WEBVTT
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Th say thrills.
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This is Thursday Thrills, a quick weekly ride into the
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creepy stories, haunted places, weird obsessions, and eerie little corners
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of the world worth talking about. I'm your host, Enrique Kuto.
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You're walking through a building you don't remember entering. Carpet
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is the color of old teeth. The wallpaper is yellow
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in a way that feels less like decoration and more
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like a warning. Above you, fluorescent lights buzz with the
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cheap electrical hum that makes your eyes ache if you
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listen too long. There are no windows, no furniture, no
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exit signs, no voices, just hallway after hallway after hallway.
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And the worst part isn't that you're lost. The worst
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part is that some little animal part of your brain
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is whispering, I have been here before. That is the
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hook of the back rooms. Not a vampire, not a
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masked killer, not a demon crawling out of the wall,
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but an empty office space that feels a few degrees
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off from reality, a place so boring it becomes terrifying.
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And right now the back rooms are back in a
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big way. Not someday, not vaguely down the road, but
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literally tomorrow. And this is not in any way sponsored content.
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I'm not here to promote some movie because a studio
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asked me to and offered me some kind of I
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don't know, cash money or a strangely shaped popcorn bucket. No, no,
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but this is important in the world of spooky and
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the Internet. What started as an image from the web,
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a bad feeling, a tiny little creepy pasta idea has
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turned into games, lore, videos, TikTok, rabbit holes, YouTube nightmares,
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and now a feature film from A twenty four in
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theaters May twenty ninth, directed by Caine Parsons, the filmmaker
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behind the viral Cane Pixels backroom series. So tonight we're
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taking a dark, little walk through the scariest hallway on
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the Internet. Why did this idea stick around when so
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many memes vanish overnight? Why does an empty office, a
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dead mall, or a hotel corridor at two in the
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morning make us feel like reality has quietly broken? And
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why is the back rooms scarier now than ever before?
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I think it's probably best to start at the beginning,
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Although in the back rooms, the beginning, the middle, and
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the end are very easy to confuse. The backrooms began
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the way so much modern folklore does. With a picture
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that felt wrong, it had bad vibes. In twenty nineteen,
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an image of a strangely empty yellow interior appeared in
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a thread about unsettling images. It wasn't bloody, not even
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a little bit dramatic. It looked vacant, or like a
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forgotten conference room the wrong corner of a furniture store
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after closing. Then someone added the story. The idea was
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that if you no clip out of reality, like a
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video game character glitching through a wall, you can end
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up in the back rooms, an endless maze of yellow rooms,
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damp carpet, fluorescent lights, and something unseen wandering somewhere nearby.
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That phrase is a major part of the magic no
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clip out of reality. It doesn't sound particularly ancient or gothic.
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It comes off digital, like the universe has collision detection
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and for one awful second yours failed. That is very
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modern horror. It's not this house is haunted because someone
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died gruesomely here. It's more the world might be built
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on code, memory, routine and architecture, and maybe there's a
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maintenance area behind all of it, a secret level, a
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debug room, the place reality stores the parts it doesn't
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want you to see, in many ways, reminding me of
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the Langueliers by Stephen King. But I won't succumb to
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that digression for your sake. And that image worked because
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it was already so for familiar. Almost everyone has been
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somewhere back rooms adjacent, a school hallway after everyone has
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gone home, a church basement, a closed department store, a
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hotel corridor when you're half asleep and can't remember exactly
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which door is yours. A beij office where the air
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smells like carpet glue and long ancient coffee. A liminal space.
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That word means threshold, a between place, a hallway, a
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waiting room, an airport gate, a stairwell, a mall after hours.
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It's not usually meant to be the destination. More so,
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it's meant to move you from one place to another.
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But when the people are gone, the purpose vanishes, and
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because your brain is a wonderful little horror writer in
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its own right, it fills that blank with something is
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wrong here. The back rooms are basically liminal space horror
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turned into a shared monster myth. The original idea was
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simple and brilliant, an endless, empty place where the ordinary
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becomes hostile. But the Internet did what the internet does best.
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It expanded, It built levels, It added entities, It made wikis, maps, games, theories,
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and survival guides for a place that should not be mappable.
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Suddenly there were endless pool rooms with blue tile and
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and humming lights. Dark office levels where every cubicle looked
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abandoned five minutes ago. Industrial corridors with pipes sweating in
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the ceiling, suburban streets under fake night skies, faceless things
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glimpsed around corners. Rules whispered like survival advice. Do not
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follow the voices, do not trust the smiling thing, Do
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not stay where the lights flicker for too long. That
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is what draws you in. Because old folklore used to
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grow around forests, caves, crossroads, graveyards, and lonely roads, places
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where the world felt dangerous and mysterious. Now are folklore
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grows around office carpet, and not just because it's scratchy
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on your toes. This is why the back rooms hit
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a nerve. They turn the backstage of normal life into
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a trap. The back hallway behind a movie theater, the
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employee only corridor in a mall, which, by the way,
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When I worked at Spencer's Gifts, that mall corridor was
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really creepy when we would be there until two am
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doing spring inventory. Seesh, There's the stairwell in a hospital
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parking garage, the basement bathroom at an old school event.
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Those places creep people out because they feel like the
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public face of the building has been peeled away, and
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now you're somewhere you never were supposed to linger. That
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is the scare in its purest form. The world still
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looks normal, but it will not let you leave. Then
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Caine Pixels gave the back rooms a second life. In
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twenty twenty two, Caine Parsons released a found footage short
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on YouTube that treated the back rooms like leaked analog evidence.
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A camera operator falls into the impossible space, wanders through
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the yellow maze, and slowly realizes the place is not empty.
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Part of why that video hit is that it doesn't
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feel like a polished monster scene. It feels like something
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recovered from a corrupted hard drive. The camera stumbles through
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ugly corners, unfinished walls, strange gaps in the architecture, rooms
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that look less designed than generated. You're watching someone make
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the same awful calculation over and over. This turn has
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to lead somewhere. This doorway has to mean something. This
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room cannot just become another room. The camera shakes, the
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audio distorts, the rooms feel too real and too fake
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at the same time. And the creature when it appears
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is not the only scary thing. The real scare is
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what's waiting before the scare happens. The camera points down
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a hallway and gives your imagination just enough to put
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something out there. A dark opening at the end of
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the room becomes a mouth, a corner becomes a hiding place,
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a buzzing light, a warning. That's what the back rooms
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do best. They make you afraid of empty space, because
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empty space starts to feel like it's watching you back.
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But the truly scary thing is the architecture itself. The
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room is the monster, and when we come back, we're
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stepping even deeper into why this empty yellow maze is
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walking out of internet folklore and into movie theaters everywhere,
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and why the scariest thing in the back rooms may
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not be what's chasing you, but the place itself. The
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back rooms give horror creators something incredibly powerful. You understand
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it instantly. Empty yellow maze you're trapped. Something might be
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in there with you, good luck, and there are so
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many simple scares hiding inside of that setup. You hear
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footsteps that stop. When you stop, you turn around and
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the doorway you came through is gone. You see a
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person far down the hall wave and then you realize
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they're standing perfectly still. You find a room with chairs
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arranged like a meeting just ended, except there's dust on
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everything and one chair is still rocking. A sign pointing
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to an exit can be scary if it's pointing deeper inside.
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Even a vending machine can be scary if it's humming
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in a room nobody could have possibly stocked. A child's
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laughter can be utterly mortified if it echoes from behind drywall.
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The ordinary details are the trap doors, but the original
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terror is colder and simpler. You are in a place
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that should not exist. You do not know how you
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got there, You do not know if the exit even exists.
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And the lights they just keep on buzzing. That's all
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you need. The back rooms also speak to a very
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modern kind of loneliness, not the kind you get when
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you're in the wilderness. It's not a I am alone
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in the woods under a black sky. It's more, I
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am alone in a place that's built for crowds. When
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all of that is gone, the silence is not peaceful.
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It's evidence, evidence of absence, evidence you missed something that
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everyone else got the signal and left. And that is
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why back rooms imagery spread so easily online. They're not
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just scary pictures. They're little emotional traps. Your brain recognizes
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the setting before it understands the threat. It says, yes,
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I know this carpet, I know this light, I know
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this stale air. Then half a second later it says, wait,
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why am I seeing it like this? It's the uncanny valley,
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but for rooms. Usually we talk about the un canny
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valley with faces, a human face that is almost right
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but not quite. The back rooms do that, but with
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the architecture almost an office, almost a hotel, almost a school,
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almost a real place. But the proportions are wrong, the
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emptiness is wrong, the repetition is wrong, and repetition is
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a nightmare engine. One hallway is boring, ten hallways are upsetting,
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and a thousand hallways are pure cosmic horror. At that point,
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the question stops being where am I and becomes what
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kind of universe needs this many hallways. To be fair,
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what we actually have here is not a true paranormal
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case by any means. There is no evidence that people
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are really glitching into yellowy office mazes. The back rooms
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are collaborative fiction, Internet folklore, and digital age horror storytelling,
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but that doesn't make them meaningless. Folklore has always been
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a way for people to turn anxiety into a place
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you can point at. Don't go into the woods after dark.
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Don't answer the voice from the well, do not drive
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down that road at midnight. And now do not no
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clip out of reality. Do not follow the buzzing lights.
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Do not trust the empty hallway. Because somewhere between a
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twoenty nineteen image thread and theater opening, the Internet figured
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out that the scariest place in the world might not
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be a haunted house. It might be the space behind
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the haunted house, the blank place, the waiting place, the
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place where the carpet is damp. The lights never stop humming,
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and every doorway promises the next room will be different,
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but it never is. And if you ever find yourself
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alone in a hallway that feels too long, in a
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building that suddenly seems too quiet, and you hear that
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fluorescent buzz crawling under your skin, do yourself a favor.
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Do not look for the exit sign, Look for the
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door you came through, and pray that it's still there.
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Come back to morrow for more fear. Until then, lock
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your doors, as if that will help.
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
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