The success of the 2026 horror film Backrooms, an A24 release that has become a box office sensation, has drawn renewed attention to its origins in video game culture, specifically the practice of "noclipping" – exploiting glitches to pass through walls and floors into areas never meant to be seen by players. This phenomenon, which began circulating widely in a May 2019 4chan thread, matters because it illustrates how a piece of internet folklore born from gaming bugs has crossed into mainstream cinema, with developers and players alike recognising the film's unsettling liminal spaces as echoes of experiences they've had exploring the hidden architecture of games like Batman: Arkham City and Skyrim.

Developers such as Studio Chyr's William Chyr describe noclipping as a "Wizard of Oz moment", revealing the artificial scaffolding behind a game's world, such as flat textures standing in for distant cars or bookcases embedded in the ground disguised as tables. The Backrooms mythos itself remains open-source in spirit, having grown across 4chan, Reddit and fan wikis, which has allowed numerous unofficial games to adopt its yellow-walled, hazmat-suited aesthetic, most notably Escape the Backrooms, released in early access in August 2022, just months after Kane Parsons' original videos popularised the concept.