#26: The Backrooms wiki

In which I contract Stage 3 Snack Rush from the Snackrooms.

Happy Halloween!

I had kinda hoped to make this a whole production, but to be honest I’ve had… a very bad week! So instead, please take this post in the spirit it’s meant, which is a broad survey of one of my favorite websites on the entire internet.

Some background: the above image of a HobbyTown in Oshkosh, WI was anonymously posted to 4chan on May 13, 2019 with the caption,

If you're not careful and you no clip¹ out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, 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 hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

Part of this post’s extreme popularity—which I can hardly quantify, except to say that “the Backrooms” has entered the common vernacular, spawned countless video games, TikTok trends and think pieces from mainstream publications, and garnered a movie deal from A24—comes from its chicken-and-egg relationship with online liminal aesthetics. Liminal spaces grew in popularity around the same time as the Backrooms, to the extent that the Backrooms are sometimes considered the original liminal space. Not everyone is happy with how thoroughly the Backrooms have conquered the concept of liminal spaces, the eerieness of which is probably far more timeless than any one image.

In any case, it created a cultural wave of mist-cloaked playgrounds and abandoned arcades and empty swimming pools. It became easy to knit these images together as part of the same tapestry, different “Levels” of the ill-defined Backrooms that so tempted the imagination of internet horror fans. That original 4chan post became something of a sacred text to mine for inspiration: it established the concept that there are entrances to the Backrooms hidden in the real world, that these spaces are measured in millions of square miles, and that there are dangers within.

Most of this worldbuilding happened on disconnected forums, so fans needed a way to keep all of these details straight. The obvious choice was to make a wiki. Enter: the Backrooms Wiki.

I have no idea whether the Backrooms Wiki is the sole, or even primary place where people congregate to write Backrooms lore. But over a thousand pages of fiction have been compiled here and, like the Backrooms themselves, the best way to experience it is to pick a random starting point and get lost. I have visited this website so many times, and never tread the same path twice.

This time, I found a level called The Crystal Fields (Level 894). It consists of 300,000 square miles of waving emerald grass dotted by modern windmills, with blue crystal growths spawning throughout. It’s a place of calm, barring the threat of Krystalrs. What are Krystalrs? Giant crystal spiders that burrow underground and cause hallucinations. Also an orb named Jason lives here.

Level 894 is dangerous, but it may be a blessing if you emerge there from the windmill in Level -101, the Northern Chrome. Its irridescent towns rise from an expanse of mercury-covered tulips, habitable before the Chrome Haunting. Now, wanderers become enveloped in chrome, dying if they lack the hope to go on—a Class Ψ threat.

And I could go on like this. There are voids and research groups and oceans and serial killers and a place called The Snackrooms and lots of bottles of almond water, and hundreds of thousands of words of rich descriptive text. But the main thing about this extended Backrooms lore, which you’ve probably already noticed, is that it’s profoundly bad horror.

A common axiom about horror movies is that they become less scary when you see the monster, when it stops lurking and becomes a presence on the screen. This is so far beyond that. The Backrooms Wiki not only shows us the monster, but cages it and transports it to a medical campus where you, the reader, are invited to participate in its dissection, as well as a week-long symposium detailing its anatomy. With footnotes from the writer detailing its creation. It’s an absurd degree of telling, not showing.

I’m torn on how I should feel about this. One contingent of “Backrooms Purists” rejects any attempt to smother the feeling of liminal spaces under so much OC. I agree that anything significant about the Backrooms as a concept is destroyed by the weight of what’s essentially fantasy worldbuilding. Isn’t uncertainty what makes the Backrooms so compelling in the first place?

But as a general rule—which you are free to steal—I don’t like to align with any group described as “purist!” I can’t escape the make-funableness of the Backrooms Wiki, but I also can’t bring myself to make fun of it.

My sympathy is certainly misplaced. For one, the purpose of art isn’t to be good, just to exist. I also have to acknowledge that this stopped being horror a long time ago. Horror is a genre with a short half-life, one that dissolves quickly back into its constituent pieces. Absent fear and surprise, artists are free to smash those pieces together, kneading its pure substance into shapes which may collapse just as quickly. Then new, permanent structures will emerge from that substance. Kane Pixels’ Backrooms series, the very goofy mulitplayer game Into the Backrooms (which has next to no distinction, but which I loved), or Severance. And some of those will be very good.

But what do I know! Even if I was inclined to say “everyone should stop making Backrooms fic,” that would be completely futile. Same as Slenderman, same as SCP. Same as Doki Doki, which received the horror hug of death so thoroughly that on this Halloween seven years after the game’s release, fans are imagining their waifus in costume.

So quiet the part of your brain that distinguishes good from bad and spend some time clicking around the Backrooms Wiki, and please recount your journey for me in the comments. I’d love to hear them!

Thanks for reading!

Expect some changes to Supernormal in the next couple of months. I intend to keep my New Year’s resolution, which is to leave Substack! I’m currently looking into solutions so that the experience on your end—the receipt of my writing via email—doesn’t change all that much. What probably will change is schedule and content.

For example, I know that people like my more developed essays on background music and liked TikToks, and pressuring myself to produce weekly means I have less time to work on these. I also want to work more on reviews, since I love writing reviews. I think these two problems solve each other? But I want to be thoughtful and intentional with any changes I make, so it’ll take me a minue to iron it all out. I think December I’ll go on a posting hiatus.

What absolutely will not change: it will be my words, and my views on underappreciated culture. It will be dumb approaches to big ideas, and big approaches to dumb ideas. Also the name “Supernormal,” which I still really like.

Anyway, thanks again!

DR

1. No clipping, btw, is gaming terminology. It refers to objects in a video game world that appear solid, but aren’t, so that it’s possible to walk (or “clip”) through them. The association here comes from the unsettling feeling of clipping outside of a game’s pre-defined area, and suddenly being left to wander a space you were never intended to be. Good video on the subject.