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The Backrooms Wiki

daytenrose.substack.com

40 pointssurprisetalk71 comments

Kane Pixels[0] is the most popular Backrooms creator by a wide margin[1], and the recipient of that A24 movie deal.

His Backrooms canon is completely separate from The Backrooms Wiki canon. It has none of the prescribed "levels", or any other of the Wiki's infinite proliferation of boring bullshit. It's purely descended from the original 4chan post[2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=backrooms

[2] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/495/035/a5a...

From all the backrooms channels this one is my second if not most favorite: https://youtube.com/@lostinthehyperverse - there’s something nostalgic to it rather than action and it focuses less on an actual entity horror.

(Note that the channel contains pre-backrooms videos, you probably want to start with 1997 in the name.)

Endless wiki spam nonsense aside, I think the biggest contrast between Kane Pixels' stuff and most other Backrooms-derived content is that he leans hard into the weird cosmic horror aspect and surrounding interactions with the world (and black comedy absurdity/tragedy to go with it, like a government contractor proposal to retrofit the Backrooms as an infinite housing complex), rather than just 'spooky endless office with squiggly monsters'.

After Kane Pixel, I recommend Return to Render, whose humour excellently highlights the absurdist undercurrent in the foundations of the Backrooms' lore.

https://www.youtube.com/@ReturnToRender

That guy is crazy good. Super creepy!

Mostly agree with the author. I've always found the fundamental setting of The Backrooms to make for some good liminal horror. Simple, but spooky. I don't really see the appeal of the 100s of levels and the interconnectedness of it and all that. I think some people like to see it as some kind of a 'game'

Maybe I'm just old, but at least I'm not like another commenter here...

I have a working theory that many backrooms videos are made by people learning blender and stuff for school. It’s a great genre to do a demo reel on. You can make your set as complex as you want and show off some weird new thing you came up with.

I read it, but I’m no wiser. This made zero sense to me.

Ditto. What am I supposed to make of this:

> This time, I found a level called The Crystal Fields (Level 894). It consists of 300,000 square miles of waving emerald grass dotted by modern windmills, with blue crystal growths spawning throughout. It’s a place of calm, barring the threat of Krystalrs. What are Krystalrs? Giant crystal spiders that burrow underground and cause hallucinations. Also an orb named Jason lives here.

Are the bland writings of 12 year olds noteworthy now? It’s a wiki of bad fiction? As far as I can there’s there’s not even a story. Is it supposed to be scary? And now there’s a movie?

That it’s bad is indeed the authors point:

> A common axiom about horror movies is that they become less scary when you see the monster, when it stops lurking and becomes a presence on the screen. This is so far beyond that. The Backrooms Wiki not only shows us the monster, but cages it and transports it to a medical campus where you, the reader, are invited to participate in its dissection, as well as a week-long symposium detailing its anatomy. With footnotes from the writer detailing its creation. It’s an absurd degree of telling, not showing.

If something is purposefully bad in order to prove some ironic meta narrative point, it’s just bad.

It's increasingly recursive, usually low-quality fanfiction of the original one-off post describing the Backrooms as a setting as a spooky endless office interior with undetailed monsters in it.

Kinda similar to the SCP where a novel concept is caught by the mainstream and then done to death.

There are some pretty wonderful SCP stories. I'm a fan of the anti-meme stories, infinite Ikea, and a few others.

Same, it made zero sense to me. In an age of housing and energy crisis we have huge buildings with lights on for no reason whatsoever? I can't fathom that. So it has to be fiction, and then I think of MUDs, Mystic Quest, WoW, and Elvira. Scary can be part of end of repetition. Also, repetition in gaming is a means to deal with lack of [other] content.

In non-fiction that sound you hear in an empty building is probably some homeless person, a prisoner, sex slave, or all three: you ended up in a SM basement. The probability of that is near zero, so shrug it off as fiction.

The beauty of fiction is: if you don't like it, if you don't get it, if it gives you inspiration to something competely different -- you are free to do so. Whereas with non-fiction, reality and facts (or laws) may haunt you into oblivion. E.g. paralysis on judgment day.

@dang

Need to bugfix comments on Android Firefox:

-While not logged in, write a comment,

-Press "add comment,"

-Go "Oh shit!" and press back to go back to the text box (to copy contents),

-See text box is now empty, so you press Forward in the browser to maybe recover by logging in,

-Noope! Browser requests to resend data, hangs and never loads (I presume this is being filtered serverside because a second POST looks funny),

-Now screwed with no original comment text

Expected behavior:

-The original comment is there when I first press back, AND/OR

-The server accepts the second POST when I press forward, and Firefox prompts to resend the data for the 'expired' page.

Thank you! :^)

hn@ycombinator.com gets you fairly quick replies :)

[+++ But as a general rule—which you are free to steal—I don’t like to align with any group described as “purist!” +++]

A really terrible redditor heuristic.

If you want a real backrooms story, which sadly ends in a death - https://youtu.be/sx14YtiLFIM?t=1461

I've been in similar architecture to the story and have never been in anything like it again. This wasn't a simple, old person lost in a normal place.

I have a recurring dream about it, it was so different. Although I urban explore I was just looking for a exit, and I guess because I urban explore I didn't notice the signs so I suddenly went from bright shops to a dark deserted maze.

Even before hearing this story, I used to religiously check that any door I entered while straying from the beaten path (urbex, or simply exploring infrastructure not meant for the public) wouldn't lock behind me. I've stopped myself from entering a stairwell a few times because I wasn't sure if there'd be another exit I could take. Occasionally, if I'm feeling daring, I'll pull out one of the blank plastic cards from my wallet and jam the door latch with it, then keep going.

> ... any door ... wouldn't lock behind me.

You are not alone with that precaution. Ages ago, before plastic gift cards were ubiquitous, I used to quest/urbex with shims of thin aluminum trimmed to door jamb size (making them harder to detect).

The buddy system also was used - "You stay on this side, I'll go through and test it can get opened from the other side."

Extremely useful when entering campus/city steam tunnels that may not have another good door for hundreds of meters (the tunnels were secured to prevent access to the structures they connected).

I must confess I couldn't make it beyond maybe the first two minutes. I know there's a difference between "telling the news" and "telling a story", but then there's also "get to the point" which this video (IMO) doesn't.

For those with less patience the story of Bernard Gore is told in many articles including this one:

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/nightmare-in-wes...

> I must confess I couldn't make it beyond maybe the first two minutes

About 30 seconds for me because I can't watch talking heads (especially that close to camera) which have jump cuts between sentences. If you can't read it all smoothly in one go, don't appear on camera!

(I appreciate this is a niche complaint)

It’s MrBallen, right?

Ofc it’s him.

Please note that these stories are recreational and may contain parts that aren’t exactly real. Also real-based stories get mixed a lot with just horrors without explicit notice. Not saying that he’s intentionally tricky with it, but reality and fact-checking is not the selling point of this channel either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com