Aw yea guns in the backrooms

Part 1: The OG Post

so when i originally wrote this i was tired, had a headache and stomach ache and just kinda went off the cuff about it, so it may be incoherent. also it mentions me working on my own backrooms-inspired thing but that may have been scrapped or otherwise transformed into something else entirely but, whatevers. This first part is essentially the original post I had made about it on Cohost at the time.

Okay so I've been thinking about this for the past couple of weeks especially as I meticulously plan out and work on my own backrooms-inspired thing that'll tell the story of the supernatural, abandoned government contractors, exploitation of innocent people and the careless abandon given to prisoners, and in the midst of doing that I opted to look into how backrooms content is as a whole and my god is it just

bad.

My points aren't coherent I admit goes everywhere here and I made it while dealing with a headache, a stomach ache, and with no pre-thought-out plan other than "A rant on the backrooms" and my problems i've had with it. It's not organized but whatever

okay so for some people on here who use youtube and browse horror stories often, they should know what the Backrooms are but for those who don't it was a spooky thing of internet media that started on 4chan after someone posted this to one of the boards:

It's a simple yet horrifying concept, reminiscent of classic video game stories where you get out of bounds and enter a place you're not supposed to be in, applied to real life. The idea of being in a endless maze of nothing but you, yourself, and the distant hums of the lights above you. Oh, and the implication that there's something else in there with you.

I fucking love this concept, especially after having grown up enjoying the idea of game glitches and stuff.

At first it wasn't too bad, with people contributing by making up multiple different areas of The Backrooms-- although in hindsight this could've been what led to a lot of the problems it has now.

Ya had shit like the pool rooms...

... people taking liminal places like this and making them into backrooms places...

and cool things like that. It especially took off after Kane Pixels, a 17(!!!) year old dude decided on a whim that he'll make some backrooms content and basically made the best shit starting with this and it's own series involving the horrors done by people to exploit the backrooms and that within it.

So what's the problem?

Sigh

Well as is the norm with the internet, it becomes popular and everyone learns about it. If you've been on the internet long enough, you know how this tends to go. While there were some good things to come out of it, you got... Many horrible things. People taking the concept and throwing whatever at it.

Like slides, seriously, there are so many fucking videos that have people just, going inside slides, and I'm sorry but when I see a fucking yellow suited guy (that im also pretty sure was just taken from Kane Pixels videos, everyone latched onto them and everyone's using them instead of being even a little bit derivative) going into a slide, horror is the last thing on my mind. Especially when half the videos I've seen of them include either bad camera shit with the screen shaking, annoying goddamn audio, and oftentimes just lame attempts at scares and, oftentimes, the fucking unity default skybox.

Then you have apparent machines in the backrooms, like it's a goddamn cartoon trap factory where you'd have stuff like "SPIN THE WHEEL TO WIN" where you press a button and a wall spins and you either get another backrooms place or death, random signs everywhere that are "apparently" placed by the backrooms being a fucking trickster, and did I mention there are a lot of apparent fucking slides?

Oh and don't get me started on the monsters. Such highlights include... Spindly Johnny...

Okay he doesn't actually have a name and all things considered I don't have too much of a problem with him since he was used pretty well in the Kane Pixels things, not to mention it fit the bill of "something else in there with you".

Do wish it was more than a badly drawn stick figure though but whatever. It's fine.

BUT THEN YOU HAVE THIS SHIT

The... Bone thief.

Okay i don't want this to come off as me like, dissing people for making content, i don't mind, hell i like seeing people make things but. I just don't like this thing. It looks... not scary. And also got yassified into just being a fucking yellow cone with eyes in it by everyone else. Because of course.

Then you have 'Smilers' and i just

JUST A FUCKING FACE THATS ALL IT IS
im sorry i just see it and i can't take it seriously

SO why do i bring these three up? Because apparently aside from the occasional other monster that I rarely see brought up (I think I've only seen one other fr), these are the most common monsters people have in The Backrooms.

I'm sorry. I just, don't get it. People have latched onto these and they're just... not scary at all, to me.

But then there's the problem I have with how people protray the backrooms itself. This malvolent fucking hellhole that'll constantly bring you to various traps and dangers where the walls will change and crush you, you'll get dropped into death pits and crushers and taken to rooms where a bunch of fucking Spindly Johnnies or Bone thieves or whatever the fuck are.

As a whole my problem is that people are utilizing the Backrooms in a weird and frustrating way that takes away from what should be the whole horror of the place. I mean for fucks sake you had people saying "TO SURVIVE YOU GOTTA DRINK ALMOND WATER" and not to mention you also had like, people organizing it methodically, like it's an SCP thing.

My problem is that it shouldn't be a place of logic where you can map it out easily, where you can label each place as a level, where you can make sense of a map, where you can easily assign a name that everyone can use for a monster.

I don't like the categorization of it being individual levels and how apparently you can meet an evil smile ghost or bone stealing mofo after riding a minecart or something.

What I'm basically saying is that the power of the backrooms should be a terrifying location but that's it. It makes no sense to be in. You shouldn't be here. But it's not malevolent. The horror comes from how little explaination there is to me. How you can enter it just by being unlucky, how you're forced to traverse it until the end of time or until you get lucky.

I think that's my main problem honestly now that I'm thinking about it: The horror of the backrooms and what it could mean if applied to reality, and the stories that can be told with them, are not being fully realized by a lot of people.

Kane Pixel's stuff has the spooky backrooms stuff, yeah, but there's also the horror in what people do to access the backrooms, what they want to exploit it for, and the costs of that, especially the human cost and the deaths and horrors involved with conspiracy stuff.

tl;dr: The Backrooms should embrace the mysteriousness and bizarreness of it, but also should be used to augment the stories told. It shouldn't just be weird monsters, it should be unexplainable. It should be incoherent. It should embrace the madness. I want madness. I want that feeling you get when you're a little kid lost in a mall, no where to go, I want that fear of being lost. I want that fear of something unexplainable.

Part 2: The Aftermath and Reactions

So, when I originally posted this on cohost, it blew up immensely, with a lot of interesting input being thrown in from other sides. I figured I would link the reactions people had, as the other individuals on cohost had some very good insight into horror and cosmic horror as a genre in-of itself, the reactions people have to it and the internet's interpretations of things, and how it's all perceived!

Long story short, The Backrooms are a strange and interesting concept that, while I felt had a lot of things taking away from the experience, it had-- and still does have, infact, plenty of value, depending on the right set-up and idea. Something that, if left without explanation or even better: is attempted to be explained but only results in more confusing or worse, nothing, can be horrifying in the best ways. A friend of mine, Warmaji, compared the gripes I had discussed about the over-explaning of the everything and trying to apply cohesion and logic to stuff that can be seen as even metaphorical, is like that of what happened with the movie Annihiliation's ending. Never seen it myself, but apparently the ending to that was metaphorical and people missed the point there.

On a side-note: A lot of people had recommended House Of Leaves in these discussions. So that's a fun thing I'd say for people to read!