore grew around it, including various ‘levels’ of the Backrooms based on different aesthetics, usually inhabited by creatures of varying levels of hostility.
Many have argued that this expansion has watered down the original intent and sense of horror of the Backrooms. This author is inclined to agree with that sentiment, while not aiming to discredit the creativity that goes into the Backrooms lore. The Backrooms, like many other things, is simply scariest as an unexplained, unnatural, and incomprehensible phenomenon. The Backrooms is scary because the very idea of it is scary, not because it has monsters in it.
The aim of this essay is to examine why the Backrooms has seen such widespread notoriety and resonated with so many people in this new decade. In this pursuit, we will focus on the three most notable features of the original description of the Backrooms: it’s nature as an endless maze of non-manmade architecture, fluorescent lighting, and yellow wallpaper.
Firstly, who are the people engaging with this kind of content? With whom does the idea of the Backrooms seem to click with?
The Backrooms is a part of the digital horror genre, a genre that was born and thrives on the internet. The people who use the internet are mostly young adults and teens, the people who are beginning to understand the nature of horror beyond things like lumbering monsters and jumpscares. These are the people feeling the creeping dread of the so called “real world”. College, student loans, jobs, apartments, bills, and all the unexpected “monsters” hiding around the corners of life.
One 2019 study by the CDC reported that the demographic that displayed symptoms of depression with the greatest frequency were adults aged 18 to 29 years. Additionally, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 31 percent of adults in the US have struggled with an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. There are many factors that contribute to these somber statistics, but the recent COVID pandemic has only heightened feelings of isolation, fear, and hopelessness among those who already suffer with these feelings. It is no coincidence that the Backrooms, a concept that feeds on those exact three feelings, exploded in popularity during the pandemic.
Perhaps there’s some catharsis in the horror of an infinite prison maze, and some subconcious relief that comes from making up lore to make it make sense.
Fluorescent lighting has become a symbol of artificiality and the endless trap of corporate cubicle jobs. It’s energy efficiency has caused it to see widespread use, but studies have shown that long-term exposure to fluorescent lighting has many negative side effects. Most notable among these side effects are impaired sleep, migraines, and eye strain. One study even suggests that the kind of UV light emitted by this kind of lighting can damage the mitochondria, leading to chronic fatigue. On top of the physical ailments, another study suggests that fluorescent lighting may heighten feelings of anxiety in people with already existing anxiety and panic disorders. A common factor expressed by many in the study is that this particular form of lighting is associated with high stress locations, such as workplaces, schools, and hospitals.
The color of yellow is a fickle color. It is bright and cheery, symbolizing happiness, warmth, and hope. However, because it reflects so much light, it can cause eye strain, leading to feelings of frustration and irritability. The color has an interesting mythology surrounding it, and although the empirical evidence is limited, it has a number of negative connotations. Yellow is associated with yellow bile, one of the four humors in an outdated form of medical theory, an imbalance of which could cause emotional imbalances. An old wives tale even claims that babies that sleep in rooms with yellow wallpaper will cry more often.
In the era of gothic horror, yellow came to symbolize sickness, death, and decay. The writer Robert W. Chambers wrote a collection of short stories titled The King in Yellow, a titled shared by two recurring elements in the first four stories in the collection. The King in Yellow is both the title of a fictional play that is said to induce madness and despair in the reader, and a mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity. This figure and the associated stories would later be incorporated into the Lovecraftian horror mythos.
There is another piece of writing from the same era that happens to focus heavily on something yellow.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. The story is a series of journal-like writings from the perspective of a woman suffering from postpartum depression, a condition affecting women who have recently given birth.
The story was written in a time when women were systematically infantilised, controlled, and suppressed by the patriarchal society they lived in. Gilman herself was victim to the diagnosis of “hysteria”, a label frequently put onto women who behaved emotionally, when she developed postpartum depression. Instead of having her issues understood and her needs met, she was prescribed what’s known as the ‘rest cure’, a process by which the patient is isolated and prevented from any ‘thought provoking’ action. In that sense, The Yellow Wallpaper is as much autobiographical as it is fictional.
Throughout the story, the unnamed woman’s inner thoughts become gradually more unhinged as she becomes obsessed with the odd patterns of the ugly yellow wallpaper in the nursery she’s forced to be in. Her husband, John, is a doctor of high standing who insists that he knows what’s best for her, and she truly believes in his guidance. The woman is forbidden from interacting from people she enjoys and from working on her writing. She writes anyways, as it is one of the few sources of relief from her literal and figurative imprisonment.
Additionally, the woman hides many of her symptoms in order to keep up the appearance of a functional wife to her husband. John has no idea how far gone she truly is until she suffers a psychotic episode at the end of the story.
The wallpaper, similarly to the Backrooms, can be thought of as a metaphor for both the woman’s own mental maze and the society she lives in. The description of it is even eerily similar to the nature of the Backrooms.
The wallpaper in question is described as having a pattern “… not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.” It is an endless mess of curves with no satisfying conclusion. Behind the pattern, in the dim moonlight, she believes she can see a woman (herself?) trapped behind the pattern, like an animal in a cage, slinking around the curves and desperately shaking the bars of her decrepit, sickly-yellow prison.
The woman is trapped equally by her own condition and society’s treatment of her. She is kept from aid that would genuinely help her by a man that believes that her condition is nothing more than hysterics. The woman comes to believe that the wallpaper is influencing John and his sister, Jennie, as well. In a sense, she is correct. Perhaps even John does have some genuine love for her, but they are just a susceptible to the biases and misconceptions prevalent in their time. They too are lost in the pattern, the endless two-dimensional corridors, constructed by unknown hands, like all of us in modern times.
As someone who suffers from several disabilities that compound on one another, the infinite, monotonous hallways of the Backrooms echo the trap of life in late-stage capitalism. No matter how long you spend in it, you never find the end. No matter how much you analyze the patterns, there’s no end to find. Just more and more carpeted corridors, more dead ends, more confusing twists and turns, more incomprehensible architecture. Not only are you trapped, but you have no way of comprehending just how vast and complex your prison is. You feel alone. It feels like the only feasible options are death or madness.
That’s a bleak picture, but it comes from a lived experience, not just of myself but countless others like me. That’s the one thing the Backroom lacks, however: other people. We’re not alone in this labyrinthine search for meaning in the patterns in the wallpaper. Even in the direst of circumstances, the people around us can make all the difference. That’s what makes the Backrooms all the more hauntingly beautiful, I suppose. We’ve turned our fear and despair into art, together. We put faces to the monsters so we can overcome them. We put structure and order into the madness so we can navigate it.
I’m not alone, and neither are you. Remember that. Let’s keep tearing at that wallpaper.
Links
The Backrooms Wiki, for your late-night browsing pleasure.
Blue light induces mitochondrial DNA damage and free radical production in epithelial cells
The Effect of Fluorescent Lighting on Anxiety Patients
Symptoms of Depression Among Adults: United States, 2019
National Institute of Mental Health: Anxiety Disorder Statistics
The entirety of The Yellow Wallpaper can be read for free here