Tag: backrooms

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.