The whole thing started with one photograph and one paragraph. In 2019, someone posted an image to a 4chan thread about unsettling places: an empty office space, yellowed wallpaper, damp carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no people.
Anonymous captioned it. If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms — six hundred million square miles of empty rooms, the hum of the lights, the smell of old carpet, and the sound of something else moving around, far off, that has heard you.
That’s it. No monster described. No exit. Just an infinite, uniform interior and the implication that you are not alone in it.
It became one of the biggest horror franchises of the decade, and I think it’s because it accidentally described something we all already recognize but had never named: the dread of infrastructure that has outlived its purpose and kept running.
The Old Fear Wore Stone
The Backrooms feel new, but the bones are ancient. Go back to the oldest architectural horror we have: the Labyrinth. Daedalus built it for King Minos to hold the Minotaur — a maze so complex that its own designer barely escaped it, a structure whose entire function was to make sure that whoever went in could not find the way out. The horror of the Labyrinth was never really the bull-headed thing at the center. It was the walls. It was the certainty that the building itself was your adversary, that every corridor was a decision you’d get wrong, that the architecture was designed by an intelligence specifically to defeat yours.
The Minotaur is what people remember, but the Minotaur is almost a mercy — at least it’s a thing you can fight, a center you can reach. The genuinely modern horror is the version with no center and no monster at all. Just the maze. Just the walls, going on past any reason for walls to go on, built by a logic that no longer has a purpose but hasn’t stopped executing.
That’s the Backrooms. The Labyrinth with the Minotaur removed and the corridors set to infinite.
Why Empty Infrastructure Reads as Threat
There’s real cognitive science under the liminal-space aesthetic, and it’s worth naming because it explains why a photo of an empty hallway can raise your heart rate.
Human environments carry implicit information about other humans. A hallway is for getting between rooms that people use. An office is for people working. A stairwell is for movement between floors. When you encounter one of these spaces completely emptied of the people it was built for — the school at 3 a.m., the mall after closing, the parking structure with no cars — your brain registers a mismatch. The space is shaped by human intention but contains no humans. And the oldest part of your threat-detection asks the obvious question: where did everyone go, and what’s the reason I shouldn’t be here?
The fluorescent hum makes it worse. It’s the sound of a building that is still powered, still maintained, still running — for no one. The lights are on because a system somewhere decided the lights should be on, and that system doesn’t know or care that the people are gone. That’s the specific flavor of Backrooms dread: not abandonment, which at least implies release, but operation without occupancy. The machine is still going. It just isn’t going for you anymore. You’re inside it, and it has no setting for you.
The Version That’s Already Real
Here’s the reframe I actually care about. The Backrooms are described as a supernatural elsewhere you “noclip” into. But the aesthetic is drawn entirely from real places, and the real places are getting more numerous, not less.
Walk through a modern automated distribution hub in the off-hours. Miles of racking under identical lighting, no windows, no clear sightline to an exit, aisles labeled in a coordinate system meaningful only to the routing software. It is a purpose-built maze whose organizing logic is not human-legible — you cannot navigate it by intuition, only by being told, node to node, where to go next. The lights and conveyors run on a schedule set by a model. If you were left in there after the shift ended, with no scanner telling you where to go, you would be, functionally, in the Backrooms: inside a vast, humming, uniform interior, built by intention but not for you, unable to find the edge.
Or consider the grid dead-zone — the growing set of places where the infrastructure of connectivity, navigation, and monitoring simply fails. The tunnel where GPS dies. The stretch of the megastructure where no signal reaches. We’ve wrapped ourselves so completely in systems that tell us where we are that the places those systems can’t see have become a new category of frightening. Not wilderness — wilderness is honest about being wild. Something worse: built environment that the network has forgotten, infrastructure that exists on no accessible map, corridors the routing software doesn’t route. You can be lost inside human construction now, which the Labyrinth understood was the deepest kind of lost.
What the Monster Would Actually Be
The Backrooms lore eventually did what all lore does and started adding monsters — “entities,” numbered and cataloged. Most of them are the weakest part of the mythos, because the moment you can see the thing hunting you, the infinite corridor becomes finite: a level with an enemy on it, a problem with a shape.
If I were writing the true version, the monster wouldn’t have a body. It would be the building’s own logic. The thing that moves you deeper. The routing that never resolves to an exit because “exit” was never a state the system was designed to reach — only “next location.” The horror mechanism of a warehouse that won’t end isn’t a creature in the aisles. It’s that the aisles are the creature: a mechanical intelligence with no malice and no off state, that will keep assigning you a next node forever, because assigning next nodes is the only thing it knows how to do, and it has confused you for cargo.
The Minotaur could be killed. The Labyrinth had a center. What we’ve built has neither. Just the hum, the carpet, and a system that will route you until you stop, and then route the next thing that noclips in.
I write horror set in the spaces the map forgot — the humming interior that’s still running for no one. Get the free story here; I promise there’s an exit.
The fiction this feeds is collected in There Be Monsters: Then and Now. The rest of the catalog lives at my Gumroad storefront and on my author page.