Imagine being a teenager and for some reason encountering that kind of space and wondering "what the heck was going on here? why was it built at all, and why like that?" This kind of built space feels at once familiar and yet totally out of place, because it is obselete and anachronistic. Hordes of office workers used to wander windowless corridors in downtown buildings; not so much anymore. That the abandoned emptiness of such a space might feel scary is unsurprising (see: "eyes on the street")

"No-clip" is a gamer term, but more specifically it originates from the classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D (a close cousin of DOOM). This is micro-fiction written by and for a generation that leaves home far less than previous ones, that gathers on Discord rather than at a local bar or coffee shop. For them the experience of the IRL built environment can feel especially surreal, uncanny, and difficult to process. (5/n)

Enter Kane Pixels (Parsons), whose take on the Backrooms reinvigorated the genre, ignoring some elements of the plotline and adding others, most notably a corporation called A-Sync who accidentally open a portal to The Backrooms and then make the unwise decision to keep that portal open in order to explore its development potential (entities be damned). In effect his story is about much bigger things: colonization, greed, hubris, willful blindness to the mysterious origins of the world around.

Kane's most recent video series, "The Oldest View", is also a liminal horror masterpiece, but it does not take place in "The Backrooms". Rather, Kane chose the setting of the Valley View Mall (or rather, an immaculate digital reconstruction thereof), recently torn down in Dallas, Texas, and now inexplicably located a mile underground down a long, very spooky (also CGI) staircase. The monster? A digitally re-created puppet that inhabited the mall in its latter days before total destruction. (6/n)

It's worth taking a brief rabbit-hole dive to learn about the tragic history of this now-dead mall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_View_Center

The stories told by people who experienced it firsthand are of the "you can't make stuff like this up" variety: random clowns and opera singers wandering into the mall, the smell of sewage seeping in at night, the Sears that outlasted all others. It's weird and spooky, and, in a way, an urban development horror story of its own. (7/n)

So chiefly, the biggest distortion of reality made by Kane is placing this mall a mile underground. Aside from framing what happens next as a kind of archaeological expedition following classic mummy horror genre tropes, it also seems evocative of how remote the site was when the anchor store first opened: "This Sears was built as a two-story freestanding store on what was then the far north fringe of Dallas County and the location was largely surrounded by pasture land." (from Wikipedia)

(8/n)

The mile-long staircase might be symbolic of the mind-boggling infrastructure investment that provided access to the American suburbs. It collapses, trapping the protagonist in an empty shell of outmoded commerce with a huge, powerful puppet whose intentions are at best unclear, at worst hostile. Are we similarly trapped in a development pattern that no longer serves us, increasingly isolated except for parasocial relationships with shady influencers and chatbots who might as well be inanimate?

Kane's portrayal of the protagonist as a hopeless click-chaser so hungry for attention he ignores all the warning signs of paranormal activity is spot-on. But it's also a send-up of urban explorers who venture into "bad" neighborhoods and abandoned buildings for fun or profit. His message, if there is one, could be: "Ignore the spiritual fabric of a place at your own risk. There are always forces at work which you might never understand." This would probably be good advice for planners! (10/10)

Oops, I didn't even get into the backstory behind the puppet, who represents a botanist who originally came to Texas as part of a failed utopian colony. In a way he is a perfect foil for the protagonist; someone who paid close attention to the land and the things that lived there before he got there. (11/10 sorry)