There's something terrifying about musty, forgotten, anonymous backrooms.
As someone who's done a little bit of urban exploration with my camera, I can tell you, there are few things more unsettling than a building full of empty, discarded rooms left to molder into decayed disuse. And, in another life, I've had some other reasons to know more than I'd care to about out-dated and disused space in semi-industrial settings. Old offices at the back of old buildings that smell like damp wallboard and receded floodwaters. I think if H.P. Lovecraft were alive and writing today, his nameless horrors would lurk in places like that. I've been thinking about it lately thanks to Mark Frauenfelder's article in Magnet about "The Backrooms", a 4Chan meme that's been given deeper life thanks to procedural generation and people stuck at home. His article has videos, but more importantly, links to the deeper world of this horror space. The videos and games are ... Well, they're interesting and disturbing and something you sort of need to experience. I probably should have saved all this for Halloween, but, I didn't think it would keep any longer.
Go and look for yourself. Yes, it's unsettling, but it's also a safe distraction from the more unsettling things happening in our world today.
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