This past summer, A24 released Backrooms, and it became the highest-grossing film in the studio's history, roughly 81 million dollars in its opening weekend alone. The premise: an infinite, decaying maze of empty office corridors, yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lighting, carpet that seems to be slowly consuming the architecture around it. The story began in 2019, when a photo was posted to 4chan, a picture actually taken in 2002 inside an empty Wisconsin furniture store, captioned with a warning that if you slip out of reality in the wrong place, you fall into hundreds of millions of square miles of randomly generated, empty rooms.
The internet community built on that single photo has spent six years adding structure to it, naming different Levels, each with its own geography and rules, and populating them with Entities that hunt anyone who lingers too long. A24's film is only the most visible layer of something that was already a sprawling, collaboratively built fictional universe before a single frame was shot.
The reason it's unsettling has a name. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in his book The Weird and the Eerie, describes a specific kind of dread he calls a failure of presence, when something is conspicuously, structurally absent from a space that clearly implies it should be there. An office implies workers. A hallway implies somewhere to arrive. The Backrooms is architecture with all the form of institutional life and none of the content.
Did a philosopher already predict something like this?
That premise is not new, exactly. In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom published an argument now known as the simulation trilemma. It proposes three possibilities, and says at least one of them has to be true: almost every civilization goes extinct before becoming technologically mature enough to run detailed simulations, or mature civilizations exist but choose not to run them, or we ourselves are very likely already inside one. Central to that third possibility was a specific concept Bostrom called an ancestor simulation, a technologically mature civilization with enough computing power running high-fidelity recreations of its own historical past, populated by conscious simulated people who don't know they're inside one.
Rome under Hadrian is exactly the kind of scenario Bostrom's own paper gestures toward. A civilization capable of that is a civilization capable of building almost anything else too.
If the computational capacity exists to reconstruct second-century Rome down to the conscious experience of its inhabitants, there's no obvious reason the same infrastructure couldn't run something else entirely, an environment with no historical referent at all, built purely for its texture, its dread, its wrongness. The Backrooms wouldn't need new physics beyond what ancestor simulation already requires. It would just need different content, running on the same kind of substrate.
Could a mind actually move between these worlds?
We have written elsewhere about a related idea: that functional intelligence, in the philosophical sense, does not appear to require any specific physical substrate, carbon or silicon, biology or circuitry. That same principle is already doing quiet work inside Bostrom's own argument. An ancestor simulation only makes sense if a mind's experience can, in principle, be generated by something other than the biological brain that originally produced it. If that premise holds, there's no clear reason the same mind-process couldn't be paused, transferred, or reinstantiated across differently built environments, closing one constructed world and opening another, the way a person today closes one application and opens the next.
Why build something deliberately unsettling at all?
Why build something deliberately unsettling at all, rather than only historical recreations, is really just a scaled-up version of a question that already has a mundane, well-documented answer. Humans already seek out controlled, consequence-free fear on a massive scale, haunted houses, horror films, roller coasters, and psychologists have a term for the appeal, benign masochism, discomfort that is enjoyable specifically because it is safe. Backrooms outselling every other film A24 has ever released is itself a small, current data point for how strong that appetite already is at the lowest possible fidelity, a screen and a pair of headphones.
Entertainment is not the only motive worth naming, either. Bostrom's own paper suggests ancestor simulations could serve historical or scientific study, a way for a civilization to genuinely understand its own past rather than simply reconstruct it from fragments and inference, the same impulse that runs through everything this publication does at a much smaller scale. A civilization with both motives, curiosity about its own history and an appetite for constructed dread, would have reason to build both kinds of space, and no particular reason to keep them separate.
None of this confirms anything about what a future civilization would actually do, or whether any of it is physically achievable. It is a logical extension of an argument already taken seriously in academic philosophy, not a claim about what is coming.
What it does suggest is narrower and stranger: the same premise that makes visiting Rome under Hadrian philosophically conceivable does not obviously rule out something like the Backrooms. It might even predict it, as a natural byproduct of the same capability, if a civilization capable of reconstructing history for study also turns out to build things purely to feel something, the way humans already do, at far lower fidelity, every time a horror movie sells out its opening weekend.