You've Never Experienced Horror Like Kane Pixels' Backrooms

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For the better part of a year, I’ve been absolutely raving about the Backrooms. A fixation on a new kind of horror that is both hugely popular, and completely under-the-radar. Something I’ve written about numerous times now, including fictional speculation, and my most recent play-through of the Backrooms inspired Steam game, POOLS: Many have their ideas about the Complex, many people put out amateur content that is in the very least, entertaining. And then Kane Pixels, every so often, drops a nuclear horror bomb that redefines the Backrooms, again.

But it’s not just the Backrooms, or the idea of it that makes it scary. It’s the liminal born horror of being in places where nothing lives. You walk through your house, you probably have hallways, and stairs. You don’t live in these spaces, but they exist, nonetheless. In the silence of the day or the night, you stand in these spaces, maybe at 2am, and you feel like it’s wrong. Maybe you don’t, maybe you do. You jump in your car at 3am and drive out on a lonely highway, and you stop at a seemingly empty gas station. Again, it probably feels … off.

That’s the liminality we’re talking here.

The Backrooms are the hallways in an empty home, the gas station late at night, the middle of nowhere on an empty road, forever.

It’s a concept I first learned and heard of, funnily enough, on Tumblr, years ago, and this is exactly the way it was described. Except it wasn’t horror, and there were no Backrooms (that came a bit later, via a single 4chan post).

A lot of random content on Youtube are cartoonish demons, and disembodied smiley faces, and then you stumble upon what I believe to be the real Backrooms. Everything ever made by Kane Pixels. The “howler,” the “bacteria”, and now, in FF3, whatever the hell that was. I think it’s speculated our new monster is a bacteria infected human, driven mad. But, unlike the other two “found footage” pieces in the evolving story that Kane’s been crafting, number three feels … too real. The distinction between the real world in the recording and 3D rendering, is completely unclear. It’s totally seamless. For a while, it seems as though all of it is a set piece that someone is actually walking through. And, for all intents and purposes, it very well could have been.

And then our camera-wielding buddy enters a lone home surrounded by walls, and … speaks to someone connected in reality. Something not ever done in Backrooms fiction before. And not only that, the protagonist “witnesses” the man he’s speaking to, falling directly into the same place, but somewhere else. And then you get an exposition from the cameraman as he takes in his last moments, right before the battery dies.

If this is anything like the movie, Hollywood won’t know what hit ‘em.

Some people call it boring walking simulation, or not even scary, and those people would be wrong. We’ve had Resident Evil, we’ve had Scream, and we’ve had The Ring. I think it’s time for the next evolution of horror. I don’t know why I say “I think it’s time,” I mean, it’s already here.

Just watch it. Most of it is unnerving, most of it is freaky and unsettling. But this newest offering goes even deeper. And I definitely mean that as a pun.

I find myself sometimes wondering what it would be like to suddenly break from the meandering regularity of my real life and “fall” directly into an endless labyrinth. I mean … aside from starving to death. Everyone in these found footage videos have what appears to be amazing courage. But I don’t think I could ever. I might sulk in a corner and wait, or just run and run and run until something hears me. Who knows! I don’t do well with empty and strange places where things could be following you in the dark.

But that’s my take on Kane Pixels’ Backrooms content, and the ridiculously good third found footage sequence.