The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games. Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces
It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”. The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall. Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins. For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors. Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side.
