Backrooms Spirituality

An essay I recent wrote using ChatGPT, based on what embodied cognition can tell us about wisdom, and on the uncanny, liminality, and modernist architecture's fascination with the younger generations, and the deeper spiritual meaning of this kind of fascination with disenchantment, specifically in the context of the Backrooms internet folklore and gaming:


In the beginning, the Backrooms was just internet horror—a bit of digital folklore that began with a simple prompt: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms..." What followed was a strange vision: a vast, liminal space of endless beige hallways, dingey yellow carpets, flickering fluorescent lights, and a terrifying silence broken only by the soft buzz of electrical humming.

But in the years since, the Backrooms has grown into something more. Through games, mods, memes, and collaborative storytelling, it has evolved into a strange, shared mythos—a liminal world that speaks, almost by accident, to deep spiritual and cultural conditions of our time.

At its core, the Backrooms is a wilderness narrative—a retelling of the 40 years in the desert, except instead of sand and tents and the voice of God, we have Brutalist corridors, broken vending machines, and the aching absence of meaning. It is a place of exile shaped not by divine mystery but by modern architecture, trauma, and disconnection. And yet, in its very sterility, something sacred begins to stir.

What makes the Backrooms feel so deeply unsettling isn’t just the silence or the looping spaces—it’s the recognition. The environments are eerily familiar. These aren’t haunted castles or Gothic ruins. They’re office parks, data centers, hotel conference rooms. The horror here is not ancient. It is contemporary and institutional—spaces we’ve already been trained to inhabit, but never to love.

In this sense, the Backrooms evokes what scientists and theologians alike now understand: our minds are not separate from our bodies, and our bodies respond to space. Embodied cognition tells us that we perceive meaning through physical patterns—symmetry, light, color, curves, texture, human scale. The brutalist geometry of the Backrooms strips all that away. The result is not just visual discomfort but a deep, existential disorientation. This is what dissociation looks like in architecture.

The space echoes trauma, not melodrama. It reflects what many people feel already: overstimulated yet undernourished, surrounded by noise but deprived of depth. It is, quite literally, a temple of absence.

And yet—despite all of that—something remarkable happens in the Backrooms:
people play.

They don’t just survive—they cooperate. They explore together. They tell stories. They share tips. They form communities in a place designed to deny community. “Stick to the left wall.” “Don’t look at the Smiler.” “Shine your flashlight—it’ll keep them away.” “Take some almond water. You’ll need it.”

That last line—"Take some almond water"—carries unexpected weight.

In the mythology of the Backrooms, almond water is a healing substance found in vending machines and crates. It’s sweet. It restores sanity and stamina. And though it’s fictional, it feels real—because it plays the part of sacramental grace. It is the Eucharist of the uncan ny: unexpected comfort, mysterious provision, a gesture of care in a landscape of indifference.

In a world where God seems absent, people still reenact communion—imperfectly, intuitively. Even in digital exile, the liturgical instinct survives.


The Backrooms functions, whether knowingly or not, as a Christ-haunted space. The narrative structure mirrors deep theological patterns: descent into darkness, testing in the wilderness, survival through community, and the slow rediscovery of hope. It's a parody of transcendence, yes—but also a sincere search for it.

The players who enter the Backrooms do not merely entertain themselves—they engage in a form of spiritual resistance. They reject the horror’s premise of isolation. They laugh. They help each other. They mock the monsters. In a subtle but real way, they mock death itself.

Theologically, this is not far from the Christian understanding of Christ’s descent into hell—not to suffer it, but to fill it with presence, to disarm the powers, to make a public spectacle of fear itself. Even the demons become playthings when joy refuses to bow.


But there’s a warning here, too—one embedded deep in the logic of the game and its mythos:

You can visit the Backrooms. You can even play there. But you cannot live there.

To remain in the Backrooms indefinitely is to lose your identity, your name, your sense of time and direction. The space offers survival, not return. It can host initiation, but never homecoming.

This mirrors a cultural temptation: to live forever in liminality, irony, alienation. To aestheticize exile. To treat numbness as wisdom. But we are not made to dwell in absence. The mysticism of emptiness—popular in 20th-century theology and modern art—has its place. But without nourishment, without joy, without beauty, without almond water—it becomes death by fasting.

We are embodied souls, not minds floating in space. We need warmth, color, song, rhythm, bread, presence.


In the end, the Backrooms functions as a kind of parable for our generation. It shows us the shape of the world we have inherited: strange, disorienting, traumatized, and yet full of longing.

The Backrooms are not Eden. They’re not even Egypt. They’re the wilderness.
And the wilderness is only holy if you remember to keep walking.

The Liturgist said:

I quite like Kane Pixel’s Backrooms series. The shared universe isn’t as interesting to me, although it’s better than the pure distilled boredom that is SCP.

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I think it's clever stuff. I grew up with horror involving dark alleys and creepy, dark, abandoned houses. Horror in a brightly lit space of endless corridors is a completely different vibe, and illuminates the difference in generations. They aren't as afraid of ghosts anymore, as shadows of everything modernity has rejected, so much as hauntology itself, the idea that there is no escaping the looping series of fragmented experiences that we call postmodernity.

Friday Night at Freddy's is another great example of the changing mood of horror. Not ghosts, in the usual sense, but derelict techhnology inhabited by the stolen souls of children coming to rip you apart. There's alot of symbolic depth to that imagery that speaks a truth that respectable society would rather remain hidden. We are living in the ruins of a techno-dystopia already, and the sacrificial victims are our future generations whose souls are stolen by technology to give a wrecked and broken system afloat, manned by faceless corporate drones whose lives are so hollowed out they can talk about it all without a semblance of real recognition of horor.

The Liturgist said:

Well, like I said, I love the films by Kane Pixels, which he released starting when he was 16, and he has a contract with A24 to do a Backrooms movie. Also another guy has a channel that is apocryphal but set in the same continuity.

There’s also a brilliant video game set in the Pool Rooms.


The wikis however that describe all of the floors … thats what I find boring.



You know it turns out the Backrooms photo was the second floor of a former furniture store in Wisconsin which in 2002 was emptied out for conversion into a slot car racing club, which I love - the Backrooms in real life a failed business in the process of being made a place of joy for a community.

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As often is the case, you don't want to see what's happening in the kitchen, you might lose your appetite.

The Liturgist said:

However, the photo depicting a courtyard with a ceiling covering it is actually real - it is the dystopian interior of one of the massively overpriced hotels at London Heathrow.

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It just shows how Kane Pixels has enough depth for spotting how this kind of horror is evident in our ordinary lives and we often don't notice it because we lack the context and storytelling to properly frame it as horror. Postmodern architecture has this kind of disjointed aesthetic, where features are haphazardly placed where they don't belong, in a fragmented manner. Wheras older modern architecture at least tried to bring a sense of unified aesthetics, even if it was often sterile and imposing. In postmodern and metamodern aesthetics, what is incoherent and ultimately clumsy is seen as "brave" as long as it fits a logic of "representation" or perfomative sincerity (almost a kind of nostalgia, all we can remember is what sincerity looked like, not what it felt like).