The Backrooms Has No Fixed Number of Levels — And That’s the Most Terrifying Thing About It

The question sounds simple enough. How many levels does ‘The Backrooms’ actually have? The honest answer is that nobody knows, and depending on which version of the lore you follow, the answer could be three, hundreds, thousands, or simply infinite. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the mythology. It is the mythology.

What started as a single creepy photograph posted on a 4chan paranormal thread in 2019 has since exploded into one of the internet’s most elaborate collaborative horror universes, and with an A24 film hitting theaters later this month, more people than ever are trying to figure out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The Original Backrooms Lore and Where the Levels Began

Between 2011 and 2018, a photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and pale yellow dividing walls circulated on various message boards, and on May 12, 2019, an anonymous user started a thread on 4chan’s paranormal board asking users to post disquieting images, accompanying the thread with the photograph. The original post invented a two-paragraph story around the image, and the internet took it from there.

In the beginning, the concept had no levels at all. A post to r/backrooms in June of 2019 explained the nature of two additional levels, with the third being the most dangerous, and this was then adapted to a visual guide posted to Deviantart later the same month. So the very first expansion of ‘The Backrooms’ beyond a single image gave it exactly three layers.

One established canon holds that there are just three distinct levels, though thousands of levels have since been created within fan-made wikis, featuring different photos and safety classes in a format influenced by the SCP wiki. The gap between three and thousands tells you everything about how ‘The Backrooms’ functions as a storytelling phenomenon.

How the Extended Lore Turned Three Levels Into Thousands

Once the community truly caught fire, the level count became essentially limitless. Those who adhere to the anything-goes extended lore system run with the idea that the backrooms being infinite means there is an infinite number of levels, with the contents of the space and those levels being limited only by the contributor’s imaginations. This is the version most people encounter today.

The lore allows people to write their own levels into existence, and as of recent tallies there are over 2,641 entries on the Backrooms Wiki. These entries range from meticulously detailed environments complete with safety classifications and survival guides to deeply surreal dimensions that deliberately bend the rules of what a level can even be.

Levels can be diverse in shape, size, and form, with certain levels being outdoors and others indoors. A level is described as a spatial anomaly, infinite or finite, which has strange properties differing from other levels, and levels may fluctuate over time, slowly changing their properties, or stop existing entirely. That internal instability is baked into the lore itself, making any definitive count not just impossible but narratively appropriate.

In some versions of the wiki, a level cluster is made up of 1,000 levels, and it is very difficult to travel between clusters, with only the first and last levels of each cluster allowing transportation between them. The existence of negative levels and anomalous levels that cannot be assigned a number only adds more layers to an already staggering structure.

Kane Parsons and the YouTube Series That Redefined the Canon

While the wiki-based lore was expanding endlessly, one creator managed to give ‘The Backrooms’ a focused, cinematic identity that cut through the noise. In early 2022, American YouTuber Kane Parsons published the first installment of a series of Backrooms short films on YouTube, and the viral videos were credited with igniting a surge in Backrooms content and taking the concept into the mainstream.

Parsons’ approach was disciplined and deliberately grounded. Throughout the making of his work, Parsons was careful to maintain his initial logic for the world, staying away from the idea that the backrooms is somehow a dreamy headspace where, if you turn around, the room could have changed, because it preys on the human brain’s ability to map spaces and understand them. That commitment to internal consistency is a major reason his version resonated so strongly.

His first Backrooms video amassed 77 million views and close to two dozen videos, serving as the viral seed that bloomed into his first feature film. The series built its own contained mythology rather than trying to incorporate the thousands of wiki-created levels, giving audiences something coherent to hold onto inside an otherwise infinite concept.

The A24 Film and What It Means for Backrooms Lore

The conversation around ‘The Backrooms’ has shifted dramatically in 2026, because the mythology is no longer confined to wikis and YouTube. Parsons directed a feature film adaptation produced by A24, with the film scheduled to be released in the United States on May 29, 2026.

The production scale alone signals how seriously the industry is taking this IP. For the film, over 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms were built as a physical set, and people were reportedly getting lost on it during production, with Parsons himself calling it the strangest and coolest moment on the project. That detail feels almost poetic for a story about losing your bearings in an infinite maze.

At 19 years old when he was greenlit, Parsons became the youngest director in A24 history, with the film’s cast including Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor as well as Renate Reinsve, who led the international hit ‘The Worst Person in the World.’ The pairing of a digitally native creator with a prestige art-house studio and critically acclaimed actors represents a genuine cultural inflection point for horror.

Dan Erickson, creator of ‘Severance,’ named ‘The Backrooms’ as one of his many influences while working on the series, which underlines just how deeply the liminal space aesthetic has embedded itself into prestige storytelling. Whether the A24 film introduces its own fixed level structure or leans into the infinite ambiguity of the original lore is one of the most exciting open questions heading into release.

The answer to how many levels ‘The Backrooms’ has is ultimately a mirror held up to whoever is asking. For purists it is three. For wiki contributors it is thousands and growing. For Parsons it is as many as the story needs. With theaters just weeks away from making that question feel very real for a mass audience, where do you think the film should land on the spectrum between contained mythology and infinite horror?