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backrooms lore
The backrooms are a community-created liminal-space aesthetic (yellow wallpaper, damp carpet, buzzing fluorescents, no windows, no exits) that spread from a single anonymous image-board post around 2019 into one of the most resonant visual phenomena the internet has produced. liminals.space is built around that same feeling, but turned inward: the eerie empty version of your places, not a stock hallway.
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Sometime around 2019, an image of an ordinary-looking office space began circulating on anonymous image boards. Yellow-tinted wallpaper, moisture-stained carpet that had clearly seen better decades, fluorescent lights buzzing at the frequency of a mild headache. No furniture. No people. No doors that led anywhere recognisable. Whoever posted it attached two words of context: it had the feeling of somewhere you were never supposed to be, a backstage to reality that had been humming along, empty and infinite, without anyone noticing.
The photo wasn't staged. It was almost certainly an unremarkable office or commercial space that someone had photographed by accident or out of mild curiosity. That was precisely what made it land. It looked real in the way that a dream looks real while you're still in it: familiar materials, recognisable proportions, but stripped of every social cue that tells you you belong there.
Within months the concept had acquired a name, a mythology, and hundreds of fan submissions. Writers expanded the lore. Artists produced variations. The core aesthetic (empty institutional spaces, degraded materials, fluorescent light, a sense of infinite extent) became its own genre almost overnight.
The backrooms mythology borrowed a term from gaming: noclipping. In a video game, noclipping means passing through solid geometry (walls, floors, ceilings) to end up outside the intended playable area. Usually this means an empty, unrendered void. In the backrooms mythology, it became a metaphor: if you were somehow to noclip out of the physical world, you might end up here, in a space that had always existed just behind the plaster, humming along without you.
The appeal of this idea is worth sitting with. It's not really about fear of being trapped. It's about the uncanny suspicion that the ordinary built environment has an underside: that the places where we go about our daily lives are thin, and behind them is something older and emptier and continuous. The backrooms gave that suspicion an address.
A few things converged. First, the specific aesthetic of the original image hit on something that a lot of people already carried without being able to name it. The empty office. The dead mall. The school hallway after everyone's gone home. These are spaces most people have experienced (transitional, functional, unmemorable in the moment but oddly persistent in memory). The backrooms gave that persistent-but-formless feeling a very clear visual grammar.
Second, the timing. Lockdowns had put large numbers of people in empty buildings, or kept them from buildings they suddenly realised they missed. Familiar spaces became strange in real time. Walking through an empty supermarket at 7am, past the humming refrigerator units and the strip lighting, was not a million miles from walking through the backrooms. The aesthetic confirmed something people were already living.
Third, and this matters, the community around it was genuinely creative. Writers contributed survival guides and lore documents treating the backrooms as a shared fictional universe. Photographers submitted spaces that fit the aesthetic. The original image became a seed, not a ceiling.
The backrooms are the most well-known example of a broader category that gets called liminal spaces. A liminal space, in the original anthropological sense, is a threshold: a place you pass through rather than stay in. Airports, stairwells, waiting rooms, parking garages, hotel corridors. They exist to be traversed, not inhabited, which means they carry no social weight. No one owns them, no one belongs to them, and they're almost never photographed or remembered.
When you strip the people out of a liminal space (or catch it at a time when it's genuinely empty) something happens to it. Without the flow of bodies that give it purpose, it becomes an object in itself. You see the carpet pattern. You hear the ventilation. You notice that the ceiling is lower than you remembered. The space becomes strange in the way that a word becomes strange if you repeat it often enough.
The backrooms took this experience and made it deliberate and extreme: a liminal space with no exits, pushed to its logical limit.
From there, the aesthetic branched. Indoor pools (poolcore, as the sub-genre became known), empty offices, school hallways after the last bell, dead malls, hospital corridors. Each of these places carries its own flavour of the liminal, and communities built around photographing and sharing them grew significantly over the years that followed.
The aesthetic migrated from image boards to YouTube, where short-form video content explored the spaces with ambient sound design and minimal commentary. It moved into games, where fan-built environments let players walk through procedurally generated backrooms levels. It appeared in student short films. It was referenced in mainstream television. Eventually it attracted the attention of professional filmmakers and studios, who recognised that the community had produced something with genuine emotional weight.
Throughout all of this, the core emotional logic stayed consistent. The backrooms work because they're not scary in the conventional sense. There are no monsters in the first image, no threat named or implied. They're unsettling in the way that a half-remembered dream is unsettling: the wrongness is structural, not external. The place itself is the thing that's off.
That's a harder thing to manufacture than a jump scare, and a harder thing to explain to someone who hasn't felt it. But most people who've seen that original image (or any of its many descendants) didn't need it explained. They already knew the feeling. They'd felt it in a real place, at a specific time, and had just never had a name for it before.
The places in the canonical backrooms (yellow wallpaper, beige carpet, institutional fluorescents) are generic by design. They're meant to trigger a vague familiarity, to feel like somewhere without being anywhere specific. That generality is part of what makes them travel.
But the most personal version of this feeling isn't a stock hallway. It's the specific hallway you walked every day for six years. The specific bedroom you lay in as a kid, staring at the same patch of ceiling. The specific waiting room you sat in for hours and never thought about again until right now.
That's what liminals.space exists to make. Upload photos of the places you actually remember (your childhood bedroom, your school, a mall you grew up in, an office you spent years inside) and the AI rebuilds them as their backrooms version, empty and eerie and unmistakably yours.
The result doesn't look like a generic AI hallway. It looks like the memory of a place you can't quite get back to. Which is, in the end, what the backrooms aesthetic is really about.
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