Biters it’s been far too long… But I am back once more with a new topic and some personal anecdotes to go with it. The tail end of May a movie of the backrooms came out so what say you biters shall we get lost in the internet’s endless yellow hellscape that is the backrooms?

Now for the uninitiated like myself the backrooms is a piece of digital folklore that went viral from two posts back in 2019. One was this random photo of an emptied out office building; no people, no doors or windows just yellow walls and fluorescent lights. The other was a reply to that post: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality, you’ll end up in the backrooms.” Now the thing about this is the lore is communal there is no one true author or definitive rules so the backrooms are ever growing and ever changing.

When I first started hearing about this I actually just wrote it off and moved on as just another Creepy Pasta or SPC files, it wasn’t “folklore” folklore things like vampires, mothman, or superstition in the vein of breaking mirrors and black cats being unlucky. Come to find out I wasn’t too far off one of the more popular SPC files is SCP‑3008 is the infinite IKEA posted in 2017. It looks like any other store but once you enter and lose sight of the door you become trapped in an endless maze with no start or end.

My skepticism was further ignited when I heard they were making a backrooms movie the whole point of the backrooms is you are alone wandering empty rooms and corridors the “horror” comes from the isolation… What are we going to do for two hours just watch the protagonist aimlessly wander around? Sounds as thrilling as watching paint dry. Then again biters what do I know as it made $300 million globally at the box office, probably helps that it was directed by Kane Parsons the very man who helped the backrooms go viral on YouTube in the first place.

My drying paint joke aside the ideas of the backrooms does actually have some teeth to it. Time for those aforementioned anecdotes because I have some real world experience with this. For a little while thanks to my autism I stayed at a disability center, this building sat on land that had held two different hospitals before it. One from the 1920s and another repurposed in the 1950s before it became the place I knew.

During one of my nights there I wanted a snack from the vending machine, thing was it was on the main floor my dorm room was in the basement. I got my snack no problem but I thought I knew a shortcut back down. Yeah, I got lost in dimly lit empty coridoors of an old medical building in the middle of the night. My anxiety and imagination was running high I kept waiting for some creepy looking doctor with bloody medical scrubs and bone saw to come walking out of the many doorways down there. It was never going to happen but that is where my mind went.

The other thing that came to mind with the backrooms was a short story I had to read in I believe middle school… The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in 1892. The initial plot being a doctor looking to cure his wife’s nervous depression. He does this by locking her in a room under forced bed rest. As you can guess the room has ghastly yellow wallpaper she starts seeing women trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story ends with her driving utterly mad ripping the wallpaper off the wall to free these non existent trapped women.

The imagery stuck with me and still does to this day. The woman with a blank thousand yard stare crawling along the edge of her room following imaginary figures as her shoulder rubs wear-marks into the wall from repeated laps. I can attest to this as well. You see, I had wood paneling in my bedroom and at night I would see disturbing faces in knots and wood grain almost like a Rorschach test.

Now Biters here is the interesting thing, the main character of The Backrooms movie, Clark, finds himself in an inescapable place with yellow walls. He is seeing a therapist for, that’s right, depression.

Kind of funny how one random nondescript photo of an empty room can spark something so creepy and unnerving, with roots that run so deep.

So careful not to noclip from reality and until next time Biters,
James Vaughan