'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic

What “Backrooms” / liminal spaces are

• Described as human-made, typically corporate or institutional spaces that are empty, repetitive, and disorienting.
• Emphasis on “liminal”: thresholds, corridors, basements, staff-only areas, service tunnels, after-hours schools, malls, and offices.
• Horror comes from blandness + slight wrongness: endlessness, non-Euclidean layouts, or the idea you could wander until you die of thirst.

Origins and influences (contested)

• Disagreement whether the core concept originates in video games (noclipping, unused dev rooms) or from an image/creepypasta forum post that later spawned videos and games.
• Some argue the broader idea predates all of this as a recurring dream/archetype and appears in older fiction.
• Cited influences and parallels: SCP stories, “found footage” and creepypasta, early Slenderman media, experimental novels, art-house horror, text adventures, and avant-garde art/architecture.

Emotional responses: horror, uncanny, nostalgia

• Split between people who find these spaces deeply unsettling and those who feel nothing or even comfort/peace.
• Concepts like the “uncanny” / “unhomely” and Capgras-like “something is slightly off” are discussed.
• Some experience “memoryless nostalgia” (anemoia): longing for eras/styles they never lived through.

Real-world experience vs online aesthetic

• Several commenters have worked in or explored such spaces (offices, tunnels, malls, schools) and describe them as oppressive, eerie, or alternately totally mundane and fun to explore.
• Debate over whether fear relies on never having actually been in such spaces versus how photography, video, and editing frame them.
• Nighttime, emptiness, motion-sensor lighting, and faint building noises are frequently cited as amplifiers of unease.

Related media and broader readings

• Many references to games, films, web series, and literature that use institutional, non-Euclidean, or infinite architecture.
• Some see Backrooms/“institutional gothic” as a reaction to totalizing corporate environments: taking cheerful, functional office aesthetics and revealing them as lifeless, alienating, and sad, akin to certain modernist and metaphysical art or vaporwave.