As an Eldritch Location where the environment can be just as dangerous as the entities, The Backrooms has plenty of octane to fuel nightmares. Please note that any videos presented here are just artist interpretations that help convey what the levels may look like and aren't the final say on the matter.
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In general
In general:
The very idea that stepping onto the wrong place in reality could cause you to no-clip into the Backrooms can inspire a sense of being unable to trust your eyes or your senses in general. Then there's the idea of going about a regular day and suddenly being trapped in a dilapidated, yellowed maze of drywall with no rhyme of reason to the layout and backtracking being inexplicably an unreliable way to get back to where you were before.
- Level 0 is usually considered relatively safe, secure, and with a minimal chance of entity encounters, but there is a chance one may see the entrance to place called the Red Rooms. These should not be entered under any circumstances because they will trap a wanderer inside with no know way to escape. The Red Rooms work like an infinite loop of rooms that keep repeating no matter how many times you try to make progress.
- If you're very unfortunate, you may end up skipping the relatively safe Level 0 and instead end up somewhere with more danger.
- One of the worst places you can find is Level 611, a place where you're in a maze of corridors with broken flooring that can cause you grievous injury, blood and entrails strewn about, and raw sewage. However, even that pales in comparison to the Unique Enemy of this level, The Sentinel(s). The moment you enter this level, this monster will be closing in on your position to give you a messy death. Additionally, it was based upon a nightmare the original author once had about being hunted by a similar entity.
- Thought the first five levels were bad enough? Wait 'till you find yourself in Level Six: Lights Out.
- First of all, it's not brightly lit or dimly lit: it's completely pitch black, and if you think using a lighter or flashlight will work, you're out of luck, as no light sources work in this level.
- Nothing Is Scarier is in full effect, as there are no physical threats in Lights Out, but you will hallucinate as a by-product of how easily visual perception can be altered by being in the dark.
- Backrooms Level 558
(later 995) by Ruster captures the essence of a suburbia that looks too upbeat. The bright colors of the homes that should be comforting seem too reassuring and the road suggests that there should be vehicles but there is no place to park them like driveways or garages, as if the place is in some sort of dream world. Eventually, an entity spots the camera operator and gives chase but we don't even get a good look at the entity as they shout unnatural laughs and pursue. The neighborhood seems to stretch off indefinitely into the "horizon". - Backrooms - Level 22 (found footage) is like a virtual nightmare in a dismal abandoned parking lot with limited lighting. The sound echoes bizarrely and someone in the distance is pleading for help. Sure enough, the cries for help are coming from a silhouette-like entity who gives chase when approached, forcing Luka to leap over a short safety wall to an uncertain fall. Luka appears to have escaped to film another day, but it's still left ambiguous if this is the same Luka in other videos or someone else who is stuck falling indefinitely.
- Level "The End" is essentially a seemingly endless library or book store that has closed down and had its books all removed. It is absolutely silent besides the humming of computer terminals and despite its relatively ordinary appearance, has Alien Geometries; the laws of physics don't have to apply, and it is easy to become trapped due to the regular method of going from point a to b being unreliable.
- The Poolrooms:
- The Poolrooms may be a relatively calm and serene level, but the fact that it's highly unlikely to come across other wanderers due to how colossal this place is and the danger of catching the Hydrolitis Plague in the poorly lit regions as well as from the stagnant water pools can still make this place unnerving. There is also the danger of warp zones to other levels that resemble The Poolrooms in concept but are more overtly dangerous.
- Poolrooms - The Danger Zone (Found Footage) by Donbit Z portrays the Poolrooms as being connected with related features like Real Life swimming pools, making it possible to be pulled underneath the water and possibly invoking the fear of drowing before warping to The Poolrooms.
- Poolrooms - The Red Room (Exploration Footage) continues Donbit Z's Poolrooms renditions with an eerily realistic new portrayal. We hear an entity lurking out of sight but they are never shown, which can still be chilling.
- Poolrooms - Don't Get Lost (Exploration Footage #2) and Poolrooms - Murky Waters (Exploration Footage #3) by Matt Studios shows an example without any entities at all. It starts off feeling like a relaxing waterworks facility but just imagine having your sanity get worn down from being lost in a place like this.
- Backrooms - Level -9223372036854775808 (found footage) by Ruster depicts a Mushroom Samba world of sensory overload that can be oddly amusing for such a potentially nightmarish level. The level is like a video game level that has experienced a fatal programming error with the audio and video gone haywire. Naturally, Luka the camera operator doesn't want to go inside and we can only imagine what this level might do to a wanderer who goes inside.
- There are some levels that are deemed "unwinnable" either due to lack of people escaping or other factors. For instance, there's The Whiteout and The Blackout, two "enigmatic levels". The Whiteout doesn't seem too bad, as it's devoid of hostile factors (aside from the features making it easy to lose your way), but the grey door deep in the level could catch an unaware, curious wanderer off guard as it leads to The Blackout. The Blackout is a Dead-End Room area and it's a presumably inescapable death trap with dangerous entities and The Bride who follows you endlessly once they see you (but isn't harmful).
- The Hydrolitis Plague is basically a very dangerous disease, providing some Realism-Induced Horror among the fantastic entities. The otherwise serene Poolrooms has this as a cruel surprise if one ventures into the darker parts of the Poolrooms. With only 16% of infectees surviving this disease statistically, it's best to avoid stagnant water in general and the darkest reaches of the Poolrooms as even if you survive, the experience can be very unpleasant. Necrosis, and internal bleeding are possibilities along with a high fever.
- The fact that there’s no true escape from the Backrooms. Once you’ve entered, there’s no getting out. You might think there’s hope for escape with areas like Neon Paradise or The End but those are mere tricks to let your guard down.
Animated Horror Flicks' Backrooms - Found Footage (1992)
- The short initially starts off very light hearted, with a text-to-speech voice advertising a hotel. However, the audio glitches out, and is replaced by very ominous music. Then they glitch into the Backrooms...
- The short does an excellent job at building up tension.
- For the majority of it, nothing really happens... And it constantly puts you on edge, because while our protagonist is wandering the Backrooms, the viewer is paranoid out of their mind that something bad is going to happen. You would be correct if you believed that.
- A lot of the tension from the short comes from the way the Backrooms are structured — it's at once too tight, with several blind corners and dead ends, while being too large, with wide hallways that seem to go on forever. That all of it is completely empty does nothing to take away from the fact that the protagonist is a sitting duck for the entirety of the short. Not helping is the camera movement which frequently pans across the Backrooms, presenting the constant threat of something suddenly coming into view.
- You would be lying if you said the entity didn't scare the hell out of you. Its design is very off-putting. It looks somewhat human, but there's something ever so slightly otherworldly about it, placing it firmly in the Uncanny Valley (the eyes certainly don't help). It gets worse when it starts moving.
- The ending. The entity initially started chasing the camera operator, but appears to have lost him... then it suddenly runs up to the protagonist and shoves him out of a window.
Fanmade works
- A-Sync Research's Backrooms - Found Footage: a series of Fanon that branches off of the Kane Pixels' The Backrooms continuity, gives. Another camera operator has fallen into The Backrooms and finds multiple disturbing moments. When a ball is kicked back into a dark hallway, the ball is sent right back with great force from an unknown party. A dead body is also found behind a bed mattress, with legs removed by curcumstamces unknown. The person behind the camera also encounters a room overgrown with black vines and awakens a "bacteria" entity who starts giving chase relentlessly. It's not the bacteria but a deadly fall that leads to the main character's death, due to panic. We even get a view of the camera operator falling and hitting the ground as the camera goes into free fall separately.
- Evan Royalty's Into The Backrooms features Officer Richardson, a professional By-the-Book Cop who is prepared for a typical patrol, but his experience in the Backrooms is so beyond his training that he is quickly reduced to calling out in desperation to find rescue himself rather than the inverse. His entire experience leaves him in need of psychiatric treatment. His only companion is a synthesized voice over his radio who "assures" him: "Nobody will find you in there." The overseer over the radio gives the misadventure the feel of a Saw film with a serial killer amused by their victim being trapped in a death maze.
- The Level X◊ is nothing short of horrifying. Not only it is endless, empty void, but the moment you enter the room is also the moment your body starts to decay while you're alive. And it's extremely painful. No entities, no atmosphere, just emptiness and a very Cruel and Unusual Death.
- Matt Studio's Backrooms - Second Encounter dispenses with the traditional no-clipping method of entry and tells the story of someone finding a non-euclidean crawl space at the back end of a stairway. Even if the explorer left a trail to mark the way back home, that becomes irrelevant as an object spontaneously hitting the floor from behind causes him to fall down a hole from bring startled and thus become unable to retrace his steps anyway. There are no entities encountered, but the constant loneliness and the sense of how easy it could be to get lost and starve is enough to inspire chills.
- Ohmspino's dinosaurs in the backrooms (found footage) features a POV character stalked not by entities but dinosaurs… completely ordinary dinosaurs. As many viewers point out, it actually comes off as far scarier as it suggests that the Backrooms are far more ancient than we think and that beings have been falling into them since the dawn of time. It ends on a somewhat cheap Jump Scare, though. On top of that, in this video, the Backrooms themselves are quite eerie looking, it's not as bright or vibrant as other versions, making it look unnerving even before the dinosaurs appear.
- The scariest part is the T. rex simply does what it did all the million years ago, hunting its prey, that is you, silently stalking you until it was noticed and then chases you down, with a frightening roar accompanied, as a Shout-Out to 3D Monster Maze. Here, the Tyrannosaurus rex is arguably just as terrifying as the Backrooms' entities, or perhaps even moreso, as unlike the entities, the T. rex was a real predator and it wouldn't take a genius to conclude if it still had existed, it would've definitely saw us as food!
