The Backrooms and the Death of the Eerie in Online Media
Oh god i no clipped through the floor
When I was young, I attended a homeschool convention for educators to share their curriculum and ideas with other educators. It was held at one of the largest hotels in Atlanta, the Marriott Marquis. This beast of a hotel has 47 floors and basement tunnels, which seem to go on forever. The conference was held in the various meeting rooms that all hotels have, spreading across what seemed like a large portion of these tunnels.
Being a young person, I was fascinated by the tunnels. I began to explore them whenever I could escape the prying eyes of the adults running the convention. However, just as I began to work my way into their depths, an employee would come out of the woodwork and escort me back to my parents.
To a young rose, these tunnels were a marvelous curiosity. They looked as if they went on forever. I could turn corner after corner, walk for what felt like forever, and never find the end. This was a perfect example of liminal space or the eerie. It sat between the space that I knew, the lobby of the hotel and the convention, and its negation, that is, the end of its influence on space. I was terrified and fascinated by this space. I found that this place between the object and its negation was the eerie materialized.
“The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. There is something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.” - Mark Fisher in The Weird and The Eerie.
The eerie and the liminal took the internet by storm in recent years as the feelings it invokes connect deeply with the symptoms of capitalist alienation and the social isolation caused by the modern conditions of capitalism. We connect deeply with the eerie feeling that the liminal invokes. It dissociates itself from the dialectic of object and negation, becoming a deterritorialized outside. This outside is dissociative, reflected in our own identity under capitalism. The backrooms perfectly show off the eerie. It is a beautiful realization of the eerie in the physical world.
As the internet loved the backrooms, we deeply connected with the liminality and oddness. Entire accounts were entirely devoted to posting images of liminal spaces and creating content centered around the feeling of liminality. People created whole liminal worlds inside their blogs and social media accounts. Millions of people flocked to this concept, seeing themselves in the dissociation of the liminal. However, this popularity leads to a degeneration of this eerie sense. Something fundamental shifted as the internet ate up the backrooms and liminal content.
As the internet does, it began to stratify and reterritorialize the eerie into a canon. The backrooms were no longer spaces where potentiality flourished; instead, they were defined and categorized. People created monsters to inhabit the backrooms, making floors and different areas with their phenomena and rules. The back rooms lost connection to the eerie; they were given explicit presence and rules. Monsters we knew every detail about roam the infinite halls of the back rooms, and floors or regions seal off liminal spaces into their own harshly defined worlds.
The internet is the apparatus of the dissemination of meaning through the cyclical reflection of signs. It categorizes and assigns new meanings to signs as they consolidate and internally collapse, simplifying and becoming closer to the singular or an individual sign. It creates new meanings and mythologies inside the sign, no longer reflecting its origin.
When I walked through the real-world back rooms as a young child, there was no lore behind the spaces I found myself in. No monsters or creatures were hunting me down, only its outsideness. I found myself immersed in the in-between. I walked through endless corridors and meeting rooms without the signification given to these spaces by the internet in modern times. An entire mythology has been created around the back rooms, spawning the creation of many games and art pieces.
Over the last three years, the backroom games have popped up like weeds across the indie development landscape. Countless clones of the same dimly lit yellow room fill the steam store, and videos about their development plaster the YouTube homepage. These games all follow the same plot, where the player finds themselves in the backrooms and must traverse its narrow spaces while being hunted down by a generic monster. This monster is usually a rip-off of Slenderman and the Skinwalker.
The primary space of the backrooms, or what has been defined culturally as the first floor, is a yellowed and empty set of corridors and rooms with nasty yellow wallpaper and generic carpet squares. Because many of these games use procedural generation to create the infinite floor plan, it often disconnects itself from what was one of the backroom's greatest strengths.
In my experience of traversing liminal spaces and the eerie, I've found that their digital counterparts inside games rarely hold up and fail to bring forth the same level of dissociation from the known reality of spaces. Rather than having real rooms and corridors that connect in a maze-like formation, the backrooms in video games have poorly cobbled-together walls and rooms that don’t make sense. They become too weird and disconnected from the rest of the world. It no longer feels like you are in a space between the real and its negation, but rather a space that defines its negation itself.
The spaces lose meaning as they become too disconnected from the real world. They become so deterritorialized that they no longer resemble spaces in enough of a way to allow for the liminal’s inherent in-betweenness. The backrooms become a maze without real consistent walls or shapes. It is too alien to be eerie or liminal; it is no longer transitory and has become its own new space—a new sign with new meanings attributed to it.
This phenomenon could also be seen in the SCP community. Some monsters are very well done, cleverly hiding away information about the creatures and creating a sense of wonder. The eerie is found in some of these creatures or phenomena written about in the SCP foundation, whereas other entries have expressed the opposite. The monsters of the SCP foundation are a fascinating mix between the stratified and heavily controlled nature of modern science fiction and the eerie that hides deep within its archives.
The backrooms have lost all eerieness. It has lost its liminality and its status as the in-between. It is now a highly stratified space that exists as a new negation of the material world. The capturing process of the internet accelerated over the entire body of the backrooms and consumed it. It has become a commodity, literally transporting into video games to be sold online and for YouTubers and streamers to create further content. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of capturing, content creation, and then reflecting the new meaning of the captured sign into perception.