The internet is by far the scariest place on earth. It’s a breeding ground for twisted fantasies and demented nightmares to lurk and spread like wildfire. With the recent rise of analogue horror, which caught my attention with Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink earlier this year, I started hearing a lot about various must watch internet horror videos. One that kept cropping up was that of The Backrooms, a series of shorts created by Kane ‘Pixels’ Parsons that play into my greatest fear in a similar way to Skinamarink.
When the ASYNC Corporation opens a portal to a set of endlessly repeating hallways and rooms, they believe they have discovered a way to solve the problem of limited space on Earth. Hoping to utilise this discovery to store everything from pollution to people, the area dubbed ‘The Backrooms’ by scientists must first be explored to ensure its viability.
But the Backrooms prove to be more complicated than ASYNC could ever have imagined, with dangerous air, monsters, and time distortion lying within, it’s only a matter of time before the fabric of reality begins to rip.
When the ASYNC Corporation opens a portal to a set of endlessly repeating hallways and rooms, they believe they have discovered a way to solve the problem of limited space on Earth. Hoping to utilise this discovery to store everything from pollution to people, the area dubbed ‘The Backrooms’ by scientists must first be explored to ensure its viability.
But the Backrooms prove to be more complicated than ASYNC could ever have imagined, with dangerous air, monsters, and time distortion lying within, it’s only a matter of time before the fabric of reality begins to rip.
The Backrooms comprises of sixteen short episodes on YouTube varying in length between one and fifteen minutes. This comes to a total of around an hour and a half and whilst The Backrooms will provide no answers as to what the eponymous space is or why it’s there, it is an excellent example of how excellent horror can be achieved by a single person on a budget of next to nothing.
Kane Pixels was sixteen at the time he started making The Backrooms (and seventeen by the time of its completion) yet he handles the whole operation as though he’s been doing this for decades. Made almost entirely with 3D animation assets in Adobe After Effects, The Backrooms often lives in the ‘uncanny valley’ realm of looking real but not quite, and it makes the whole ordeal that much more disturbing.
Whilst all the episodes are fantastic, I think ‘Pitfalls’ is the perfect encapsulation of everything that makes The Backrooms so terrifying.
Following a team of scientists on an expedition deep into the unknown, they discover a room with several holes in the floor. After accidentally falling into one, the camera operator explores the floor below the one his team are on, only to discover a haunting replication of a neighbourhood, with a house that’s filled with road signs (but the text on them is reversed), all whilst a voice in the distance calls for help. The source of the voice turns out to be a monster which gives chase to the scientist, who makes it back to the pit he fell from by the skin of his teeth.
Whilst the chase is definitely the part that gets your blood pumping, the entire episode is so eerie, and because of how strange everything looks, and how little sense it makes geometrically, I personally found myself scared the whole time I was watching it. The way the monster lures the scientist in reminded me a lot of the Alex garland film, Annihilation, where a mutated bear screams out in pain with the voice of its most recent victim.
Kane Pixels was sixteen at the time he started making The Backrooms (and seventeen by the time of its completion) yet he handles the whole operation as though he’s been doing this for decades. Made almost entirely with 3D animation assets in Adobe After Effects, The Backrooms often lives in the ‘uncanny valley’ realm of looking real but not quite, and it makes the whole ordeal that much more disturbing.
Whilst all the episodes are fantastic, I think ‘Pitfalls’ is the perfect encapsulation of everything that makes The Backrooms so terrifying.
Following a team of scientists on an expedition deep into the unknown, they discover a room with several holes in the floor. After accidentally falling into one, the camera operator explores the floor below the one his team are on, only to discover a haunting replication of a neighbourhood, with a house that’s filled with road signs (but the text on them is reversed), all whilst a voice in the distance calls for help. The source of the voice turns out to be a monster which gives chase to the scientist, who makes it back to the pit he fell from by the skin of his teeth.
Whilst the chase is definitely the part that gets your blood pumping, the entire episode is so eerie, and because of how strange everything looks, and how little sense it makes geometrically, I personally found myself scared the whole time I was watching it. The way the monster lures the scientist in reminded me a lot of the Alex garland film, Annihilation, where a mutated bear screams out in pain with the voice of its most recent victim.
The Backrooms has a retro aesthetic in the form of it appearing to be shot on tape, with plenty of grain and a CRT type filter applied to the final image. Combine this with the liminal space of the Backrooms themselves and despite the fact that this was all generated on a computer it does give off the illusion of being genuine. But a lot of what gives The Backrooms its charm is that it can be digested in almost any order.
There is a chronological order of events, but the videos could be watched in any order to be pieced together at the end. I followed the IMDb page for episode listings to watch them in the order of release, and Kane Pixels has a chronological playlist on his Youtube channel, but honestly you can approach this in any manner you like and piece the mystery together as you go. There’s a lot of hidden messages in the videos which simply beg for re-watching, frame by frame analysis, and a lot of googling. It’s interactive, and it feels like you’re a detective watching this stuff back and trying to make sense of it all.
The Backrooms series may not be available on a mainstream service like Netflix or Prime Video, but it delivers such a tightly crafted and terrifying horror experience that it is worth seeking out. The best part is, it’s all free. Kane Pixels has been signed on to direct a feature length adaptation of The Backrooms with the production studio A24, so I’m sure in the next couple of years we will see these eerie liminal spaces on the big screen, hopefully it won’t lose the low-quality allure of the Youtube series.
If you’re a horror fan then you simply need to check The Backrooms out, they are incredibly well made and it spans so many different types of horror that there’s bound to be something that’ll tickle your fancy, and at only an hour and a half in total it’s hardly a massive commitment.
There is a chronological order of events, but the videos could be watched in any order to be pieced together at the end. I followed the IMDb page for episode listings to watch them in the order of release, and Kane Pixels has a chronological playlist on his Youtube channel, but honestly you can approach this in any manner you like and piece the mystery together as you go. There’s a lot of hidden messages in the videos which simply beg for re-watching, frame by frame analysis, and a lot of googling. It’s interactive, and it feels like you’re a detective watching this stuff back and trying to make sense of it all.
The Backrooms series may not be available on a mainstream service like Netflix or Prime Video, but it delivers such a tightly crafted and terrifying horror experience that it is worth seeking out. The best part is, it’s all free. Kane Pixels has been signed on to direct a feature length adaptation of The Backrooms with the production studio A24, so I’m sure in the next couple of years we will see these eerie liminal spaces on the big screen, hopefully it won’t lose the low-quality allure of the Youtube series.
If you’re a horror fan then you simply need to check The Backrooms out, they are incredibly well made and it spans so many different types of horror that there’s bound to be something that’ll tickle your fancy, and at only an hour and a half in total it’s hardly a massive commitment.