The Backrooms Viral Marketing Noclips Into An Earlier Era

Last month, people started noticing a an advertisement for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire popping up across the internet, advertising amazing deals on furniture. The only indication this wasn’t a low-budget, grainy commercial for a local furniture store is an A24 logo that pops up in the lower right corner of the spot towards the tail end of its run. This video kicked off the viral marketing campaign for the studio’s upcoming film The Backrooms, which releases this coming Friday. And over the past few weeks, the campaign has offered a number of chances for fans to “noclip” into the film’s world.

The Quick Backstory For The Backrooms

The Backrooms started its life as a creepy internet photograph of unknown provenance. The image depicts a seemingly abandoned retail space with yellowed wallpaper and carpeted flooring lit by the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights. And for years, the photograph was passed around message boards without context as shorthand for “creepy liminal spaces”.

Eventually, the image would be posted to 4chan with the accompanying text, creating a basic vocabulary for The Backrooms:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you

A number of creators would return to this concept, but Kane Parsons (posting under Kane Pixels) in particular went on to create a series of videos expanding on the concept that would help define the aesthetic and rules of the world for fans. In this interpretation, The Backrooms is a parallel dimension filled with a seemingly endless maze of hallways and corridors, dotted with “Null Zones” that serve as semi-permeable barriers to clip in and out of the real world. The rules of time and space don’t behave the same in the Backrooms, and objects flowing through the Backrooms might reappear in our world at incongruous times.

According to Parsons’ interpretation, an organization known as the Async Research Institute discovered how to access The Backrooms decades ago. Over the years, the company sent employees in hazmat suits to explore the spaces, in much the same way the SCP Foundation uses Class-D personnel to research otherworldly dangers. Getting lost in the liminal spaces isn’t the only threat to these employees, as a number of dangerous lifeforms stalk the hallways of the Backrooms, including a bacterial entity often referred to as “The Lifeform”.

Finding the Backrooms, and the Move to the Silver Screen

While the original Backrooms photograph went unidentified for years, lost media fans gradually pieced together the photograph’s history, which appears to have been incorporated into the film itself. And that story starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at 807 Oregon Street. Between 1958 – 1994, the address was home to Rohner’s Furniture, a small business that was a fixture in the town since as early as 1928. Rohner’s abandoned their furniture business in 1994 and the building was acquired by Hobbytown USA in 2003, when the company started blogging about their renovations efforts. One of those progress photos was the now iconic Backrooms photo. Recently, the Oshkosh Public Library created a video going through their own archives to help flesh out this story.

And so, when A24 partnered with Kane Parsons to turn his take on the Backrooms into a feature length film, he drew upon the photograph’s newly resurfaced provenance to place the film’s Null Zone bridge to the Backrooms inside Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture business. Transplanted from Oshkosh to San Jose California, the adaptation is nonetheless paying homage to the image’s history…a theme that comes up quite a bit, in the viral marketing campaign to follow.

The Viral Marketing Begins: Faxed Flyers and BBS Servers

A curious detail you might have picked up on from the Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire advertisement mentioned at the start of this article is that the icon number next to the phone number wasn’t a normal telephone. Instead, it was the icon for a fax machine. Dialing up the number with a fax machine printed out a flyer for The Backrooms‘ furniture store, dated May 17th, 1990, along with instructions to the store’s exact cross streets.

The address actually exists, and a few players took pilgrimages to the location to see if there was anything there. Somewhat fittingly, all they found was an abandoned building that used to be a Spirit Halloween. But at least at first, this particular trail seems to have been abandoned.

However, a few weeks later, the A24 store released a t-shirt for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire featuring the same fax number. And after checking a second time, fans realized that the message printout changed to an advertisement for the South Bay Bulletin Board. The message, now dated May 18th, 1990, provided yet another number to call.

This second number led to an automated recording explaining that the South Bay bulletin board has been down since 1991, but an archived version could be found at 408bbsarchive.net. Just as the initial furniture ad referenced the Backrooms origin story as a renovated furniture store, this abandoned archived bulletin board quite literally called back to the image’s history of floating around message boards as creepypasta. And again, the fandom hit a dead-end, as the archived page only gave fans the chance to enter their contact information.

The Bulletin Board Expands, Tying in South Bay History to the Backrooms

Fans didn’t have to wait too long, however, as the 408 BBS Archive messaged registrants letting them know they were approved for access to the original message boards and directory. Some of the messages contained within provided hints about objects that “noclipped” into the Backrooms. Trash is popping up in the Fremont parking lot, and it’s attracting seagulls. A concerned citizen reported the repeated disappearance of a local stop sign. There’s even an invitation to a meeting at the Santa Clara City Hall that makes passing reference to “Reverchon Ventures”, an easter egg for Parsons’ other YouTube series, The Oldest View.

The centerpiece of the BBS update, however, was the events schedule for Recycle Bookstore, where Dr Mary Kline has a signing for her new book The Window Within scheduled. Recycle Bookstore still exists, BBS event listing references its old location, as that location was vacated in 1998.

Numerous hints have been made that Dr Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve) will be significant to the film, including a freeze-frame image of her book inserted into the film’s first trailer.

Backrooms Popups, Zines, and Async Null Zones (Oh My!)

A slightly more actionable discovery from the revised BBS site are two .TXT files, listed in the site directory: enter.txt, and access.txt. The former file became available with the site’s refresh, providing a link to enter.backrooms.mov, with no further context. The link led to a registration site for a Los Angeles area popup where fans could explore an immersive popup for the film. Shortly after, access.txt encouraged fans to buy tickets for the film at backrooms.mov, with the chance to purchase an exclusive “local 408” hat as a reward for using the secret link.

The special hat isn’t the only exclusive Backrooms merch on offer, as AAA24 members will be receiving The Yellow Wallpaper Zine, an A24 zine that hints it will feature a “surprise you’ll get to piece together”. There have even been reports of people dressed up in Async hazmat suits, marking up walls with tape tape to indicate the presence of Null Zones. The most recent of these sightings even featured another famous liminal space, photographed in 2019. In the video, an Async employee is taping up a wall at the real world location digitally recreated in Kane Parsons’ first Backrooms upload.

Hearkening Back to An Earlier Era in More Ways Than One

The viral campaign for The Backrooms has gone to great lengths to pay homage to the history of its source material, as well as the aesthetic of the time we’re noclipping into. Referencing the original photograph, The Backrooms promotions center around a struggling furniture store in the 1990s. As a nod to the photograph’s initial spread, fans are asked to explore an archived BBS server. And leaning in on the ephemeral nature of the internet, practically every location referenced has changed. The address for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire might have been intended to point towards a Spirit Halloween. The bookstore featured in the BBS moved locations is now a cannoli catering company. Even the fax number itself has changed its output.

But the campaign also hearkens back to an earlier era of viral marketing. The Backrooms may not have used its promotional efforts to tell its own narrative, but it did invite fans to explore the aesthetic and world of the film while maintaining an in-universe facade. We’ve seen this quite a few times in the past…from the time Prometheus teased its film in 2012 by having Peter Weyland deliver a TED Talk in the far future that was 2023. And we’ve seen it when Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hid paintings from the film around the world. Both of these campaigns happened during the peak of MovieViral.com‘s operations, which focused just as much on campaigns looking to slightly extend the world of their films as ones looking to make full-blown alternate reality games.

And it seems like, at least in horror, we’re starting to see a resurgence of this type of marketing campaign, ranging from Undertone‘s narrative puzzle trail to Exit 8’s hunt for the Smiling Man through NYC subway stations.

And even if projects like this don’t rise to the level of alternate reality game, it’s exciting to see teams blending the line between fiction and reality a little, to help their stories come alive.