YMMV / Kane Pixels' The Backrooms

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Are the Bacteria entities truly hostile, or just driven mad from isolation and desperate for social interaction from any being who comes their way? There are two instances where an entity observes the camera guy in Found Footage but seem too shy to come out of hiding like they're the ones unsure. One entity gives chase, but doesn't actually harm the main character, and sounds vaguely elated to see another living being. One could interpret the entity grabbing the camera guy at the end as saving him from falling backwards, possibly to his demise if he glitched back into the real world with the camera and fell through the sky.
    • The nature of the Bacteria entity in Pitfalls is also very ambiguous. Was it deliberately tricking Marvin so it could attack him? It certainly seems so, given that, when it sees him, it stops talking and starts screaming demonically while seemingly pounding the wall with its left arm and advancing menacingly towards him, shaking its right arm. Still, the lack of speech after the lure adds ambiguity.
    • Are some Bacterias hostile while others are peaceable and just want help? How much of this is the personality of the Bacteria itself? Could it be that the former human has enough self-control not to attack in some cases, other times losing control over their own mutated body or else not having any?
  • The ASYNC Foundation itself is subject to this due to the contrasting versions of events put forward by Reunion and Damage Control. Did ASYNC really try to help Peter Tench rejoin society after he returned from his Time Travel experience, only for him to develop schizophrenia, become convinced that ASYNC was trying to hurt him, and tragically die while fleeing from their facility? Or did the organisation try to eliminate him after he risked jeopardising their project by undermining his faked death, then order security to shoot him dead after he managed to escape, creating the schizophrenia story as a form of damage control to reassure their employees?
• Awesome Music: "Not" Kane Pixels has created an entire playlist of the incredible soundtrack which is still being updated, ranging from eerie and twisted to disturbingly peaceful.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • The wire entities (Bacteria) have some of the best designs in Backrooms history, and their Ambiguously Evil nature combined with their loud noises and frighteningly fast and fluid movements have made them beloved in the fandom.
  • To a lesser extent, the unnamed entity seen at the end of Motion Detected is also one of the scariest creatures, mainly due to the fact that we see so little of it.
  • The mysterious man looking down from a balcony in Pitfalls also stands out because we initially know so little about his role and intentions, and his posture is very confident like he knows a lot that we don't.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Bacteria are one of the scariest and most well known aspects of the series, yet so far, they have appeared in only 3 episodes despite being implied to be the cause of most of the disappearances in the Backrooms.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Discussing the series as though it is part of any of the wiki canons will often lead to backlash, as the series being in its own version of the setting has become clearer and clearer over time.
• First Installment Wins: "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" is the video everybody remembers, with many parodies and homages to the series using many of its plot beats (an amateur cameraman falling into the Backrooms, being stalked and then chased by a monster, the wall scribblings) as inspiration. It's noteworthy that the rest of this series is much more of a slow burn Conspiracy Thriller that treats the Backrooms more as an incredibly twisted Standard Office Setting, but that first video and its monster chase is certainly what got a lot of people hooked on the premise.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There have been numerous suggestions of the SCP Foundation and ASYNC teaming up for joint ventures.
  • There's also friendliness with authors who are inspired by Kane's videos but try something different to set their content apart. For instance, drawing from other concepts in the original Backrooms lore and putting their own interpretation on it. The Poolrooms are a popular concept to apply the Kane-style to, for example.
• Fandom Rivalry: Kane Pixels fans tend to generally dislike or at the very least not care at all for mainstream Backrooms lore, either viewing it as childish or feeling like it detracts from the liminality of what made the Backrooms in the first place. However, it tends to be one-sided, as Backroom fans see them as Friendly Fandoms and appreciate the series for exploding the Backrooms in popularity, though this is the same reason why other fans tend to hate on Kane's series.
• Genius Bonus: The title of the unlisted video linked in Report is the ISBN number for The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman confined to a yellow room where the yellow wallpapers gradually mutates into a figure of a woman trapped in the wallpaper that moves through the room.
• Heartwarming Moments: Questionable authenticity aside, it's somewhat heartwarming to think that ASYNC would at least attempt to reverse Peter Tench's faked death and reintegrate him into society. The presenter also explicitly states that "Dr. Tench, regardless of how troubled he was in his final days, was a brilliant man who gave his all to his project."
• It Was His Sled: Fans of the Backrooms lore likely knew what was up with the distressed calls in Pitfalls The Reveal was such a landmark that it became well-known regardless, due to all the viewers who tuned in. People familiar with lore like the Skin-Stealers' ability to mimic voices and the warnings about deceptive cries for help in general easily deduced that an entity was making the cries. Reaction videos followed shortly to further share this plot twist. In a twist on this however, these assumptions are Right for the Wrong Reasons as the Kane Pixels version of the Backrooms throws out basically all the wiki lore.
• Nightmare Retardant: The last Bacteria entity that the Male Camera Operator encounters in Found Footage has said operator tense and hiding for his life, but this Bacteria seems more mild mannered and curious than aggressive. This entity has a more droid-like look and seems to be wondering "Is someone around here"? It helps that the Bacteria's final act seems very ambiguous.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The unknown entity creeping its tentacles around the corner in Motion Detected is nothing short of spine-chilling.
  • The man in the business suit watching the Hazmats cross the threshold in Pitfalls gives off major G-Man vibes.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • It's downright horrific every time a character becomes forcibly separated from their companions and is left to wander all alone in seemingly-empty, endless or gigantic environments, especially since it's not impossible for it to happen in real life. Pitfalls shows an especially disturbing and realistic example of this.
  • Also the fact that ASYNC's morally dubious actions are fuelled by nothing more than simple corporate greed — they aren't trying to Take Over the World or conduct sinister super-science using their research into the Backrooms, instead they just want to commercialise an infinite space, which is far more plausible-seeming. Businesses Cutting Corners behind the scenes to uphold investor morale has certainly been known to happen in more mundane Real Life circumstances.
  • Similar to the above, ASYNC takes reasonable precautions to protect their employees: building barricades, marking lines to guide people through the Backrooms, constructing guardrails at pitfalls, and training and arming staff who are exploring unsecured areas. This makes the fact that things go horribly wrong regardless of these precautions all the more terrifying.
  • Bacterias can be chilling with how relentless they can track those fleeing, but there's solace knowing that they can be thwarted by hiding and staying still, or finding an escape route they can't or won't follow you through. However, encountering a desperate survivor who holds you hostage can be scary as it's a scenario that can and does play out in real life; any impression they get that they're losing control of their negotiations and it can all go downhill fast.
• Signature Scene: The Bacteria's sudden appearance and spine-chilling pursuit of the camera guy in Found Footage, having garnered many reactions since the release.
• Shocking Moments: Oh, so very many.
  • The Bacteria giving chase in Found Footage. Later, it (or another one) grabs the camera guy and yanks him away from his own camera, possibly never to be seen again.
  • The body recovered and examined in the Autopsy Report is infected with a mutant strain of bacteria - the same word used by Kane himself to describe the entities.
  • The Reveal that the person crying out for help in Pitfalls was a Bacteria showing its ability as a Voice Changeling.
  • Marvin, Mark, and Randall in Reunion finally enter the unexplored doorway last seen in Pitfalls and are ambushed by Peter Tench, the man who warped into the future in Informational Video. He has wrested away Mark's shotgun and holds the trio at gunpoint, explaining his abandonment by the company. Mark radios for armed support and gets a shot that grievously wounds him, Peter flees and pleads to Marvin to let his family know he's still alive.
  • On a meta level, many viewers were surprised when they found out that everything was CGI, due to how realistic it looks and the fluid camera movements.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The entire series convincingly portrays humans both in and out of Hazmat suits wandering liminal spaces who look real and convincingly motion-captured and the vast majority of what we see is 3D animation with an incredible 80s-90s VHS filter. The view from the camera is also motion-captured and very natural in its nuanced movements.
  • Then there's the entities - so unnatural, so alien, so eldritch, so horrifying in their movements and sounds. The Bacterias move quickly and efficiently, and the unnamed entity whose tentacles creep around a corner is so beautifully terrifying that it's impossible to not be impressed.
• The Woobie: Several examples.
  • The camera guy in Found Footage gets dropped through the ground and into the infinite maze, has no idea what just happened or what this place is, gets chased by a screeching entity that has the advantage of no-clipping through solid objects, escapes, wanders around, finds himself back in the yellow hallways and gets grabbed by an entity, his final fate a mystery.
  • The camera girl in Found Footage 2 is also an ordinary person who clips into the Backrooms. She seemingly successfully evades a Bacteria, but then the room she fled to gets covered in glowing green cracks before her camera cuts out.
  • Marvin the Hazmat Camera Operator falls into the titular Pitfalls, is injured, separated from his team, attempts to aid someone screaming for help only to find out that it's a horrific Voice Changeling monstrosity that pursues him while shrieking a mutated version of possible past victims' screams. He runs, falls, drops the camera, picks it up, bolts for the hole that he fell through and makes it out alive. In Reunion, he can only watch helplessly as an old friend of his who has gone off the deep end shoots another colleague with a shotgun right in front of him; Marv then has to presumably deal with the shock that his friend he presumed dead is alive but not the same person he once was.
  • Everyone who's disappeared, especially the children.
  • If the Bacteria entities were once human and/or are legitimately begging and pleading for help in the only way possible for them, they definitely qualify.
  • Peter, the hazmat explorer who got warped in time. After going missing for a few months, he was declared dead and a funeral was held for him. After he inexplicably returned, he started developing paranoid schizophrenia while being held at ASYNC, believing that their building was just another part of the Backrooms, and he used his credentials to sneak back into the maze. This leads to him ambushing and attacking Marvin's team, possibly putting the guilt of killing someone on his conscience. After fleeing to an elevator and making it back outside, he fails to spot a dip in the ground and dies by cracking his head on a rock.^note Although this could be another cover-up by ASYNC, as there is a similar-looking figure seen alive and well on a city street for a split second.

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