This could be a metaphor for the internet; but it’s also the set-up for the horror movie Backrooms. Three things make the film notable. First, it’s phenomenally successful: it has just broken $300 million in global box-office takings. Second, its director is phenomenally young: Kane Parsons was 20 when the film was released in May. And third, Backrooms marks the moment that creepypasta crossed definitively into the entertainment mainstream.

What, you might be asking, is creepypasta? And can you eat it? Well, no. Creepypasta is sometimes used as a catch-all term for any horror story published online, but a more precise definition is that it’s a kind of horror story that could only exist online: a collaborative venture into the uncanny that deploys the structure of the internet to generate fear. Creepypastas grow on message boards and wikis, usually created in-character (with users posting as though the fictions they’re describing are real), and are expanded in videos and podcasts.

The term derives from “copypasta”, itself a corruption of the term “copy-paste” that emerged on the image board 4chan in 2006 to refer to blocks of text posted there (copied and pasted) by internet users. A year later, the word creepypasta emerged to specifically designate scary copypastas. That makes them sound like a 21st-century spin on the old chain letters — the ones that instructed you to forward this message to 10 other people, or suffer a horrible fate. But creepypastas have a power to disturb that goes far deeper.

They feed off the glitchy, uncertain way that information is reproduced online. Distortion might be the result of saving and reuploading a picture multiple times, or it might have been deliberately tampered with; or it might, if you’re feeling susceptible, be an authentic document of an unnatural event. Whole horror lores can even be spun out of innocuous bits of media which become sinister purely because they’ve been shorn of their context — like the photograph that inspired the Backrooms creepypasta.

In 2002, an old furniture store was being renovated; because it was 2002, someone decided to document the process on a blog, with photos of the cavernous, yellow-wallpapered space. And that was the end of that, until 2019, when a poster on 4chan put out a call for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”. Someone responded with one of the sickly pictures of the empty store, taken at a slightly odd angle: not scary, but definitely unheimlich. (It would be 2024 before the source of the picture was identified.)

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Someone else replied with a brief but vivid horror scenario that would set the terms for everything that the Backrooms mythos would become: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

From this germ, a whole fictional universe proliferated across Reddit, wikis and Discord. There was even a split in the community between those who were interested in roleplaying and lore-building, and those who declared themselves “truebackrooms”, with an interest in the specific aesthetic that gave the Backrooms image its sinister charge. In 2022, Parsons began uploading his Backrooms series to YouTube — an incredibly accomplished “found footage” horror, which became the genesis of the Backrooms feature film.

One of the particularly unsettling aspects of the Backrooms creepypasta is the idea of “noclipping out of reality”. Noclipping is a concept taken from video games: when an error in the programming allows a character to pass through a seemingly solid object, they’re said to have “noclipped”. So while the concept of being lost in infinite backrooms is pretty horrific, there’s also the unpleasant implication that the real world has begun to behave like a video game. The physical and the digital bleed into each other in the Backrooms.

That’s also true with one of the other breakout creepypastas. Slenderman is a hauntingly tall, skinny and faceless figure who is said to control his victims’ minds. That is, he infects his target’s consciousness as a computer virus does. Like the Backrooms, Slenderman has a known origin: another image challenge, this time on the board Something Awful in 2009. A user called Victor Surge (real name Eric Knudsen) posted two pictures of children with an elongated, faceless form lurking in the background.

The first was captioned: “we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…” The caption on the second claimed it had been recovered from a library fire, and implied an authority cover-up. It also coined “the Slender Man”. This was explicit, deliberate storytelling using established horror and folklore tropes: with echoes of the Pied Piper, Beowulf’s giant monster Grendel and Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Slenderman felt horribly familiar.

Consequently, he captured something in the collective imaginary: it was almost as though he had always already existed, and was just waiting to be named. (When I was a child in the Eighties, I had a recurring nightmare about a character who looked a lot like Slenderman.) Slenderman inspired a long-running YouTube mockumentary series called Marble Hornets; multiple alternate reality games using clues scattered across media and a character in the video game Minecraft. You can take questionnaires to learn if you have the “slender sickness”: headaches, nosebleeds and fatigue are all signs that Slenderman has fixed his malevolent attentions on you.

In 2014, Slenderman was also implicated in the attempted murder of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin by two of her friends who believed that they could become Slenderman’s proxies (and protect their families from him) by providing a sacrifice. The stabbing of Payton Isabella Leutner by Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser generated, inevitably, an international moral panic, some of it justified: just how much were parents aware of the content their children might be consuming unsupervised in their devices? (YouTube, where Weier and Geyser absorbed much of their Slenderman media, did not launch YouTube Kids until 2015. When Weier and Geyser went on their tablets, there was no delineation between age-appropriate and inappropriate videos.)

Some of the coverage around the attempted murder, though, appeared to be under the impression that Slenderman really did have the occult powers of mind-control that Weier and Geyser had credited him with. Overheated commentators acted as though a demonic force had been unleashed into the brains of children by the internet. In reality, though, the two perpetrators were sadly vulnerable girls. Geyser had untreated early-onset schizophrenia with vivid delusions. Meanwhile, Weier had been bullied and isolated until she met Geyser: in her police interview, she explained her actions by saying she hadn’t wanted to lose the friendship.

Weier and Geyser, then, had noclipped out of reality. They were lost in the Backrooms of their shared fantasy. When they were arrested, they had been attempting to walk to “Slender Mansion”, the supposed home of Slenderman which they had decided was actually located in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. In footage of them after their arrests, they earnestly describe Slenderman’s abilities. Within their private game, Leutner had been reduced to the status of a non-playable character — a prop without her own inner life.

Each generation creates the monsters it needs, or perhaps the monsters it deserves: the horror genre is a kind of collective nightmare, where cultural anxieties are given grotesque form. In the 2000s, the idea of being stalked by a faceless humanoid who could manipulate your brain made instinctive sense to internet users: by placing yourself online, you created a digital version of your own psyche that could be rifled through by malicious anons, and abused. Slenderman stole children, and the internet seemed to be stealing them too.

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In the film Backrooms, the monster isn’t a character — it’s a place, and what happens to you when you’re in there. Our current contemporary nightmare isn’t the creature that stalks you. It’s the possibility of slipping into a parallel dimension and never being able to come back. Everything that exists in the Backrooms is an echo of something outside them, but distorted, like degraded digital copies, or AI hallucinations. The characters who enter the Backrooms are initially repulsed by their strangeness, but some end up seduced by them: the Backrooms feel more real than the real world.

For the director, who is young enough to have grown up fully online, this must be a very recognizable kind of horror. Like the Backrooms, the internet is a place designed to make you lose your bearings, as you click from link to link or scroll from post to post until you’re deep down a rabbit hole with no way of retracing your steps. It’s also a place where you can lose yourself, psychologically and morally: an infinite version of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, where every corridor draws you deeper into your own corruption.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that, as well as birthing creepypasta and myriad other forms of internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful have been the factories for some of the most heinous online tendencies. The writer Dale Beran (in his book It Came From Something Awful) describes these boards as incubators for the memeified far Right. 4chan in particular became characterized by a deep nihilism, where anything — from child pornography to suicide to school shootings — could be treated as a joke.

For most, this was edginess without intent. For others, it was a staging ground for real world violence: in multiple cases, mass shooters or murderers have announced their intentions or documented their crimes on 4chan. The distorted norms of the site meant that they expected, and sometimes received, applause for their acts. Maybe the fellow users cheering for killing were evil by nature. More likely, their absorption into the parallel world of message boards had fractured something in their sense of right and wrong.

Though it’s set in 1990 (and its characters consequently use no technology more advanced than a fixed-line telephone), Backrooms is probably the most accurate film about the internet ever made. It’s terrifying, not because its world is frighteningly alien, but because its world is frighteningly familiar: like the characters of the film, we are all constantly being seduced by what’s on the other side of the portal. The online realm is real, even if it doesn’t exist as space or matter. We’re all lost here, and the longer we stay, the more monstrous we become.

The young man in question is called Bear. Never was a name so ironically bestowed for this Bear is anxious, tentative, and terrified of overstepping. He’s in love with a co-worker at the local music store, a girl called Nikki, but cannot steel himself to declare his affections to her. In a hippy shop selling crystals and dreamcatchers, he buys a “One Wish Willow” — marketed as a “collectible toy from the Eighties”. He breaks it in half as instructed, and wishes “that Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the world”. He immediately gets his heart’s desire, and all hell breaks loose.

To boomers, this may sound like a familiar tale of the terrifyingly unhinged power of the female libido, with shades of Fatal Attraction or Single White Female. But this film is no nostalgic reprise of that late-Eighties theme. The obsession of the title belongs as much to the male as to the female; and if anything, the latter is to be thoroughly pitied. Thanks to the fulfillment of Bear’s wish, Nikki is subject to an all-consuming romantic possession that drives her towards abject self-debasement and social humiliation against her better nature. During a rare moment of lucidity, she begs for death as a release, and who would blame her? We’ve all been there, Nikki love.

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Actress Inde Navarrette pulls off an astonishing feat as the obsessed young woman, alternating insane aggression with comic pathos. Her devotion is child-like in its intensity, completely untrammeled by attempts to play it cool. Most of the time she is all id, no ego, openly begging Bear for more affection, ferociously guarding him against imagined rivals, and covering the front door with tape to stop him leaving for work. When that fails, she becomes literally rooted to the spot until he returns, with devastating consequences for the carpet.

But for all of Nikki’s spellbound antics, the more interesting character is Bear — sensitively played by another relative unknown, Michael Johnstone. His story makes a compelling contrast to the original “monkey paw” trope, created by author W.W. Jacobs in 1902. Jacobs’ short story depicted a cozy working-class domestic scene, interrupted by the arrival of an acquaintance fresh from the colonies, carrying with him a mysterious shriveled object that will grant three wishes. Ignoring the visitor’s dire warnings and his own misgivings — “it seems to me that I’ve got all that I want” — the family patriarch, Mr White, wishes for two hundred pounds. Next morning White receives this exact sum as compensation for his son’s death, “caught in the machinery” at work. The old man’s second wish is to bring his horribly mangled son back. His third wish is to cancel out the second, finding himself too afraid to answer the ominous knock at the door.

As befits a child of his time, director Barker says he first came across The Monkey’s Paw via an episode of The Simpsons, but one hopes he has read Jacobs’ story too. Along with all the timely social anxieties it expressed about the costs to the working classes of industrial progress, and the threat from the exotic foreigner (Mr White, anyone?), there was a simpler message there too. The Indian fakir who originally put the spell on the monkey’s paw, Jacobs wrote, “wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow”. White’s mistake was to fail to accept his lot in life, trying in Promethean fashion to alter destiny instead. As such, he firmly belongs in the pantheon of classic Gothic overreachers, along with Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray.

But Bear’s tragic flaw is precisely the opposite. He is a chronic underreacher who uses his modernized monkey’s paw as a lazy proxy for a deliberate, intentional choice. Romantically he is paralyzed, terrified of being seen to “take advantage” of a girl — even though that’s precisely what he eventually does. And even after it seems clear Nikki has fallen under his spell, still he can’t bring himself to publicly own his feelings. When she asks him if he likes her, his guarded response is: “Why, do you like me?”.

Crazy as she is, Nikki can tell what Bear’s real problem is. At one point she gives him a “Tiger’s Eye” stone as a love gift, to bring him “confidence and will-power”. But it doesn’t work, reappearing during the film’s finale to no avail. It’s not hard to conclude that through this character, Barker has neatly encapsulated the predicament of a generation: unable to ask a pretty girl for a light, let alone steal fire from the gods.

According to some recent estimates, nearly 50% of men between 18-25 have never asked a woman out on a date. Possible reasons are legion, but include the fact that there are simply fewer chance encounters with strangers as social life has moved online. There is an attendant awareness in the young of social media’s potential for making private humiliations public. And there’s the surrounding progressive culture, placing huge emphasis on the potential for men to get sexual approaches wrong. Unfortunately, the threat of heavy social censure only seems to produce confusion and fear in conscientious types, while leaving habitual sex pests perfectly unperturbed.

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In a sense, then, Obsession acts as a permission structure to examine this inadvertent mess, drawing to the surface of consciousness a widespread ambivalence, but without telling viewers how to feel about it. Such story-telling neutrality makes a nice contrast with the socially conscious horror that was popular about a decade ago, following the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Made at a moment of peak didacticism, Peele’s film — though otherwise pretty good — was widely interpreted as saying black people should be afraid of white people, and that white people should feel bad about this. For a while afterwards, we got a spate of clunky lectures disguised as horror films, addressed primarily to viewer’s consciences and only secondarily to their viscera.

But Obsession prefers showing not telling, and is all the better for it. When I eventually staggered out of the cinema, senses bruised by spectacle and noise, the world looked temporarily different. Strangers’ smiles seemed uncanny, the birdsong eerily pronounced. I felt peculiarly in touch with the numinous, and that doesn’t often happen to me in Horsham. It was as if I’d had a tiny holiday from reality, or a restorative miniature psychotic break.

You don’t get much of this uncanny afterglow from streaming films at home, which is another reason why the phenomenal success of Obsession and Backrooms is so cheering. It is striking that both Barker and Kane Parsons — the 20-year-old director of Backrooms — began experimenting with their craft on much smaller screens, bypassing turgid studio systems by taking their output straight to YouTube, and building massive fanbases there. But still the silver screen retained its old power to bewitch. As a result, now these directors are luring the kids out of their bedrooms to watch with other people — a fact that may do wonders for the birth rate, if nothing else.

Presumably these newcomers are encountering the thrill of mental surrender to a huge cinematic experience at close quarters, with no pause or mute button available, in a place where it is frowned upon to have a rival screen out at the same time. And who knows? Perhaps they are also learning of that time-honored way to make an easy move on your love object, something that also used to be big in the Eighties: reaching for a trembling hand in the scary dark.