The Backrooms

I'm definitely missing a few.

Backrooms Guy.

Backrooms Guy.

Yeah.

Yes.

Stories that take place in vacant, in-between spaces.

Like the internet lore that inspired the movie Backrooms.

I grew up in a town that didn't have a lot of people in it.

And there'd be like these old shopping malls where no one would be around and all the stores are gone.

The fact that you felt like this was a real person that may have actually disappeared and for years that remained uncontested, you have to put it up there just for that.

He was really a pioneer without realizing that's what he was.

More widely known creepypastas like Slender Man and more recently Backrooms, which was turned into a Hollywood movie this year, all have their roots in Ted the Caver.

I think you can trace it to a lot of these things, but Backrooms being the most recent example, I don't know that you can say these things wouldn't have existed without Ted, but you can't say that they would either.

So how will this upcoming generation reveal its fears and faiths through story? In 2026, Gen Z has finally grown up enough to start making their own feature films.

This year's biggest horror movies were both spearheaded by Gen Z directors, with Kane Parsons and Curry Barker making The Back Rooms and Obsession, respectively.

This week, Religion Unplugged's culture writers Joseph Holmes and Gillian Chaney sat down to explore how Gen Z thinking is changing the horror genre.

Here's Joseph and Gillian.

He obviously uses it, makes a wish that she loves him more than anyone else in the world.

And things devolve from there, as they often do in stories about wishes.

In The Back Rooms, The Back Rooms is based on a series of 4chan posts, like a fictional kind of world that was spun out on the platform 4chan forever ago.

I remember being in middle school and reading Back Rooms posts on Reddit and getting really scared, which that was really fun to kind of see that make it into a movie.

In a dream, maybe, or somewhere worse.

This is the story of the backrooms, the internet's most powerful act of collective imagination.

And maybe it's the most terrifying.

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Today, I'm telling you the story of The Backrooms.

It started with a single photograph posted on 4chan.

So it's not

The Back Rooms, it's just Back Rooms? Not The Back Rooms, the 2022 series by the same writer-director.

It's a movie with actual money behind it.

Did

I keep saying they're going to hammer my eggplant.

I don't know what that means.

The back rooms as a concept is.

I think I just did.

That is exactly what happens in an aspect of Severance.

And there is sort of the same, almost like rat in a maze type concept of trying to escape this... building or corporation or whatever, even with the newer film Backrooms that came out this year, maybe similar sort of tones and things.

But one of the things I thought as you were speaking is that I think what this game does really well, no matter what you think it's about, is that in the moment when you're playing through it, it's because there's so many questions, everything sort of breaks down and nothing has much meaning.

And it's similar to the Backrooms movie where I think when things break down and a character is within that, it only emphasizes their search for meaning because there's so little of it.

And it gets you to ask these important questions like, not just why am I here, but is what I'm doing right? Or is this narrator good or bad? And it kind of gets right to the heart of the story maybe the morality questions and what's a true ending, what's the explanations.

And obviously the game doesn't give you a lot of explanations, but what it does do is I think it gets you to think about that first player perspective in a way that other video games just don't really do.

I'm not in the industry like this, guys, but I'm just trying to say, if you want to open your market share, I think a lot of people would watch scary movies during Halloween.

Yeah, considering the two largest movies as we are now entering early July are horror movies, a.k.a. Backdoors, a.k.a.

Obsession.

Backrooms, not Backdoors.

My bad.

My bad.

So perhaps we'll start by talking about the back room.

So for anybody who doesn't No, The Back Rooms is a movie that's been a huge hit this year made by a guy called Kane Parsons.

He's the director.

And it is based on a – this is great as well and something that we should touch on.

If you've not seen it, it's worth Googling.

Just look up original back rooms image.

And it's funny because it looks very much like if anybody's seen the film, The Back Rooms, you'd go, oh, my God, that's like that is that that whole film is just that that image.

So I've been kicking around 4chan for years.