The Backrooms: Navigating the Liminal and the Uncanny

On May 12, 2019, 4chan users were asked to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’. The post was anonymous, and the now-famous reply was as well. The user posted a photo of an empty space with yellow patterned wallpaper and beige carpeting. They included the following blurb with the photo:

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.¹

The image was later revealed as a photo of a HobbyTown store under renovation. Its unsettling quality led Kane Parsons to create a series of YouTube videos that spread the legend of what became known as the Backrooms. “Noclip” is a term used by gamers for a mode that allows them to pass through solid objects. The implication is that one accidentally stumbles into an alternate dimension, trapped in an eerie and unsettling landscape of monotonous rooms.

The emotions evoked by the original Backrooms photo and the liminal space aesthetic that gained popularity on social media in its wake suggest a collective discomfort with what is void and unfamiliar. In this brief essay I will look at both liminality and uncanniness through the lens of both psychology and anthropology; the way in which this idea has developed tells us something about the way we handle experiences that defy our sense of familiarity.

The Uncanny

The terms “uncanny” and “liminal” are often used to describe the sense of unease that we have when we encounter something outside of our experience. They do not mean exactly the same thing, but they do overlap in many circumstances.

Ernst Jentsch was the first to write about the idea of the uncanny in 1906.² The German word used by Jentsch and later by Freud was unheimlich, and both men understood this term very differently. For Jentsch, feelings of the uncanny were proportional to intellectual certainty. The word heimlich refers to what is familiar; thus the unheimlichen must be connected to what is unfamiliar. In this view the uncanny is that feeling of unease that we get when we are confronted with the unknown, when we lack context for what we are experiencing. The feeling of uncanniness dissipates when we are able to put the unknown into a context that allows us to relate to the experience.

Freud’s essay on the uncanny begins with Jentsch’s definition, and places the notion of the uncanny within the realm of aesthetics.³ Aesthetic philosophy usually deals with discussions of the beautiful, while avoiding or overlooking the revolting or horrifying. While Freud gives props to Jentsch for his consideration of the subject, he finds his definition lacking. Freud provides an extensive analysis of the word heimlich, which he defines at the outset as “homely” or “native,” thus implying that unheimlich would be something foreign, and possibly disquieting. However, not everything foreign to us makes us uncomfortable.⁴ He goes on to point out another meaning of the word heimlich: that which is concealed or kept from sight. Jentsch’s definition of the term unheimlich is already contained within its opposite, to some degree. Freud quotes Schelling, who suggests that things that are unheimlich are brought to light, but should have been kept out of sight.⁵ Freud concludes that this latter aspect of unheimlich is connected to repeating past patterns, something familiar that has been repressed. He considers the usual source to be infantile complexes that have been surmounted, but return in this feeling when the right triggers appear.

Other psychoanalytic thinkers have addressed the idea of the uncanny; Julia Kristeva links it to the idea of the “abject,” something cast off from ordinary rules and norms. Jacques Lacan connects it to the field of experience where we can’t distinguish good from bad, pleasure from displeasure.⁶ A good working example of this Alan Resnick’s YouTube channel @alantutorial. What usually begins as a comic video about Alan’s attempt to do one of a variety of DIY projects takes a dark and revolting turn, leaving the viewer unsure as to whether they should laugh or be horrified. Similarly, the video series entitled Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared appears to be a children’s puppet show, but the initial innocence of each episode quickly grows shocking and unsettling for the viewer. The frequency of our normal emotional responses becomes jammed; we are forced into an uncomfortable space that questions all of our aesthetic and nostalgic assumptions.

Masahiro Mori’s essay Bukimi no Tani Genshō (Valley of Eeriness Phenomenon) addresses the idea of uncanniness when it comes to dolls, mannequins, prosthetics, and robots. The “uncanny valley” is the gap between humans and those things intended to imitate human bodies, minds, and feelings. Robotics technology and artificial intelligence work to bridge the gap, to make human facsimiles that are so realistic we don’t know the difference. This seems very unlikely to succeed, as we always have that instinctual sense that something is not quite right in the presence of the robot or the AI chat bot. But the current AI takeover of our computers and the programs we use for the creation of words and images threatens with the allure of convenience. If we yield all of our human creativity to artificial intelligence, we may truly lose our souls in a sort of Backroom, becoming a collective monster that continually cannibalizes itself.

Liminality

Liminality is a separate yet related topic. The root word limen is Latin, and means threshold. Thus, the liminal is a suspension between two states; we are not where we were before, but we are also not yet in a new place. Victor Turner’s essay “Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” talks about the liminal in ways that will remind us of discussions of the uncanny.⁷ In traditional tribal initiation rituals, the neophytes are said to be “invisible.” They do not have a solid identity during the initiation process; they are not the person they were before, and they are not yet the newly transformed person. In such societies, change is connected to biological and meteorological occurrences, rather than technological ones. We can think of these as life cycle initiations—from childhood to adolescence, from adolesence to adulthood. These rituals are different for males and females in the tribe, but even the idea of being male or female is obscured in this state; Turner mentions examples of “third genders” in indigenous tribes. In a pre-Western Japan, young adolescent males often became wakashu, a liminal form of gender identity that marked the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Christin Bohnke notes that this liminal form of identity was abolished when Japan ended its political isolation and began connecting with the very dualistic Western world.⁸

Indeed, in our modern Western society, rite of passage rituals of this type are nonexistent, as the importance of the soul’s transformation is diminished in a world that privileges rational analysis as the standard for truth; our own soul truths are deemed untrustworthy. The initiation ceremonies of modern religions, monotheistic and influenced by rational secular thinking, usually end up being little more than an excuse for a party. There is no transformation; it is an empty symbolic gesture. I am reminded of Jung’s account of making his first Holy Communion in his father’s church, a typical Christian rite of passage sacrament. His father performed the service, attentive to the details of ritual, with “no sadness and no joy,” and Jung felt “the feast was meager in every respect”:

Suddenly my turn came. I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had expected. The wine, of which I only took the smallest sip, was thin and rather sour, plainly not the best. Then came the final prayer, and the people went out, neither depressed nor illumined with joy, but with faces that said, ‘So that’s that’ … I had reached the pinnacle of religious initiation, had expected something—I knew not what—to happen, and nothing at all had happened. I knew that God could do stupendous things to me, things of fire and unearthly light, but this ceremony contained no trace of God—not for me, at any rate. To be sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words.⁹

The Liminal Aesthetic

The liminal aesthetic applies the idea of liminality to spaces. A liminal space is one of transition, and has qualities we might associate with uncanniness—eerie, forlorn, and surreal.¹⁰ They are both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Some liminal spaces evoke a sense of nostalgia: the abandoned school or amusement park, the empty shopping mall. Other spaces evoke a sense of dread, and even the places of our past can assume this uncomfortable aspect when viewed in this dystopian manner. Empty spaces, sometimes abandoned ruins, are uncanny projection points for twenty-first century anxieties.

As a professor of mythology, I usually invite students to focus on myths that either fascinate them or repel them—or both. Our reactions to stories, spaces, and images tell us a lot about who we are, what triggers us unconsciously, and what our a priori ideas are about the world. What do we assume to be true? Are these assumptions always correct? The most deeply embedded narratives do not change with analysis or intellectual consideration; they require the intervention of experience, and of art. Art works in images, and says what our rational minds can only approach superficially.

Matthew Lazin-Ryder’s article on liminality places the rise in interest in the liminal aesthetic in the COVID-19 pandemic, around March 2020.¹¹ He quotes Sabina Magliocco, an anthropologist from the University of British Columbia, who connects the interest in liminality to themes of abandonment, “something that was once filled with life and is now empty.”

So what accounts for this emptiness? If our human transformation was once pivoted around biological change, it is now dominated by technological change. Kurzweil’s theory of accelerating change suggests that the rate of change tends to increase exponentially.¹² It is no wonder that in such an environment people are determined to cling to the past, and to reject change. We are almost constantly in a liminal state, making us forever feel like our lives are passing us by. We may not trust in our ability to navigate this landscape; in societies like those studied by Turner, there were elder initiators who could guide the way. But what rituals are true initiations? Who guides us through this landscape? We rely on the media and on machines to tell us what is real. The latest Imperva analysis shows that 49.6% of what is on the Internet is created by non-human sources.¹³ But one of the earliest dictums of computing is still true today: garbage in, garbage out. The data provided by artificial intelligence is only as good as the data put into it. We are left not knowing who to trust, clinging to nostalgia and anything that gives us a sense of familiarity. We may be unwilling to broaden our horizons, simply wanting a comfortable space where we feel at home and accepted by our community.

The Backrooms as a Tool

As Kane Parson’s Backrooms videos gained in popularity, other content creators picked up the idea and created their own variations. This has led to the creation of Backrooms videos that actually include monsters; in a gaming environment the goal is to avoid or overcome these monsters, and potentially to “noclip” out of this alternate landscape and into a familiar one. However, the suspense of the Backrooms comes from the lack of a visible monster. The attempt to create one is the defense of the rational mind; if we can see what the monster is, we can address it. Sometimes the “monsters” in these videos are funny or cute; this lines up with another rational defense, the attempt to make our emotions of unease into something harmless or delusional. We laugh at ourselves for getting scared at nothing. But the Backrooms are undoubtedly an uncomfortable and despairing space. Stories and aesthetics that gain mass popularity are clues to the state of the collective social “soul.”

Whatever defenses we choose in these contexts, they provide a way of coping with the problem but not solving it. How does one perpetually live in a liminal space? What is the way out? Is it really possible to go back to the way things were? It seems to me that there are three possible responses. The first is to be paralyzed by fear; the endless monotony of the space provides a canvas for monstrous possibility. The second is to be paralyzed by nostalgia; if we find ourselves looking for comfort in what went before, we risk getting lost in memories and not focusing on who and where we are in the present. The third possibility is to look at these empty spaces as realms of possibility. When we clear away the debris of the old, is there something new that can be created in such spaces?

The third possibility is harder than it looks. As humans we are accustomed to causal thinking, we look for the familiar template of what went before when we do something new. People trend toward the simple and the orderly, and rarely do well negotiating the chaos and uncertainty of life. But perhaps this unheimlich unveiling should be seen as an opportunity to play with paradoxes by breaking the illusion of order and allowing ourselves to see the changing world in a new way.

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Notes

1. “The Backrooms.” Wikipedia. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms ↩︎
2. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Translated from the German by Roy Sellars. 1906. https://www.scribd.com/document/348047654/156653255-1906-Jentsch-on-the-Psychology-of-the-Uncanny-pdf ↩︎
3. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Monster Theory Reader. Ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. pp. 59-88. (Original essay written in 1919.) ↩︎
4. Freud, pp. 60-61. ↩︎
5. Freud, pp. 64 ↩︎
6. “The Uncanny.” Wikipedia. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny ↩︎
7. Turner, Victor W. The Forest of Symbols : Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, 1967. https://www.scribd.com/document/759088318/Betwixt-and-Between-The-Liminal-Period-in-Rites-de-Passage ↩︎
8. Bohnke, Christin. “The Disappearance of Japan’s Third Gender.” JSTOR Daily. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://daily.jstor.org/the-disappearance-of-japans-third-gender/ ↩︎
9. Jung, Carl G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. Vintage Books, 1989. pp. 54-55. ↩︎
10. “Liminal Space (Aesthetic)” Wikipedia. Accessed on February 11, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic) ↩︎
11. Lazin-Ryder, Matthew. “‘Liminal Space’ Photography Captures the Eerieness and Isolation of Pandemic Life.” CBC Radio. Accessed on February 11, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/liminal-space-popularity-1.6365390 ↩︎
12. “Accelerating Change.” Wikipedia. Accessed on February 11, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change ↩︎
13. “2024 Bad Bot Report.” Imperva.com. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2024-bad-bot-report/ ↩︎