Web Video / Kane Pixels' The Backrooms

"Hello? Is someone there?"

"That's not a person... that is not a fucking person!"

— Marvin E. Leigh, "Pitfalls"

On January 7th, 2022, interest in the Backrooms creepypasta was bolstered when a YouTube user named Kane "Pixels" Parsons released a viral found footage short about a camera operator who finds himself trapped in the Backrooms, unknowingly stalked by wire-like entities, one of which eventually decides to give chase. The video was given a VHS filter to disguise the CGI nature of the project, and many viewers were impressed with the lifelike camera movements that made the video feel real. The video was later followed by others which turned it into a full Analog Horror series, disconnected from the previous Backrooms-themed wikis.

The series follows the secretive ASYNC Foundation as its employees conduct experiments aimed at exploring alternate universes in order to to solve storage and housing issues. Their efforts result in the Threshold, a portal to the Backrooms. But once this doorway is opened, people begin to disappear into thin air with increasing frequency, finding themselves trapped inside the Backrooms, which, as ASYNC begins to discover, is somewhere that is far from hospitable for human life, and not as deserted as it first appears...

Videos

• The Backrooms (Found Footage), found footage of a teenager falling into the Backrooms and exploring it while being stalked by an enigmatic entity.
• Mar11_90_ARCHIVE.tar ^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in The Backrooms (Found Footage)'s description.
• Backrooms - The Third Test, the ASYNC foundation conduct a third test of Project KV31.
• Backrooms - First Contact, footage of the Backrooms' discovery and the events leading up to it.
• collateral.mov, the deadly aftermath of the Backrooms being discovered. ^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in Backrooms - First Contact's description.
• Backrooms - Missing Persons, a group of hazmat researchers happen upon the corpse of a young man.
• Backrooms - Autopsy Report, an autopsy report of the young man's corpse.
• Backrooms - Informational Video, a team of ASYNC's researchers investigate the Backrooms. Their cameraman ends up experiencing quite a lot more than he bargained for.
• Backrooms - Motion Detected, in response to the events of Informational Video, ASYNC sets up a series of motion-activated cameras in the Backrooms.
• Backrooms - Prototype, a short video featuring an earlier prototype of Project KV31.
• Backrooms - Pitfalls, a researcher named Marvin E. Leigh falls down a pit in the Backrooms and is separated from his group.
• Backrooms - Report, Marvin and his team give the ASYNC higher-ups the camera footage he got from the previous video.
• 9780415263573, seemingly-unrelated traffic cam footage.^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in Backrooms - Report's description.
• Backrooms - Presentation, a video presentation regarding the "A-Space" program that is intercut with footage of ASYNC researchers and Vice Director Ivan Beck.
• Simpsons, an old clip of a Simpsons episode. ^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in Backrooms - Presentation's description.
• Backrooms - Found Footage #2, the camera footage of a young woman who falls into the Backrooms while experimenting on a clippable part of her garage.
• home_27647.mov, the revelation of what happened to the "A-Space" program. ^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in Backrooms - Found Footage #2's description.
• I Remember, an unknown narrator delivers a bizarre, metaphor-laden monologue while distorted images related to ASYNC are shown.
• Backrooms - Reunion, Mark Blume, Randall Tachi and Marvin Leigh conduct an initial layout analysis of Room 14C.
• _recording014, an ASYNC employee makes a phone call to Ivan Beck. ^note Unlisted, found by a link hidden in Backrooms - Reunion's description.
• Backrooms - Overflow
• Backrooms - Damage Control, the aftermath of the events of Reunion, and what ASYNC is doing in response to it.

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A film adaptation has been announced, distributed by A24 with Kane set to direct.

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Kane Pixels' The Backrooms contains examples of:

• Adaptational Backstory Change: The Backrooms is connected to a Top Secret experiment with connecting to an alternate dimension for purposes such as solving space shortages. However, the project got out of control with people disappearing from the normal world at an overall increasing rate. It is also possible — and strongly recommended — to bring multiple people into the Backrooms (at least 3 is mandatory for ASYNC staff due to its unstable nature).
• Adaptation Expansion: The alternate universe featured is solely based upon Level 0 but with many additions to it like lower and upper levels that are directly part of Zero instead of being disconnected but accessible by warp zones, 3-dimensional features like ceiling height variations, occasional ramps connecting places at different heights, pitfalls to lower levels, places that are "outdoors", and places with radically different appearances from the default yellowed drywall corridors. This plane also has many confidential names in the ASYNC Foundation for the sake of convenient labels.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • In Found Footage, is there one wire entity or are there multiple?
  • Missing Persons: Is the human the hazmat researchers find deceased? Are they even human? Are they on the verge of becoming something else? Autopsy Report does clarify that he's dead, but the details of his autopsy don't completely rule out the idea he was being turned into a monster, and Found Footage #2 strongly implies that he was in the process of becoming a Bacteria entity.
  • The ASNYC representative in Damage Control states that, after being discovered, the company attempted to re-integrate Peter Tench back into society by reversing his faked death, but that Peter broke away in a fit of madness, believing they were trying to harm him and he was still inside the Backrooms, which contradicts Peter's earlier statement from Reunion that ASYNC left him in there to die. It's unclear who to believe.
• Badass Bookworm: Dr Kirk Maxwell, who managed to relieve Peter Tench of his stolen shotgun in Damage Control. Notably, as far as Maxwell knew, Tench wasn't actually shooting anybody with it, so he put himself at considerable extra risk in doing so.
• Bizarro Apocalypse: Downplayed, as it's not quite an apocalypse, and life for most people continues on as normal, but it's strongly implied that by successfully using Project KV31 to open a gateway into the Backrooms, ASYNC has somehow destabilised the very nature of reality, causing a steadily increasing number of people to find themselves trapped in the Eldritch Location.
• Breather Episode: "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" does this in a chapter sense, after building to a wire monster frightening the main character into fleeing and jumping down a chute in desperation: the camera guy finds himself in a location that resembles someone's home with an eccentric stairway between a kitchen to the right and closet door with a dark hallway to the left (based on a certain "liminal space◊" picture). It's very quiet here if not still conveying a sense of the unknown, and the camera guy catches his breath here for several seconds.
• Body Horror: Wire monster aside, the hazmats get a good look at a deceased young man seated against a wall covered in a mold-like substance. In Autopsy Report, a mortician concludes that much of the subject's body was overtaken by some mutant strain of ordinary hay bacillus.
• Call-Back: Damage Control shows that Peter Tench was disarmed in his mad dash through the Complex by Dr Kirk Maxwell, the bald researcher first seen in live-action during Report.
• Canon Foreigner: The wire entity is an all-new creation of this series.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames:
  • Sort of. The Backrooms are only mentioned as an in-universe nickname made up by the employees, not as its official designation. Instead, they are usually called "A-Space" here instead. Completely averted with the out-of-universe series title: it's definitely "The Backrooms," with no attempt made to avoid the "silly" name.
  • The process of entering the Backrooms without the Threshold is never referred to as "noclipping" as it was in the source material. The company dubs them Null Zones as heard in "Pitfalls" while Marvin explores the pitfall in question.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Leans into this angle rather heavily, with increasing emphasis that ASYNC were meddling with something they could scarcely understand by creating the Threshold, and as a result, reality itself may be beginning to unravel.
• Cryptic Conversation:
  • Strange fragments of mirrored messages briefly flash over the screen in certain videos. Those mention things like the inhabitability of the Backrooms and an unnamed man who can be held responsible for everything.
  • "I Remember" has a narrator monologuing in metaphors about once living in a "manor" that was forgotten and flooded by the "sea," with visuals suggesting he's talking about ASYNC being abandoned and consumed by the Backrooms. He wonders if anything can be greater than what happened and ends by declaring "it" had been there all along.
• Cruel Twist Ending:
  • Maybe. Marvin in Pitfalls seems to safely escape the entity chasing him, but emits a nasty cough by the end of it, and knowing what we already know about the bacteria present in the Backrooms, this could be a bad omen. He has after all tumbled through the pit and also fallen while running from the creature, and if the integrity of his hazmat suit was compromised at any point. Though people tend to cough after a hard bout of exercise, and he bolted straight out of a house and down a suburban block, in a full Hazmat suit and respiratory gear. Ultimately averted, as Marvin is back to trekking through the Backrooms in Reunion.
  • Zig-Zagged to hell and back with Peter Tench, the Informational Video camera operator. At the end of Informational Video, he finds a strange ASYNC facility which sets alarms blaring as soon as he enters it, which turns out to be the Threshold two months into the future (Presentation)... And then Reunion implied that ASYNC threw him back into the endless corridors to die, because they'd already covered up his death and wanted to avoid awkward questions. Damage Control suggests, however, that ASYNC was in the process of attempting to re-integrate Peter into society before he supposedly fell into paranoid schizophrenia due to the prolonged isolation and re-entered the Backrooms, looking for an alternate exit. Unable to find one, Peter then escaped the facility on his own... whereupon he tumbled down a hill and died due to blunt force trauma several hours later.
• Darker and Edgier: This series has a more dramatic tone to it, with the comical elements at least downplayed.
  • It focuses on the tragedy of people disappearing from reality, and the ASYNC Foundation dealing with the hazard of sending explorers into the Backrooms.
  • Entities encounters are played for drama, and more akin to encounters with wild predators than supernatural events. The Bacteria entity has a major presence in the series as the main entity taking explorers by surprise, using clever ploys like Voice Changeling abilities to lure people in.
  • ASYNC leadership sees great potential with the virtually limitless space that The Backrooms can provide, but they all seem to gloss over the dangers in their "Presentation" video, as the benefits are too tempting to give up on developing Backrooms as a multi-use dimension. Higher-up leaders may even be willing to abandon people who could become inconvenient whistleblowers into the Backrooms.
• Doomed by Canon: home_27647.mov proves that people once lived in the room where the Bacteria is discovered during Found Footage #2, proving that while ASYNC will succeed in the initial stages of its "A-Space" commercialisation, the project is doomed to failure... Though it's not like the whole thing wasn't just waiting to Go Horribly Wrong in any case.
• Downer Beginning: For the series, Found Footage is the starting video, yet it has an overall dismal mood with the Male Camera Operator ultimately getting captured by a Bacteria and the video ending on a Bolivian Army Ending. This episode is also chronologically last in the timeline showing us bits and pieces of the "A-Space" program after it all came crashing down figuratively. Following episodes flash back to the past when ASYNC staff discover this virtually inexhaustible space that could solve much of Earth's land shortages and the unduly optimistic proposal by a higher-up(s) to colonize this place despite mounting evidence that this will not end well.
• Down the Drain: "Backrooms - Found Footage #2" marks the first time we see this universe's version of "The Poolrooms". It has elements of swimming pools with water resistant tiles, and some oblong water pools that appear barely like hot tubs. The facility being underneath the yellow halls seems to indicate it being a waterworks of some sort.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: The ASYNC representative informing the research institute's employees of Peter Tench's death describes him as a "brilliant man" who would have wanted his colleagues to continue giving their all to ASYNC's research... Despite the fact that Tench's misadventures show, if nothing else, just how dangerous and foolish ASYNC's work really is.
• Eerily Out-of-Place Object: Just about anything can warp into the Backrooms and some relatively large items can turn up here such as an automobile that warped in off a highway, crashing spectacularly into a wall. Some features seems to be replicated from real structures instead.
• Eldritch Location: The titular Backrooms — an endless labyrinth of seemingly randomly generated areas outside of normal space and time which, beyond the iconic yellow corridors, include such bizarre features as a small suburban neighborhood and an oddly-proportioned swimming pool. Stepping a few meters away from your group can cause time itself to shift, strange noises can be heard out of nowhere, and reality itself seems to be fragile in their corridors.
• Enigmatic Institute: The ASYNC Foundation. A secretive government-funded commercial research organisation which has been covertly conducting reality-warping experiments leading to the discovery of the titular Backrooms.
• Foreshadowing:
  • "Backrooms (Found Footage)" has the camera guy discover a section that looks like a place that is eventually meant to be inhabited, or was abandoned. "Presentation" would introduce the idea of developing the Backrooms into A-Space units to solve space shortages on Earth, and these levels appear to be related to that end. As a note, chronologically, (Found Footage) occurs prior to the A-Space proposal. Found Footage 2 would confirm that indeed some living spaces were harmful due to the risk of infection by the mutant Bacteria.
  • Several of the videos are preceded with FBI warnings cautioning against reproduction or unauthorized viewing of the footage, implying that the federal authorities will at some point get involved with ASYNC's dangerous schemes, or indeed the consequences of them.
  • The bizarre half-decayed state of the body in Autopsy Report, which was infected with some bizarre mutant strain of Hay Bacillus, was the first heavy hint that the 'wire entities' are in fact all that remains of humans infected by this strange pathogen, which was all but confirmed in Found Footage 2.
  • 9780415263573 shows a car falling into the Backrooms at full speed. In Found Footage 2 we see a car smashed against one of the walls.
  • After seeing a fellow researcher equip his shotgun, Marvin says "I wouldn't wanna be on the end of that." A few minutes later, Marvin and his coworkers find themselves held at gunpoint by that same shotgun.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In the video "The Backrooms (Found Footage)," a wire entity can be barely seen around a corner in two instances. This suggests that the camera operator's presence has already been detected by at least one entity. The first instance is easiest to spot, due to the wanderer turning the camera after hearing something.
  • In "Informational Video," around a minute in, a message briefly flashes on screen which says, "Not that it would do any good, but be..." before being cut off.
• Gas Leak Cover Up:
  • After Peter Tench disappeared on an expedition into the Backrooms, ASYNC staged a car accident to provide a mundane explanation for his death. This becomes a problem when Peter returns months later. Peter suggests ASYNC returned him to the Backrooms to die, while ASYNC claim they were looking for a way to return him to normal life but his Sanity Slippage caused him to run back into the Backrooms.
  • Also possibly Implied in Damage Control. After he shoots Mark at the end of Reunion, Peter runs like hell through ASYNC's facility, and is disarmed along the way, but manages to make it outside... He then supposedly trips and cracks his head on a rock. It's at the very least slightly suspicious. Security footage of an unidentified mysterious figure in public and a scene of a wall phone rigning suggests that Peter may have escaped.
• Genre Savvy: Zig-Zagged to hell and back with ASYNC. On one hand, they're very careful when exploring the Backrooms, kitting their researchers out with all sorts of safety gear and mandating that they travel in groups. The only times their researchers get lost is when they willingly breach protocol (in "Informational Video" and "Pitfalls"). Furthermore, when Marvin encounters the Bacteria entity, his superiors respond by sealing off the corridor and fortifying the Threshold rather than attempting to capture the creature For Science! However, "Presentation" shows that they still intend to commercialise the Backrooms, even though what little they have already learned about the Eldritch Location suggests that this would be a terrible idea.
• He Knows Too Much: It was heavily implied in Reunion and its companion video that, after Peter Tench (the camera operator from Informational Video) jumped forward in time and set off the Threshold alarms, ASYNC returned him to the Backrooms to die, not wanting anyone to find out about the temporal anomalies, and as they had already faked his death in a car crash to cover it up. Damage Control presents an alternate view of events from ASYNC's perspective, in which the research institute attempted to find a way to return him to society without blowing their cover, but Peter, having developed something akin to schizophrenia, escaped and ran back into the Complex of his own volition.
• Hell Is That Noise: The deafening roars and banging noises emanated by the wire entity.
• How We Got Here: "Backrooms - (Found Footage)" takes place on September 23, 1996 chronologically occurring after later installments. We are introduced to a Male Camera Operator stumbling upon titular Backrooms and exploring the mysterious alternate reality. Later videos show the series of events at the ASYNC Foundation that allowed this Found Footage incident to be possible.
• Human-Focused Adaptation: This series is highly driven by human characters, especially members of the ASYNC Foundation, and the Missing Persons who disappear into The Backrooms. Even the star entities of this series, the Bacteria, have integral ties with humans.
• In-Series Nickname: Played for Laughs, oddly enough. One of the other ASYNC researchers refers to the Bacteria entity as "Marvin's friend". He's not amused.
• Jump Scare:
  • The cameraman of Found Footage turns around and screams as he sees the wire entity right behind him before it grabs him, while the camera falls and noclips back to the real world out of the sky.
  • A similar event happens during Found Footage #2: The camera operator hides behind a wall when being chased by another Bacteria, which seems to be working, until she just has to take a quick peek... And of course the entity is right there, and comes screaming after her again.
  • Peter Tench jumping at the armed researcher from out of nowhere in Reunion, grabbing the shotgun, and holding his former colleagues at gunpoint.
• Lean and Mean: The wire entity is tall and incredibly thin, also appearing to be potentially capable of morphing its body structure.
• Left Hanging: In "Pitfalls," the first researcher to get across the titular pits opens the door, makes an exclamation of surprise, and requests that the camera be brought over. But since the cameraman falls into the pits, we never do see what was on the other side of the door, especially since ASYNC sealed off the corridor after the Bacteria entity sighting. In Reunion they unblock the corridor, and it's implied that Room 14C is the area through the door — it's dark, with concrete instead of carpeted flooring.
• Mundane Utility: Upon finding this entire otherworldly dimension with broken physics and possibly lethal hazards, ASYNC's largest profit concern is using it for storage and living space.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Multiple videos do not show the entity, only traces of where it might have been along with several loud banging noises that sound like its footsteps. At one point, multiple human voices may be heard conversing from behind a wall, although they are never seen.
• Obscured Special Effects:
  • One of the most common effects is the use of Deliberate VHS Quality to divert attention away from the CGI used in the videos and fool the mind into believing that the video was actually recorded in a real location.
  • It is very rare that a human is shown outside of a HAZMAT Suit, probably due to the difficulty of making it look organic and convincing, so human characters are either shown very rarely, shown within their protective suits during extended periods or shown on security footage in lower resolution to make the synthetic models less noticeable as such. Pitfalls briefly shows two employees in business-casual attire facing away from the audience towards rendered HAZMAT outfits to help blur the lines between real and virtual scenes.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In Pitfalls, the explorer who falls down a pit wanders off to find somebody who is shouting for help and finds signs of a person living in a kind of residential area. Treading lightly, he gets a look at something standing in the distance behind a corner, and mutters "that is not a person" to himself. Then the entity starts screaming and flailing around, leading the explorer to yell "that is not a fucking person!!" as he flees in horror.
  • In Damage Control, an ASYNC employee can be heard exclaiming "Shit!" amongst a chorus of concerned murmuring as the existence of time anomalies in the Backrooms is finally revealed to the company at large.
• Poor Communication Kills: Regardless of how Peter Tench ended up in the Backrooms again following the events of Presentation, it's clear that ASYNC knew he was there and hostile to them/mentally unstable, yet they sent in research teams mere days after he disappeared into the labyrinth. If they were callous enough to hope he was dead, they logically should have waited longer for starvation to take its toll, and if the researchers were supposed to find him, they probably should have had at least some idea what they were in for. Instead, Tench's sudden appearance is a nasty shock to the whole team in Reunion, and a panicking Mark Blume gets shot and injured as a result.
• "Rashomon"-Style: The Ambiguous Situation of what happened to Peter Tench between the end of Presentation and his reappearance in Reunion. Peter suggests that ASYNC left him for dead after he reappeared, dragging him back into the Complex to prevent their cover being blown, while ASYNC maintain that he became delusional after he returned to the facility, being convinced that he was still in the Backrooms, and he returned to the labyrinth to escape what he was convinced was a sinister trap. There's no conclusive evidence to confirm either story.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: According to First Contact and its unlisted sister video, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was a byproduct of the ASYNC Foundation successfully opening a portal to the Backrooms.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Zigzagged.
  • Not only can you "fall" into or out of the Backrooms without any major injuries...but the camera guy drops down a chute a significant distance and seems none the worse for wear. However, warping back to reality is presumably still dangerous, as the wrong exits may spawn you far up in the sky for a fatal fall, which allowed the in-universe footage to be recovered and analyzed.
  • This gets subverted in "Pitfalls" where the main character Marv declares that he sustained some injuries from his fall into the titular hole, yet this fall was a result of an unstable piece of solid floor losing or missing the "solid" trait.
  • "Backrooms - Found Footage #2" shows that a Gravity Screw may happen when falling, demonstrated when the camerawoman has a slowed descent falling through a hole into The Poolrooms. There are also green energy anomalies occurring down there, which can warp the layout of this world.
• Recap Episode: Damage Control serves to sum up and confirm the story of Peter Tench's disappearance, subsequent cover-up, and unexpected return via Time Travel. After that, however, the video contradicts the implications in Reunion that ASYNC tried to dispose of Tench in the Backrooms by instead suggesting that ASYNC tried to help him return to society but his Sanity Slippage made him think he was still in the Complex. Many questions still remain.
• Research, Inc.: In this version of the lore, the Backrooms were originally discovered by the ASYNC Foundation in the late 1980s to serve as a vast area for storage and residential needs.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: ASYNC, as Enforced by Kane as a way to explicitly avert Evil, Inc..
  [Everyone's] seen the over-the-top, uh... Corporation or agency or whatever, that is just very, like, strict bureaucratic evil. Like, maybe they seem nice and fine, but then they've got this secret evil agenda to take over the world or do something, and ASYNC simply just isn't that. It is a research institute. It is filled with people who have never touched a gun in their life. They're not prepared to go in like... I-It's not a military organization.
  • From what we've seen so far, it has implemented common sense safety measures for exploring the Backrooms. These include Level A hazmat suits, traveling in groups of three or more inside, having a tether back to the Threshold, and even having an alarm while it is open as an audio guide back to safety. Employees are also obligated to report any injuries just like at regular companies.
  • "Report" shows that they're genuinely concerned by the captured footage of the Bacteria, and have blocked off the hallway leading to its last known location, as well as fortifying the entrance area.
  • However, "Presentation" shows that at least one of the higher-ups at the company is still pushing to commercialize The Backrooms through the "A-Space" project, subverting the company's safety goals and throwing caution to the wind. Still, this seems more likely to be down to arrogance and/or Greed rather than a genuine willingness to hurt people.
  • And furthermore, "Reunion" strongly implies that they abandoned Peter Tench (the cameraman in Informational Video) in the Backrooms to die as they didn't want anybody finding out about the time dilation he'd experienced, plus they'd already faked his death. Damage Control, however, has a representative state that when Tench returned, ASYNC attempted to reintegrate him into society before Tench attempted his own escape after he fell off the deep end, but ASYNC's word is highly suspect at this point, so the truth is unknown.
• Room Full of Crazy: In Found Footage near the hall from where the first pursuing Bacteria spots the Male Camera Operator, there is writing and pictures scrawled on a wall that seems to be from someone who misses seeing sunlight through a window and an ominous-looking drawing of black eyes with just a nose to indicate part of a face. The writing is difficult to make out, but the word "God" and the sentence "DON'T MOVE STAY STILL" are clearly visible along with what appears to be tally marks.
• Shout-Out:
  • In "The Backrooms (Found Footage)," when the camera guy drops down a chute into another level, he ends up in a facsimile of someone's home, based upon a popular liminal space photograph◊ of the inside of someone's home. The next area has a courtyard through a window based upon the same feature of Holiday Inn Express at Heathrow Airport in England. Music Disc Thirteen from the Minecraft soundtrack can also be heard.
  • The series has its share of nods to Half-Life.
    • When the Male Camera Operator ends up falling into the liminal space home, you can hear some of the ambiance from Ravenholm as the camera guy recovers.
    • ASYNC is also like a down-to-earth take on the Black Mesa Research Facility. ASYNC is developing their own portal system and employing HAZMAT suits grounded in reality more or less, as opposed to Half-Life's sci-fi HEV suits with deflector shields and onboard medical systems. ASYNC's general safety regulations are considerably better than Black Mesa's as well.
    • "Pitfalls" has a business-casual-dressed figure with arms behind their back looking down mysteriously from a balcony towards the entry portal and Marvin who is operating the camera, similar to sightings of The G-Man.
  • "Pitfalls" features a couple of familiar blue chairs in the Backrooms, one of which is tipped over.
  • "Found Footage #2" begins with the camera operator showing off an area on a concrete floor she has placed blue tape on to show where the boundaries to a threshold to the Backrooms are. The blue tape resembles the album cover for Stage 6 of The Caretaker album Everywhere at the End of Time.
• Surreal Horror: I Remember is deeply unsettling because the narrator's cryptic remarks and the strange, distorted images that accompany them are totally incomprehensible.
• Techno Babble: The official name for the Threshold device allowing access to the Backrooms is Project KV31, the "Low Proximity Magnetic Distortion System."
• Time Crash: Not only is a possible to time travel to the future, but media transmissions from the future are also received in past. The Backrooms is also copying structures from the future, such as a parts of the Holiday Inn Express at Heathrow Airport, which opened in 2018 and is filmed in 1996.
• Voice Changeling: The wire entity in "Pitfalls" displays the ability to mimic human words, which lures the protagonist to it.
• Wham Episode:
  • In "Backrooms: Pitfalls," Marvin follows cries for help from an unknown person. The cries are not from another person, but a Bacteria who gives chase. Marvin manages to escape without being captured. This marks the return of the Bacteria entity since the very first episode, and when ASYNC starts documenting them from Marvin's encounter.
  • "Report" is the very first instance in the series where we get to see the faces of the researchers, and what the facilities of the ASYNC foundation look like.
  • The employee who got lost in "Informational Video" was finally elaborated upon in "Presentation." He traveled forward in time by three months and ended up back at the threshold fortification where he was found when he tripped the alarm.
  • "Found Footage #2" and its sister video reveal that ASYNC's work managed to progress to the point where people were living in the Backrooms, and the Bacteria entities are definitely formed somehow from dead humans.
  • "Reunion", as the title would suggest, involves the surprising reappearance of Peter Tench, the cameraman from "Informational Video", who was put back inside by ASYNC in the interest of covering up evidence of the time dilation in the Backrooms. Near the end of the video, it's heavily implied he's the one who left the warnings scribbled on the wall, glimpsed all the way back in the first video, and at the end of the video itself, Peter steals another researcher's shotgun, shoots said researcher, and flees, now armed and incredibly dangerous.
  • "Damage Control" picks up where "Reunion" left off with Peter Tench on the run to escape The Complex with the shotgun he wrested away from Mark. Peter escapes up a freight elevator in the ASYNC facility proper and flees the building. However, we are given a conflicting account of what happened to Peter by an executive presentation (for the employees) and a suspicious insistence that Peter died from hitting his head and that there's nothing more to extract. Viewers are given views of security footage showing a mysterious figure out in public, suggesting there's more going on than the presentation is letting on.

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"If anybody, blame him."

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