From the second floor of an old furniture store in Oshkosh to Hollywood.
A photo snapped in Oshkosh more than 20 years ago is the origin of a meme that’s the catalyst for “Backrooms,” a new movie opening in the U.S. this weekend.
The photo is of a grim, empty commercial space — windowless, uniformly dull yellow, lit by fluorescent lights.
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the original backrooms post is genuinely some effective horror because it’s left entirely to the imagination. to give it “lore” is to inherently take away from that which made it scary. the horror is the liminal space, the “in-between”, not knowing what lurks around the corner. https://t.co/QEscfnFRd4 pic.twitter.com/5YPuqHhlOC
— violet (@empyrealviolet) May 30, 2024
Robert Penner, distinguished dissertating fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Department of Anthropology, said the image was originally posted to the HobbyTown Oshkosh website in 2003. It was later shared on the anonymous image board internet forum 4chan in 2019.
From there, the photo of a lifeless room took on a life of its own.
“It is kind of unknown of how it migrated from this website for a hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, onto 4chan, but it found its way somehow, somebody saw it and the crossover happened at some very obscure juncture in human history,” Penner said.
Shortly after the photo was posted, Penner said a “small fandom” grew around it, with people sharing similar creepy images online. He said the lore around the concept grew quickly, with people creating their own worlds, videos and games.
Kane Parsons, the director of “Backrooms,” created a YouTube series in 2022 based on the internet phenomenon. One of those videos has 79 million views. Penner said that series “blew the whole concept open.”
This location in John’s Hobbies is where the original “Backrooms” photo was taken. Evan Casey/WPR
A24 Films gave a nod to the origins of their horror story, tweeting out a billboard in downtown Oshkosh promoting the film.
The building in Oshkosh where the photo was taken is now the home of John’s Hobbies. Owner John Hetzel said he’s owned the store for nine months.
“I didn’t see or hear or know anything until I purchased the store,” Hetzel said.
Hetzel said the owner of HobbyTown, the former store in the space, told him about the building’s tie to the meme.
But anyone looking to make a pilgrimage to the space won’t find anything resembling the room that launched the film. The area where the photo was taken is now home to a carpet race track for radio controlled cars.
“There’s nothing up there anymore that even resembles where the picture was taken,” Hetzel said. “The store has been completely remodeled through the years. So I heard about it, and I just went along with it.”
“It just happened to be the way the picture was taken, it did look like an endless maze of rooms,” he added.
Even so, he said people still come to the store wanting to learn more about the photo.
With publicity around the movie “we’ve had more people come through now wanting to see where the room was,” Hetzel said.
Hetzel said someone booked a birthday party in the store this fall.
“They want to have a party in the building where the ‘Backrooms’ movie was about,” Hetzel said.
Grant Bloom grew up in Oshkosh and went to HobbyTown when he was a kid. He got into the lore behind the photo before knowing where it was taken. He said he was “shocked” to find out it was from a store he visited often growing up.
“I really had no idea about the Oshkosh connection until well into my enjoyment of ‘Backrooms’ content,” Bloom said.
Describing what the concept is, Bloom said much of it focuses on “liminal spaces.”
“A lot of times it feels like places where you would see a lot of people or be very busy … but it’s empty, there is nothing in there, the walls are kind of mazes, it’s easy to get lost, it’s just very quiet,” Bloom said.
Penner is working on a dissertation now about the phenomenon. He said he first saw the original image in 2020.
“For some reason it had this kind of effective reaction for me,” Penner said. “There’s something wrong with it, there’s something not right about the original image, but like … it’s really, really difficult to kind of pinpoint what it is and why it creates the kind of sensations that it does.”
“And obviously I’m not the only one who felt that too, because of kind of the trajectory of how it has kind of emerged into the cultural consciousness,” he said.
Bloom is the marketing manager and brewer at Fifth Ward Brewing Company in Oshkosh, which is just a few blocks away from John’s Hobbies.
“I pass it pretty much every single day on the way to work here, and it still draws my eye, just because it’s cool to be living and working, you know, within blocks of that lore, that history,” Bloom said.
Bloom helped make a video that was posted on the Fifth Ward Brewing Company instagram page in the style of other ‘Backrooms’ content. He said the motivation was from closing shifts at the brewery, where it would go from a packed house to an “empty silence.”
“It always made me think of the ‘Backrooms’ and how just eerily quiet it is after close in the middle of the night here, so I wanted to kind of do something like that to kind of go along with the movie coming out,” he said.
John’s Hobbies is seen here in Oshkosh. Evan Casey/WPR
While being home to a place so unsettling it inspired a cottage industry of horror might not seem like fodder for tourism, Discover Oshkosh hopes to capitalize on the tie. They posted a video about the phenomenon and the new movie’s connection to the city.
“I just find it so fascinating, and I think it’s such a cool thing that we can tie to Oshkosh,” said Anna Murphy-Pociask, the marketing coordinator at Discover Oshkosh.
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