The Uncanny Horror of Empty Rooms: From Backrooms to Freud

A 2026 article explores why empty rooms evoke fear, tracing the phenomenon from the 2019 4chan post that spawned the Backrooms mythos to its use in horror films and series like Severance. The Radiohead video 'Daydreaming' (2016, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) exemplifies this unease. The article cites Sigmund Freud's 1919 concept of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche) and a 2022 study by Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University, which found that empty rooms or those with structural anomalies (missing doors, repeated objects) trigger anxiety. The effect is linked to evolutionary survival mechanisms and the uncanny valley, where familiar stimuli deviate from expected norms. The article also references the Latin term horror vacui ('fear of the void') from Aristotle's Physics. The Backrooms film by Kane Parsons (2026) is noted as a recent example.