FILLING AN EMPTY SPACE

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

PREAMBLE

Immediately above this section is a block of text. This text is directly copy-pasted from the 4chan post that gave rise to the Backrooms in the first place. It is also the entirety of said post.
As I've mentioned prior, this post has spurred thousands upon thousands of creative writing pieces, video essays, films, fanart, and episodic series.

So... how does anyone work with this? There are sacrifices to be made.

Generally if you want to write a good and interesting story, you need a few things. One of these is a setting, which the Backrooms eaily provides. Another one is a conflict, which the Backrooms can also easily provide a handful of. The "man versus environment" setup is always a treat to witness, and there's very few harsher environments than those that are entirely empty. So far so good.

The last thing a story usually needs is a character. Sadly the Backrooms tends to fall flat around here, at least in its original form. "You" could certainly stand for one, and depending on how you want to read into the last sentence there might be someone else that might not be a person. Still, this is at maximum two characters, and with the aforementioned limited conflict pool leaves us with a rather small supply of story hooks.

On one hand, a supply of even one can be enough to concoct a lasting horror premise. Humans tend to fear the unknown, and experiencing something even once allows you to know it, even a little. The unknown doesn't have as much power over you the second or third time around... and so when it comes to horror, it's the reader's first pass that counts the most. Just this once, they have absolutely no idea what comes next.
In this regards, that 4chan post succeeds with flying colors. It takes a paragraph and a half to implant this unsettling thought into your head, and it's there to stay. Perhaps you don't sit down and mull over what being lost and alone in a buzzing catacombs— your world drenched in yellow, your senses helplessly wired to search for anyone that could get you out one way or another, to no avail— would really feel like until a while later. But it'll hit at some point. I promise.

On the other hand, this is a one and done deal. This goes for most forms of linear storytelling, of course, but is especially difficult to deal with for a genre built around dread and the unknown. Even more so when you are attempting to create a fanwork based of that premise. Every piece of Backrooms media ever made has to face it You can draw the liminal-space aspect out, have it encompass the entire work even, but once it's over— or if some other element is introduced— there's no going back.

FURNITURE IS EXPENSIVE

So anyway plenty of Backrooms works add some other element.
I've seen it all, but here's a handful of common additions meant to bring forth new and original premises.

Additional areas of the Backrooms with their own aesthetics and structures. These tend to be other sorts of liminal spaces, like empty mall storefronts or basements or bathhouses.
Other, non-human lifeforms. These can be animals, but are usually something else entirely.
Eldritch horrors or deific figures (as the Backrooms is often believed to lie "outside" reality).
Organized societies of varying size, formed by other people that fell into the Backrooms and banded together.
Unique technologies that wouldn't be possible on Earth under conventional physics.
A way out.

Very little of these additions are made without some sort of deliberation, but they tend to get a bad rep, especially from oft-called "liminal purists". It is generally true that introducing any new element to the Backrooms subtracts from what makes it so effective in the first place. After all, what makes a liminal space unsettling to us is its emptiness and lack of character; any addition transforms the Backrooms into more of a premise than a concrete setting whose one rule has been thrown into turmoil. But this doesn't mean the result is a bad story, or even "not" a Backrooms story.

A good horror story can still take place here! I've read them. Such works do best when they strike a careful balance: they allow the Backrooms to undergo this aforementioned transformation in one way or another and inject new life into a stale labythinth, but they also ensure that its original spirit is never quite forgotten or set aside— thusly preventing any questions of "why couldn't this take place in any other setting". Often, the additions they make are quite small as a result; enough new space is established and enough new faces are introduced to be woven into a fresh and interesting web, but not enough to cover up the mysteries that lie just outside.

I also tend to gravitate towards stories that are more personal or limited in scope. I think much of the original Backrooms' effectiveness comes from the fact that it's an incredibly generalized premise. You can fall out of reality anywhere if you're not careful, and all of these rooms look the exact same; there's no start or end point in sight. This couldn't necessarily happen to you (as far as I know) in real life, but it lines up with the real experience of a liminal space eerily well. When's the last time you looked at a place's walls, rather than what was contained within them?

Scary huh. I took this photo in my old university dorm.

THE PERSISTENCE

A pretty commonplace mindset in the early days of Backrooms writing was that the horror elements ought to, in most cases, remain present in all its fanworks. After all, the original post does heavily imply the reader should watch out for something wandering the halls with them. This is a horror seies, and there are few things more horrifying than when a scary guy comes at you.

Amateur writers as we are, this led to an over-influx of scary guys prowling the Backrooms wikis' halls who serve no narrative purpose besides being an obstacle for a hypothetical POV Backrooms explorer to face (and most likely die to, unless you take very specific actions around them). They were rather samey and gimmicky, and as such they make excellent content farm material.
Remember this anytime you see a Backrooms video with a glowing smile coming out of a dark hallway or something. That's our fault.

The Backrooms writing community has since moved on from this mindset for the most part, but the damage has regrettably been done. To many, the Backrooms is inseparable from its early monsters. As an example, we could look at one of the most (in)famous levels from a few years back. You might've heard of Level !, or simply "Run For Your Life". It's well-known, it's extremely gimmicky horror, and it also makes for an excellent punching bag.

Its premise is incredibly simple: If you wander too far into a certain hospital level or mess up really badly (not to be confused with those equally bland "You Cheated" scenarios), you'll find yourself on one end of a long, dark, debris-filled corridor only barely outlined by dim red lights. And now you better start running because inevitably, inexplicably, there's a horde of bloodthirsty monsters right on your tail. They have waited for precisely this moment, and will not give up until you are either between their teeth or on the other end of the corridor, safer and sounder. That is where this level ends.

If this sounds like it's something from a video game, you would absolutely be right. It's stiff and scripted and utterly unnatural, and any sort of "horror" one might feel from simply reading this wears off quickly. It's like a jumpscare. Sadly, it's also what comes to a lot of people's minds when they hear of the Backrooms even now.

I'm not gonna propose some means by which the modern Backrooms could escape these old monsters... because there really isn't. On the Internet all things are permanent. But we learn and continue on anyway.
Besides, not like there'd be much of a point. As of the time I'm writing this, the Backrooms have fallen a distance out of the Internet's public eye. They have "six seven" or what ever to gawk at now.

THE INEVITABILITY

With this in mind, it's not all too surprising that a lot of the Backrooms has moved away from horror.

Its popularity has become something of a cushion for this development in two ways: one, that there's enough people making Backrooms content that traditional horror is in no short supply for those two enjoy it the most; and two, that it's attracted plenty new authors and creators who are more willing to be more experimental with the Backrooms as a setting, or merely as an underlying structure. There's no way the Wikidot could've possibly filled out pages of hundreds of levels without this branching-out.

[TO BE ADDED]

INTERIOR DESIGN

As of this writing, I've authored three articles on the Backrooms Wikidot.

One is about a family of boats, who sail in aimless patterns.
One is about a new area of the Backrooms, cast in the light of a thousand odd clouds.
And one is about two computers seeking to untangle an impossible question.

I will not pretend they are the gold standard of Backrooms writing. I consider them to be middling nowadays, but I thought they were good when I made them. So that's improvement I suppose. Regardless, I believe myself far enough past parental affection that I could write reasonable critiques on all three, and elaborate on what I mean by allowing the Backrooms' "original spirit" to live on in a new premise.