The Single Photograph That Spawned the Backrooms Phenomenon

The Backrooms, a box office hit grossing over $330 million worldwide, originated from a single photograph taken with a Sony Cyber-shot camera in 2002. The image, depicting a yellow-tinged, windowless room with fluorescent lighting, first appeared on 4chan in 2011 and was later named in a 2019 thread. A Discord community traced it to an archived March 2003 webpage for a furniture store renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the building's new tenant, Hobbytown, posted the photo with the filename 'Dsc00161.jpg.' The concept was popularized by then-16-year-old Kane Parsons in 2022 through a series of YouTube videos created with Blender and Adobe After Effects. A24 selected Parsons to direct the feature film, which became the distributor's highest-grossing release. The Backrooms exemplifies the liminal spaces aesthetic, influencing works like the TV show Severance by Dan Erickson and echoing the photography of Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, and urban exploration photographers. The #liminalspaces hashtag on TikTok has amassed nearly 100 million views.