You are going about your day recording a short film with your high school friends, with you being the cameraman. You step back for a wider angle and you phase through the ground. You land in an empty office space full of yellow wallpaper, intensified buzzing lights and endless rooms and hallways to get lost in. You are trapped in this six hundred million square mile complex with the fear of the unknown making you hesitant to journey on.

You’ve fallen into the Backrooms: an endless series of rooms boasting millions of miles of vacant space. The idea of the Backrooms originates from a post on 4Chan, an anonymous english-language imageboard, and along with that post came a warning,

“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

“The Backrooms”, a movie directed by Kane Parsons coming to theaters on May 29, is based off of this idea. The movie will star main characters Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Dr. Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve. The movie will be based on Kane Pixel’s YouTube series and its established lore, with Level 0 confirmed to be in the movie based on the trailers.

The original Backrooms post was made by a member named Black August on May 12, 2019, and it included a picture of seemingly endless rooms with yellow walls, moist wet carpet, and big yellow lights illuminating the hallways. 

A reply from another user read as such: 

“If you’re not careful and you noclip 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.”

The main theory that you can fall through the ground first surfaced on the original post on 4Chan where it explains that you can no-clip out of reality. “Noclipping” is a science-based theory where if your atoms lined up perfectly with the place you are standing on, you could faze right through it like a ghost. Then you would “fall” into an alternate dimension called the Backrooms.

There are things in the Backrooms called “Levels.” Think of these like stages in a video game. In the Backrooms you can traverse through levels with “Null-Zones.” These Null-Zones can appear as glitched walls, doors, giant pits, or level-specific hazard areas. Each level has its own way of exiting.

Level 0 consists of yellow walls, randomly segmented rooms, buzzing lights, scattered electrical outlets, and moist beige carpet. It’s designed after an empty and outdated office building from the 1990’s. 

While in Level 0, you may encounter effects that may make traversing the Level far more difficult. Some people theorize that in the movie, these effects will include mental instability, outright insanity, physical effects such as trouble breathing, hearing damage, dehydration, and poisoning from trying to drink the carpet water.

Level 0 itself actively changes with variables like shapeshifting walls; walls change constantly and move when you don’t look at them which can be very disorienting. This is why it’s physically impossible to walk in a straight line in Level 0. Other effects like time travel can also occur and send people from a couple seconds, to full years into the future. They can also send travelers into the past, and note that these are involuntary actions that cannot be controlled.

There are also places in Level 0 like pillar rooms with large pillars lined up in a grid pattern from the ground to the ceiling. In Level 0 there are also the pitfall rooms. These rooms include holes in the ground shaped in a square where you often can’t see the end of them. Travelers that have been in the backrooms have gone down these holes but have never come out alive. 

Blackout zones are also an occurrence that you may run across while exploring the Backrooms. Blackout zones are parts of the Level where there are no lights. Instead, you’ll find ankle-deep water. In these blackout zones there will also be a higher amount of entity sightings.

Entities in the Backrooms are the creatures or monsters that you may encounter while traveling. Some of the most common entities of the Backrooms are Facelings, Smilers, Hounds, Partygoers, and Skin-Stealers. Each of these entities have their own effects, hunting style, and properties.

“The Backrooms is kind of the fear of being isolated and when you’re alone with no help. The place feels nostalgic but also feels just wrong,” freshman Liam Stuebe said.

It really depends on how you see it. The Backrooms community can be split into three different groups. 

People who are fans of the original concept before the added worldbuilding often dislike or ignore things like “Levels” and “entities,” and some people call them “liminal purists.” This group also takes a more direct approach to the topic. 

The second group is people who enjoy the lore that has been created on the various wikis about the Backrooms. This lore tends to add different Levels and more layers to the backrooms such as entities, effects, stories, etc. These people go beyond the “Level 0” image and tend to add more of a storyline to it. Everyone and anyone can add Levels to the wikis and they can all contribute details to the Backrooms.

Group three of Backrooms fans base the lore off of Kane Pixels’s videos on YouTube. For example, Pixels’s series is where the Async was first introduced, the original creators of the Backrooms in his videos, and the series follows a found footage style, involving very few entities. Kane Pixels’ series is about a science company called Async that opens a portal to the Backrooms in the 1990’s. After this people start to go missing by “No-clipping” into the backrooms. People often no-clip into Level 0 because it is very unstable. This is why the walls can shift and involuntary time travel can occur.

In the official trailer and teasers of the Backrooms movie, there are lots of easter eggs present. In the trailer, there is a sign in the store with the words A24 with the same font as Hobbytown, a retail chain that specializes in hobby, collectible, and toy products. The original photo was taken at a Hobbytown in 2003 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Other easter eggs can be found in the Cap’n Clark commercial. You can find this commercial on TV and on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. This advertisement is made by A24 studios and is a viral marketing commercial. It shows the movie’s main character, Clark, advertising his furniture store. This commercial includes lots of Easter eggs. For example, there is a phone number inside of the Ottoman Empire Cap’n Clark commercial where if you put it into a fax machine it leads to a flyer for the store that appears pretty normal. As you dig deeper into the flyer it talks about items that relate to the backrooms such as carpet, wallpaper, and lamps. 

This is obviously a nod to the original post on 4Chan where the whole story originated from. The date in the top left corner of the flyer is May 17, 1990. This is a hint towards the series that Kane Pixels made because it is right around when the first video took place in time. Many people already have opinions about what has been shown in the trailers and teasers.

There is also much discussion over whether or not the movie is actually going to be good. Some argue if it’s going to be based on one thing or another. Other people like Stuebe are concerned about the changes that may be present in the movie.

“I feel like it’s definitely different for sure, but I think it would be cool if they had that but they also had someone that just like how it happened in the YouTube series… like when someone falls and they’re just in the backrooms.” Stuebe said.

Some people are asking why can’t it just be the same exact as the web series. There’s also people that think some changes that may appear in the movie will be different but in a good way.

“I think something that stands out to me is like the way … you can clip through walls, that’s pretty interesting to me,” senior Melvin Mertes said.

Stuebe thinks there will be similar things in the movie like the vintage style cameras. 

“I think that some of the changes in the movie will be good because it will give it more of an 80’s feel like most of the videos do,” Stuebe said. 

Mertes says that he became interested in watching it because of something he saw on social media. 

“Yeah, I think during COVID, a lot of those videos were on our TikTok pages so I think that is definitely what gave me the inspiration to go see it,” Mertes said.

“I think that the idea for the Backrooms movie, I think it was thrown around a little bit and it definitely sounded interesting to me when I heard it, so like the fact that it’s actually in production and actually be a thing is kind of exciting because I am definitely going to see it.”

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