The backrooms and liminal spaces: Explorations of a digital urban legend

Abstract

Urban legends form an important part of socio-cultural narratives of shared fears and anxieties, and their presence online has developed similarly. This contribution explores the online urban legend the backrooms and examines its narrative construction offering possible reasons for the popularity and participatory aspect of the backrooms. Appearing on 4chan in May 2019, the backrooms represent an endless liminality. A diegetic analysis of 16 videos produced by Kane Parsons provides a sequential deconstruction of narrative elements within the backrooms, particularly the elements that exist within the fictional world of the narrative. A concurrent semiotic analysis examines the backrooms videos seen as an interrelated narrative. Narrative construction in the backrooms necessitates liminality alongside notions like video games, nostalgia, postmodern thought, and the vaporwave art/music aesthetic to reveal the backrooms as a digital chronotope. Findings reveal a clearer understanding of liminal spaces in the backrooms and relate how games and play address the narrative construction of the backrooms.

Keywords

Digital folklore liminal spaces narrative nostalgia postmodernism the backrooms vaporwave

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