This panel session seeks to explore the cultural fascination surrounding "The Backrooms," an internet 'creepypasta' about an abandoned office building with endless corridors that became a popular YouTube series and most recently, a blockbuster horror film. What are the Backrooms? Do they represent an artificial or alien intelligence attempting to simulate reality? Are they a glitch in the imperfect fabric of an unstable universe? Are they a metaphor for the subconscious, techno-paranoia, wasteland necrocapitalism, corporate control, or the internet itself? Or is this all just a retelling of the Greek myth of the Labyrinth for a Gen Z audience? Bring your crackpot theories, meandering essays, melting multi-media/multimedia/mediamulti presentations, and string-covered corkboards for this catch-all panel related to both obscure online postings as well as popular media for anything related to "The Backrooms." We expect literary connections with "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), House of Leaves (2000), Obsession (2026), Severance (2022—), Mr. Robot (2015-2019), among others, but welcome unexpected surprises and outlandish interpretations related to surrealism, eco-criticism, Bauman's liquid modernity, AI, dystopias, liminal spaces, found footage horror, science fiction, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory.

This panel will take place at NeMLA, March 6-9th, 2027 in Rhode Island. 

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html