Sources
Internet Origins
Section titled “Internet Origins”Parsons, Kane (Kane Pixels). The Backrooms (Found Footage). YouTube series, 2022–present. https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels
Parsons, Kane (Kane Pixels). The Oldest View. YouTube series, 2024–present. https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels
“Backrooms.” Know Your Meme. Accessed April 2026. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms
SCP Foundation. “SCP-087: The Stairwell.” Accessed April 2026. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-087
SCP Foundation. “SCP-3008: A Perfectly Normal, Regular Old IKEA.” Accessed April 2026. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3008
Film and Television
Section titled “Film and Television”Kubrick, Stanley, dir. The Shining. Warner Bros., 1980.
The Truman Show
Section titled “The Truman Show”Truman Burbank has lived his entire life inside a vast television studio disguised as a perfect American town — every neighbor an actor, every sunrise artificial, every coincidence engineered by a production team. The film is usually read as a satire about media consumption and surveillance culture, and that reading is accurate but partial. What makes it relevant to your framework is the specific quality of Seahaven — the town Truman inhabits — which is the most complete Liminal Form ever depicted on screen. Seahaven is not a bad copy of a town. It is a town with every element of townness present and every animating contingency removed. The streets are too clean, the neighbors too friendly, the weather too cooperative. It is the Form of American suburban community expressed without any of the biological messiness that should fill it. When Truman begins to suspect something is wrong he isn’t responding to obvious surrealism — he’s responding to the same recognition response the 2019 Backrooms photograph produces. The space is familiar and something essential is absent. The horror of the film is not that Truman is being watched. It’s that he has been living inside a Liminal Form his entire life and only gradually develops the perceptual sensitivity to recognize it as such.
Being John Malkovich
Section titled “Being John Malkovich”A puppeteer discovers a portal behind a filing cabinet on the seven-and-a-half floor of a Manhattan office building — a floor with ceilings too low to stand in, accessible only by jamming an elevator — that leads directly into the consciousness of actor John Malkovich for exactly fifteen minutes before depositing the traveler in a ditch beside the New Jersey Turnpike. The film is usually categorized as surrealist comedy but its spatial logic is genuinely strange in ways the comedy framing half conceals. The seven-and-a-half floor is one of cinema’s most precise depictions of a liminal space — not wrong in an obvious horror register but wrong in a way that produces immediate unease. A floor that exists between floors, with ceilings that force everyone to crouch, staffed by people who speak and behave as though this is completely normal. It is a space that shouldn’t exist inside a space that should, and the film treats this as unremarkable. What makes it relevant to your framework specifically is the portal itself — the idea that inside consensus reality there exist access points to something beneath or behind it, that the membrane between the Frontrooms and the source layer is thin enough in certain locations to push through. The seven-and-a-half floor is not the Backrooms but it is structurally the same proposition — there is a layer beneath the legible world and it is accessible if you find the right door behind the right filing cabinet on the wrong floor.
Vincenzo, Natali, dir. Cube. Trimark Pictures, 1997.
Lynch, David, dir. Lost Highway. October Films, 1997.
Lynch, David, dir. Mulholland Drive. Universal Pictures, 2001.
Holland, Tom, dir. The Langoliers. ABC, 1995. Television film based on the novella by Stephen King.
Ball, Bradley, dir. Skinamarink. IFC Films, 2022.
Parsons, Kane, dir. Backrooms. A24, 2026. Theatrical release May 29, 2026.
Not recommended: Severance, Vivarium
Video Games
Section titled “Video Games”Steam Games Similar to Escape The Backrooms
Davey Wreden and William Pugh. The Stanley Parable. Galactic Café, 2013.
KOTAKE CREATE. The Exit 8. Self-published, 2023.