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In February, A24 released a movie teaser that was likely difficult for many to parse. The promo for its upcoming film, “Backrooms,” features no characters, no plot, and no music. Instead, the camera moves downward through layers of uncanny interiors, accompanied by a narrator who recalls a “massive” space full of rooms that “build” and “remember” themselves. If you watched this video without context, you might have come away confused. A second trailer released this week offers only slightly more detail, with a man obsessively telling his therapist about an uncannily infinite space: “Sometimes I’m scared I’ll get lost,” he admits, before rhapsodizing, “It’s beautiful… am I right?”

However, there’s a surprisingly deep history behind “Backrooms.” It’s one that touches on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia. But above all, “Backrooms” captures a feeling — and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.

To unpack this feeling — and how it comes into play in “Backrooms” — we must first gesture toward “liminality,” a term that seems to be suddenly creeping out of academia and into the mainstream. The term, coined over 100 years ago by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, originated in reference to a ritual threshold space. Throughout the 20th century, it was used to capture the disorientation one feels in transitional, in-between spaces. By the 2010s, the internet had reified liminality into a full-fledged visual “aesthetic”: Think abandoned bowling alleys, vintage airport terminals, and deserted playgrounds at dusk. More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity.

It was out of this context that the idea for “The Backrooms” emerged, first as “creepypasta” — internet slang for a spooky story that’s cut and pasted so many times that people lose sight of its original authorship. Like all good creepypastas, the post was thin in lore, leaving ample room for endless interpretation and reinterpretation. It appeared on 4chan’s /x/, the paranormal-positive board of the infamously anonymous internet hate machine, and was conjured in response to a prompt asking for spaces that looked wrong . One anon posted a picture of an eerily empty, yellowed office space, alongside the text:

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 the 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.