Valentina Tanni's 'Exit Reality' Explores Digital Folklore and the Backrooms

An excerpt from Valentina Tanni's 'Exit Reality' (NERO, 2024) traces the evolution of internet horror from creepypasta to the Backrooms phenomenon. The Backrooms originated from a 2019 4chan post featuring a blurry photo of an abandoned office with a caption about 'noclipping out of reality.' This concept, rooted in gaming glitches, spawned a vast collaborative mythology including the SCP Foundation, which began in 2007 with SCP-173, inspired by Izumi Kato's sculpture. The Slender Man legend, born on Something Awful in 2009, exemplifies digital folklore's open, editable nature. Liminal spaces—transitional, abandoned places—form the aesthetic backbone of these narratives, evoking kenopsia. Kane Pixels' 2022 short film 'The Backrooms (Found Footage)' amassed over 40 million views, while the SCP Foundation wiki now contains around 8,000 files. The excerpt also discusses lore as a community-driven knowledge system, the #maincharacter trend, and the gamification of storytelling, referencing theorists like Jan Harold Brunvand, Henry Jenkins, and Mark Fisher.