[HN Gopher] 'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic
___________________________________________________________________
'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic
Author : anarbadalov
Score : 158 points
Date : 2026-04-02 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future
| humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that
| have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at
| the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office
| spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they
| eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know
| these environments through the ominous "Backrooms" or the goofy
| hijinks of "The Office"?
| WarmWash wrote:
| Are dungeons just medieval backrooms?
| stackghost wrote:
| Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy
| but, no.
|
| "Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the
| geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if
| you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the
| normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused
| rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| "Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant
| to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms
| and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios
| or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the
| backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so
| otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets
| and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.)
| The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in
| part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just
| around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings.
| Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem.
| It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire
| basis of The Stanley Parable.
|
| I think we _can_ argue that real world places that inspired
| our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the
| creepy basement hallways that connected staff /crew
| (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above.
| The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop
| culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were
| also often staging grounds for much more boring household
| logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to
| conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
| stackghost wrote:
| >"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames
|
| It's where the concept originated.
| breezeTrowel wrote:
| The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole
| thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a
| photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons
| created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can
| see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo .
| The video game adaptations all came later.
|
| Wikipedia has a good writeup here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
| krapp wrote:
| I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have
| - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office
| or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a
| public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless
| maze of doors that lead nowhere.
|
| The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the
| human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it
| into a meme.
| breezeTrowel wrote:
| Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia
| entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal
| space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction,
| dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The
| Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very
| popular very quickly.
| stackghost wrote:
| >The concept did not originate in videogames.
|
| Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor
| that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds.
| The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme
| doesn't mention video games but that particular post is
| not the origin of the backrooms concept.
|
| There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing
| in games that that predate that 4chan post by several
| years
| carabiner wrote:
| 90% of modern memes, internet culture, and therefore a
| huge proportion of current pop culture, originated on
| 4chan.
| albedoa wrote:
| It is not where the concept originated.
| taeric wrote:
| This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that
| ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before.
| Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people
| finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe.
|
| How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own?
| Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way."
| Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine
| going into a magical world.
| whateveracct wrote:
| The Backrooms have always reminded me of House of Leaves and the
| Navidson Record within specifically. (I think maybe that's a
| deliberate influence in the lore?)
|
| So I like how the movie's plot seems to be similar as well.
| endymion-light wrote:
| I think there's a bit of a convergent evolution
|
| House Of Leaves is similiar to Backrooms in a way - they
| represent the same kinds of horror but it's more like how Weird
| Fiction converged and inspired in the same way. There's a level
| of early slenderman there as well (in terms of a lot of the
| early slenderman horror being more about the horror of dreaming
| this entity into the real)
|
| I'd argue SCP Foundation is probably one of the main initial
| examples of internet occult, the Backrooms have more in common
| with a few SCPs.
|
| To go wider there's probably a convergent horror - It's the
| classic aspect of horror stories of the age represent
| subliminal fears of the age (e.g, bloodsucking vampires mean
| very different things across the past thousand years). I think
| liminal horror is a representation of a lot of our fears, so
| multiple different effective horrors have converged on these
| feelings of discomfort with spaces.
|
| I'm not really smart enough to know what it means - probably
| something about modern society dissassociating people from the
| space, but don't know much more.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > I'm not really smart enough to know what it means -
| probably something about modern society dissassociating
| people from the space, but don't know much more.
|
| I think it has something to do with the controlled comfort of
| modern life. And how even a small disruption can become
| unsettling.
|
| Like in HoL, the most chilling scene isn't anything that
| happens beyond the door imo. It's when the book falls because
| the house changed size ever so slightly. I think the classic
| haunted house trope is at play there too - home is comfort
| but those stories frequently involve a move, which is
| inherently stressful. I remember when I bought my
| house..every new noise or small change was disturbing.
| Potentially a hidden horror lurking in the house (like a
| water leak).
| nihakue wrote:
| House Of Leaves was published in 2000 and Backrooms
| originates (as far as I can tell) from like 2011? Not that
| it's impossible that the ideas developed independently, but
| given how big a cult hit House of Leaves was I'd be very
| surprised if there wasn't some direct lineage. Not trying to
| gatekeep, it's just that the Backroom trailer was giving me
| _really distinct_ HoL vibes. I wonder if that's just the film
| mixing in ideas that weren't necessarily present in the
| original copypasta.
|
| _edit_ : Another thing I will say is that I've noticed both
| HoL and Backrooms seem to act like a kind of shibboleth for a
| particular demographic (not even really the same demographic)
| and you often see this in how people write/talk about both. I
| think it maybe stems from how dense/unapproachable the two
| works are, how innocuous they seem on the surface such that
| you really have to sink some effort to get at them.
| SaberTail wrote:
| I said to a few friends that the recent trailer felt like
| it could be for a House of Leaves movie. Different overall
| setting, but the "found footage" aspects, and the narrative
| over it, felt like they could be right out of the Navidson
| Record.
|
| I don't have any real proof for this, but it feels like
| House of Leaves inspired a lot of the people making "found
| footage" and "creepypasta" stuff one the internet in the
| 2000s and early 2010s (SCP, Marble Hornets, Slender Man),
| and then that stuff came together to inspire the Backrooms.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I was thinking of _House of Leaves_ reading the other comments
| here, mostly because something like an infinitely long tunnel
| to nowhere hidden in the walls of your house would actually be
| scary to me, whereas normally occupied spaces being empty and
| long winding indoor hallways are far more mundane. My wife has
| gotten into backrooms lore quite a bit in the past few years
| and it 's always struck me as a strange thing to find eery.
| I've been an early morning runner for much of my life, worked
| overnight shifts at a theme park, closing at a mall, been in
| the tunnels beneath Disneyland and downtown Dallas. Worked in
| stores that hadn't opened yet and had nothing in them. There
| was nothing scary or eery about any of those things. It seems
| like an effect of the photographs and presentation more than
| the reality of the physical places. House of Leaves is scary
| specifically because it can't be real. Another example is
| something like the wormhole to 1987 and 1954 at the end of a
| cave in _Dark_. Yeah, that 's scary, because nothing like that
| exists and you have no idea what to expect going into it.
|
| Ironically enough, I first read this book when I worked at
| Disneyland, at an attraction with tunnel access, that no longer
| exists, and I no longer have the book because I loaned it to a
| girl I worked with there who never gave it back. She and I hung
| out in those tunnels during breaks.
|
| Also interesting to me seeing other responses about found
| footage, given the guy who first recommended this book to me
| was a friend from college who covered his dorm room in bizarre
| free-form prose that switched between play style and novel
| style during a manic episode, then tore it all down later, set
| it on fire, and pieced together what survived as the strangest
| pseudo-poetry that somehow still had a lot of real words in it,
| kind of nature's "found poem." This book was probably written
| around the same time _Blair Witch Project_ first came out and
| this guy also lived next to the real Greenway Trail in
| Burkittsville, which was also not particularly scary to see in
| person. I kind of doubt that was really the first example of a
| found footage film but it 's the first I'm aware of. Wikipedia
| is saying _The Connection_ from 1961 is the first.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of
| those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever
| been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
|
| I've worked in a place like this that was well past its prime and
| though uncanny, it's certainly not creepy.
|
| The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors simply
| doesn't hold up when you're actually in a space like this, but
| only works if you've only ever seen these kinds of spaces from a
| still photograph on the internet (which is why the audience for
| this sort of thing is too young to have ever experienced it
| themselves).
|
| Yes, it looks exactly like the stifling, sprawling suburban
| office complex I once worked in, but then I also remember the
| feeling of walking out the exit into a beautiful spring day.
|
| For me, the feeling these "back rooms" evokes is more akin to
| being in school waiting for the bell to ring so you can go
| outside and play.
|
| It's strange when your own mundane experiences are fodder for a
| new generation's horror fiction. Sort of takes the bite away from
| it.
| siavosh wrote:
| I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in
| my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites
| like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive.
| I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got.
| Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to
| get some fresh air and natural light.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > I've worked in a place like this that was well past its prime
| and though uncanny, it's certainly not creepy.
|
| That's kinda more what the german concept of "unheimlich" is
| like. Even though it usually gets translated to English as
| "uncanny", it's more literally "un-homelike", when the familiar
| (home) turns unfamiliar (un-homelike) in an unexpected way. A
| common idea in that would be something like the discovery of a
| hidden room in your house, especially in some weird non-
| euclidean way ("it's bigger on the inside" for example, like a
| tardis).
| layer8 wrote:
| "Eerie" would be a good translation in the quoted context.
| saltcured wrote:
| I think this whole genre flirts with Capgras Syndrome, the
| basic identity perception malfunction behind concepts like
| changelings and many other "exact duplicates" or "tampering"
| scenarios which have malice as an optional component.
|
| I think it is something that people are aware of, perhaps
| subconsciously, from cultural exposure. But, I also think
| many (most?) people have at least some personal experience of
| a similar sort. Not the full-blown delusional state, but an
| anxious moment of having feelings of recognition or safety
| turn inside-out as they realize things are not as they first
| appeared.
| tinyplanets wrote:
| I disagree. I too have worked in these environments. As
| mentioned in the article, and in numerous other references
| about the Backrooms - the creepiness stems partially from the
| "liminal" feeling of walking around large, man-made spaces that
| are totally empty. Think walking around a shopping mall after
| hours. I had several odd jobs before I was in college where I
| had to work overnight shifts, sweeping the floors of large
| department stores. That feeling of "empty watchfullness" was
| definitely a thing, and it's captured well by a lot of the
| Backrooms content.
|
| The other aspect of "creepiness" stems from the idea that the
| Backrooms represent an endless, malevolent labyrinth. One of
| the scarier aspects of being trapped in the Backrooms (for me)
| is that you would just wander around until you died for lack of
| water and food, in a bland corporate office corridor with
| fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
| palmotea wrote:
| I've worked in these environments too, and I think the modern
| "open" office without assigned desks give a far greater
| creepy "liminal" feeling that old suburban cube farms.
|
| When you have assigned desks, people personalize their
| spaces. It feels lived in (at least a bit). A more
| contemporary open office feels more liminal, even when it's
| full of people. And after hours it's even worse: there's no
| trace of human habitation.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Most people haven't been in an abandoned mansion, abandoned
| mental asylum or abandoned mall either, but they've seen enough
| from people who have to get the idea. Never mind the urbexers
| bringing them footage of hidden infrastructure.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > I don't really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of
| those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have
| ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
|
| I developed a fondness for 1970s interior decor/styling even
| though I was born in 1988 because most of the places in my
| town, such as the library, were last renovated during that
| time.
|
| Also, many people in my life, such as uncles & aunts, were
| still living in the homes they purchased in the 1970s and some
| design choices just can't be easily/cheaply changed.
|
| I grew up within and around a ghost of 1970s architecture and
| design. As an adult I wound up moving into a suburb built in
| 1968 for this reason.
|
| It's less nostalgia and more like a vague sense of familiarity
| that you can only scratch the surface of in your mind.
| wishfish wrote:
| Day vs. Night are what makes the difference. The sprawling
| suburban office complex from the 70s was, like you said, just
| boring and a bit oppressive during the day. At night though, a
| sea of cubicles. Endless hallways. Nothing but blackness
| outside the windows. Lights are all on motion detectors so only
| your area is lit. And only lit for a time. Eventually you'd
| have to stand up to make the lights switch back on. And when
| you do, you look over the fields of cubes to see a shadowy
| figure slowly slump its way across the room. Headed vaguely in
| your direction but never quite reaching you. You think it's
| Mark from Accounting, but you'll never know for certain.
|
| For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon.
| The horror, or unsettling feeling, one gets from seeing a place
| at night that's usually only seen in the day. Had that
| constantly as a kid when going to school at night for
| performances or teacher meetings. A place bright and loud
| that's now quiet and dark. You know where everything is, but it
| all seems like it's just an inch or two out of place.
| HauntingPin wrote:
| I agree, it's the night-time that makes places, particularly
| urban ones unnerving and/or creepy. I once worked as a
| courier, which sometimes involved delivering things to stores
| or weird ass storage buildings in the middle of the night. I
| hated those night-time deliveries. Even worse when I had to
| go through rooms with mannequins, made my skin crawl.
| alex_c wrote:
| >For me, I've always called it the "school at night"
| phenomenon.
|
| It's funny, I've always loved that kind of environment. Quiet
| high school hallways after everyone's left, empty university
| buildings late at night, offices after hours, even empty
| offices that haven't been moved into yet. For me it evokes
| feelings associated more with watching a rainy day from
| inside, or lofi-girl with headphones studying.
|
| I understand why it can evoke horror or unsettling feelings
| for people, but for me the first word that comes to mind is
| just "peaceful".
|
| Even the environments in the Backrooms trailer - minus the
| obvious horror elements - look like they would be a lot of
| fun to explore!
| bigbuppo wrote:
| The smell of old cigarettes, stale coffee, Certs, and urinal
| cakes wafting through the air.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The illusion of infinitely twisting, identical corridors
| simply doesn't hold up when you're actually in a space like
| this, but only works if you've only ever seen these kinds of
| spaces from a still photograph on the internet (which is why
| the audience for this sort of thing is too young to have ever
| experienced it themselves)._
|
| I'm not sure if that's true. I've definitely been to places
| that feel intentionally confusing; the basement of my college,
| several hospitals, etc. Where you walk between two buildings,
| and suddenly go from Floor 4 to Floor 6, or where you're sure
| you entered facing north, but after making three right-hand
| turns, you exit a building facing south.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I never got really super into this subculture thing, or
| whatever it is, but I vaguely recall skimming things like a
| subreddit devoted to it, ages ago. I want to say when it was
| "starting" but then nothing ever really starts or ends.
| Definitely Pre-Covid though. Anyway, IIRC the focus was not on
| the horror, maybe a slight unease, but mostly the uncanniness.
|
| I think this is just how things evolve. Creepy is a very strong
| sentiment that is somewhat aligned with uncanny, so it isn't
| that surprising to see uncanny collapse into it over time.
|
| But having spent a lot of time in empty classrooms,
| auditoriums, and hallways, waiting for students to show up,
| it's more of a nostalgic feeling to me.
| layer8 wrote:
| Feelings of nostalgia can be evoked by things you never
| experienced first-hand, and that were before your time. It's
| not uncommon. There's also a connection to melancholy that I
| can't quite find the right words for.
| munificent wrote:
| _> it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing
| are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone
| worked in one._
|
| My teenage daughter is really into this genre but has never
| actually been in a mostly abandoned 90s mall or fluorescent-lit
| business park office space herself.
|
| But don't underestimate how much history bleeds forwards in
| time in various bits of cultural ephemera that can still be
| absorbed by younger people. She doesn't have much first-had
| experience with spaces with this vibe, but there is ample
| second-hand media of it and enough bits and pieces of it still
| in the real world for it to be both somewhat familiar and
| enticingly exotic to her.
| calf wrote:
| "Memoryless" nostalgia is a real effect, and the word for it is
| anemoia:
|
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/anemoia-nostalgi...
|
| I watched the film Asteroid City last night, and the setting
| gave me this exact emotion.
| colordrops wrote:
| Naw, I'm older and the reason I'm into this sort of thing is
| that I have nostalgia about being in these sorts of spaces as a
| young child.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I'm old enough to have been in spaces like that, but the
| aesthetic illusion still works for me if I look at an image
| that is supposed to depict one.
|
| Also, the infinite corridors is only part of the appeal. There
| are other ways in which such spaces can become eerie. I
| remember how I used to often be the only person still working
| in an open floor plan office in the evening. There was no sense
| of infinite corridors, but the dimness with one area alone
| illuminated by motion-detected light was spooky, and so were
| the sounds of the HVAC system and of doors and elevators
| somewhere in a different part of the building. There was also
| an uncanny empty feeling of seeing all the chairs and desks
| with no humans at them.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Even a regular, non-sprawling office building is creepy as fuck
| when you're the only one in it, no matter the time of day.
| fer wrote:
| Where I grew up, it happened to me with (primary/middle/high)
| schools.
|
| During the 60s and 70s, in order to accommodate baby boomers,
| new buildings were built on existing school grounds, and while
| they were not cookie cutter copies of each other, they followed
| the same architectural and civil engineering principles:
| identical ceiling height, same fixtures, same walls, same
| classroom door arches, same bathroom stalls, toilets, similar
| fire exit paths, identical heavy steel and steel wired glass
| external doors, staircase layouts...
|
| But given every location had its own available surface and
| urban/terrain/attendance needs, they were anywhere from 1 to 4
| floors, straight corridors, or in L, or rectangular with inner
| courtyard, with and without basement, and overall significant
| practical deviations from some common standard blueprint
| (though I never found the common denominator) but keeping
| everything else the same. It was extremely eerie and
| disorienting visiting a different school, or getting used to
| another school when you moved, especially after hours when
| they're empty.
|
| It's probably similar to the khrushchyovki/stalinki residential
| buildings in post-Soviet countries, though I've only visited
| them well after the collapse and they've evolved on their own.
| Meanwhile these schools I mention, look actually frozen in
| time.
| frmersdog wrote:
| I dunno about that. At a previous job, we temporarily relocated
| to a building that featured a series of identical classrooms
| that were accessible by connecting doors in the back (it was
| really one long room with heavy dividers that did a good job of
| looking like regular walls).
|
| You could look from one end to the other, seeing a series of
| doorways, and then walk through them all; every time I walked
| from one room to another, by brain would do a little power
| cycle as it tried to deal with the sensation of having walked
| into the room I'd just exited.
|
| The deeper-in I got, the more I couldn't shake the feeling that
| something was "off" about the whole set-up; there were windows,
| but looking out them, the view felt... fake? It's hard to
| describe.
|
| This was a few years after SCP became popular, but before the
| Backrooms - which was why I immediately understood the appeal.
| squeedles wrote:
| Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View
| / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It
| captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which
| seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is
| all about.
|
| On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he
| puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and
| invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has
| snuck around where they really shouldn't be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View
| lxgr wrote:
| I can only second this. I personally got more out of "The
| Oldest View" than I did out of maybe half of all commercial
| shows I recently watched, and I consider myself pretty picky.
|
| At a meta level, there's something amazing about fiction that
| feels like it ought to be constrained in what it can do by its
| budget/production capabilities and then constantly surprises
| you in execution.
| amiga386 wrote:
| The article has a screenshot of the Stanley Parable, but misses
| an opportunity to reference _Control_ (2019) which is much more
| directly influenced by the "liminal space" concept, and imagines
| a non-euclidian space called _The Oldest House_ at 34 Thomas
| Street (a reference to the brutalist, windowless AT &T Long Lines
| skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, New York City).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F74LLDhAhhI
|
| It also very much ties in with the shared SCP universe, which
| itself has a number of Backrooms-like anomalies, such as SCP-3008
| (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008), which is _like_ a
| typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty passages run to infinity.
| thunderfork wrote:
| The Stanley Parable definitely plays with non-euclidean and
| liminal spaces - the room in the screenshot being one such
| example.
| amiga386 wrote:
| It does, but its main focus is ludonarrative dissonance,
| which is why _Control_ would be a better example (along with
| games that specifically invoke Backrooms lore, like POOLS)
| cestith wrote:
| I was actually a little surprised there was no mention of
| _Escape the Backrooms_ , although I suppose _The Stanley
| Parable_ is a better-known game.
| taeric wrote:
| Reminds me how much fun Superliminal was. Might have to get
| that another play through. :D
| busfahrer wrote:
| > which is like a typical IKEA, except its maze of twisty
| passages run to infinity.
|
| For the 4 people on HN who don't know, "maze of twisty
| passages" is a reference to the this (the?) text adventure
| game:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
| tsumnia wrote:
| I mean if we're trying to source where "liminal space" started,
| I'd like to add Portal and Portal 2 into the mix. It didn't
| have the surreal, creepy components because jump scare horror
| games like Five Nights hadn't been popularized yet but the
| entire second area of Portal 2 where you're introduced to Cave
| Johnson and the older Aperture Science HQ is very much
| "liminal".
|
| If we want to go _deeper_ , then I really think its
| Earthbound's absurdist take on childhood adventures with
| cultists, ghosts, dreamscapes, etc. but I think at that point I
| might as well say dice games influenced things.
| frmersdog wrote:
| I don't think it's too far to include Earthbound. After all,
| You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas' attack!
| hoherd wrote:
| Speaking of relevant games, there's also a Roblox game that my
| son has been into called Backrooms With Guns, and now I
| understand it a lot more.
|
| https://en.namu.wiki/w/The%20Backrooms%20With%20Guns
|
| I see others have mentioned Superliminal too, which was great.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| I am also going to call out House of Leaves by Mark Z.
| Danielewski. It's a really interesting book that explores a
| house that is slightly larger on the inside than the outside.
| It explores a lot of liminal spaces and has a really
| interesting format in print.
| nlawalker wrote:
| _> House of Leaves_
|
| And then from there back to another game: MyHouse.wad,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyHouse.wad
| MisterTea wrote:
| Haven't played that yet though I heard it really helps if
| you are fan of the series and read the books as the game
| will make more sense that way.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Interestingly, this video analysis of Control
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VII76R36GWw) claims Remedy
| was inspired by House of Leaves, and notes the similarity
| between "Ash Tree Lane" where the House of Leaves is set, and
| the "Ash Tray Maze" in Control.
|
| Just seeing a few images of the book's pages in this video,
| yeah it seems like a really interesting book that plays with
| the novel format directly.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| While the Backrooms movie trailer does make it look interesting,
| "Backrooms" / liminal horror / Skinamarink all have the same
| effect on me: nothing. I figure the split of people who find it
| scary vs those that don't is people who can "unscare" themselves.
|
| Like when I go into my basement at night, I can give myself the
| scare of "what if someone's watching ..." then go "nah" and I'm
| fine.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| that's definitely how they get you.
| wincy wrote:
| I think it's degrees, can you open a door halfway and stick
| your hand into a dark room without feeling creeped out? What if
| instead that liminal space is the temple in Indiana Jones and
| you've seen big spiders crawling around? It's a fear of the
| unknown and we're all tuned a little differently, I think we
| can all evoke this feeling it just takes more or less depending
| on the person and how much knowledge you have about the
| environment.
|
| I worked at a Target in an old mall and there was a corporate
| office in the basement that had been abandoned years before due
| to black mold. I was responsible for doing a once a week check,
| just making sure nobody had been down there, that place majorly
| creeped me out even though I had the key and had a high degree
| of confidence nobody else was going to be down there. Also
| "black mold" evokes an image of a creeping horror even though
| rationally I know just going down there once a week isn't going
| to give me some horrible respiratory illness.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's even meant to be scary. I think of the
| Backrooms as closer to the world of Piranesi, or the project
| that took a bunch of virtual-tours of apartments for rent, and
| aggregrated them all into a single mega-building.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| The Backrooms and Skinamarink are both classified as horror.
| lxgr wrote:
| But can you "un-un-scare" yourself to enjoy liminal space
| horror?
| mpalmer wrote:
| I grew up in the 90s.
|
| "Backrooms" and liminal spaces take me back to my early
| nightmares/kid fears, or the way they've stuck in my memory, at
| least.
|
| I have the same sort of memory reaction/association with
| chillwave/vaporwave, in part because it's chopped and screwed
| in a way that suggests memories of vibes.
|
| The teaser trailer narration mentions the spaces as something
| the place itself is remembering, and misremembering, and that
| actually made me sit up and listen, because maybe this is an
| existential Internet horror film which actually gets the
| existentialism right!
|
| Totally get why it wouldn't click with some people, but man, it
| does with me.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Arma Reforger military simulation game modders implemented
| backrooms with all of their psychological horror perfectly
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLaq-5QqIYk
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Dreams I've had (since a late teenager) have often taken place in
| some kind of architecture with infinite rooms, hallways...
|
| I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to
| room... It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing
| this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in
| what I suppose are nightmares(?).
|
| At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the
| reverse is true--that the game I write inspired the nightmares
| (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them
| to my teenage years).
|
| There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find
| myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring
| new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors
| is going to keep me busy.
|
| When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], _that_ caught my
| attention. I 've seen too descriptions of the underground
| portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place
| without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express"
| gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni
| Battista Piranesi [5].
|
| [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/09/...
|
| [2]
| http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA...
|
| [3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-
| kong...
|
| [4] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceri_d%27invenzione
| bitwize wrote:
| For me it's cities--large, empty cities with little, if any,
| foot or vehicular traffic. Typically in the US or Australia and
| laid out accordingly, so not like Kowloon Walled City. But it's
| almost as if they're that way because my brain's "GPU" cannot
| render that many people or cars moving about. Sonetimes in
| these dreams I'm able to "teleport" to an interior location
| where there are people, and I'm fine.
|
| Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15
| years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that
| never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or
| even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed...
|
| For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out
| _Stray_.
| i_c_b wrote:
| I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era
| when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin
| village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger
| realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune).
|
| I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms
| phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly
| amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed,
| reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original
| backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the
| feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection
| has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point
| precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players
| abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed
| to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed
| during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a
| somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of
| course.
|
| Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art
| movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people
| enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our
| side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we
| were all too aware could be easily broken.
| ethanmacavoy48 wrote:
| the akamai access denied page is a perfect, unintentional
| illustration of the topic. getting paged for a single bad regex
| in a WAF config that blocks legit users is its own kind of
| institutional horror
| akeck wrote:
| I feel like the infamous (and NSFW in parts, btw) story "The
| Forgotten Employee" is a proto-example of this "Institutional
| Gothic" genre.
|
| https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
| Lammy wrote:
| >More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces,
| sans humanity.
|
| >suggests a humanity at the brink of becoming digital objects
| themselves.
|
| >But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future
| humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that
| have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at
| the turn of the 20th century.
|
| Relevant, and as spoiler-free as I can make it: I cannot give a
| stronger recommendation to play NieR and NieR:Automata.
| traderj0e wrote:
| The custom AssaultCube maps are very liminal
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