The Minotaur–Maze Problem in Collaborative Digital Horror Storytelling

The Maze and the Minotaur

This article explores a particularly tricky aspect of digital horror folklore, and of the loosely collaborative, asynchronous processes that often characterize the way horror narratives unfold in online spaces. My discussion draws on collaborative digital horror from the last two decades, centring on the Backrooms, a horror concept that first emerged in 2019 and that has since developed into a sprawling story-world. I will start, though, with a brief look at something entirely different—a (more or less) analogue, single-authored, linear novel that might help to illustrate the point I want to make.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) is an intricate, experimental postmodern horror novel with a simple idea at its heart: a family comes home to find a new door in their house, which turns out to lead to a series of empty, ash-grey, constantly shifting hallways and rooms, all vastly too large to be contained within the exterior space of the house. Previous research has explored House of Leaves’s links to and prefiguring of present-day digital horror storytelling (see, for instance, Jessica Pressman’s reading of it as a ‘networked novel’ [Pressman Citation2006, 107]), but here I want to attend to just one element of the story: the growl.

Inside the labyrinth of rooms, the only sound is an occasional distant growl, which to the father of the family, Will Navidson, sounds ‘like calving glaciers, far off in the distance’ (Danielewski Citation2000, 123). To his exploration partner, Holloway, it sounds like something else: ‘[Holloway] seems to transfigure the eerie sound into an utterance made by some definitive creature’ (Danielewski Citation2000, 123). Later, Holloway’s camera records his death by suicide, followed by, shortly afterwards, a glimpse of ‘fingers of blackness slash[ing] across the lighted wall’ before total darkness descends, accompanied by the sound of the growl. The narrative (which here takes the form of a fragmentary found document, hence the gaps) asks: ‘what about the sound? Was it made by a beast or jus[] a[]other reconfig[]ration of that absurd space; like the Khumbu Icefall; product of []ome peculiar physics?’ (Danielewski Citation2000, 338).

The Khumbu Icefall is the most dangerous stretch of the South Col route to the summit of Everest/Sagarmatha/Qomolangma, in part because the geography of the ice is always shifting. So the question is: is the growl the sound of something inside the house—a beast that tears Holloway’s body away—or is it the sound of the house itself, creaking as its walls stretch and reconfigure? The novel never provides a definitive answer, but it does continually circle back to the myth of the labyrinth of Knossos, in which the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, was imprisoned in an inescapable stone maze. We could call this, then, the minotaur–maze issue in House of Leaves: when we read this book, should we be afraid of the house or of what might lurk within it—in the words of one poster on the House of Leaves subreddit, of ‘some hairy, growling monster’,Footnote¹ or of the endless growth of those corridors and staircases?

One immediate response to this question might be to deny the implied dichotomy. Even assuming that the novel presents a single answer to what the growl is, as readers we can be afraid of more than one possibility. Here, though, I will argue that to some extent the horror of the maze and the horror of the minotaur are incompatible; they represent different approaches to horror, and often work at cross-purposes. House of Leaves is just about able to keep the minotaur–maze issue unresolved, to hold on to the tension between the horror of the space itself and the horror of what might wait for us within it. This is because while it is, as Pressman argues, a book that ‘reaches beyond its bindings’ (Pressman Citation2006, 107), it is also strictly delimited. In spite of its web-like narrative connections to external texts, House of Leaves itself has one author and was published in print format at one moment in time. But Danielewski’s novel also prefigured and would go on to influence the open-ended storytelling space of the Internet. In the potentially endless spread and scroll of collaborative digital storytelling, the minotaur–maze issue turns from an engaging though unresolvable mystery to a potential narrative problem. The minotaur–maze problem in collaborative digital horror storytelling is perhaps most succinctly described in Tumblr user onion-souls’s complaint:

This article explores the minotaur–maze problem in collaborative horror storytelling on the Internet. The ‘sad fact’ that onion-souls’s post discusses is, I will argue, a distinct process that I will describe here as ‘minotaurization’: the introduction into a collaborative horror narrative or story-world of story elements that disrupt a previous ‘vibe of subtle unease and liminality’. In my primary example, the Backrooms, minotaurization has literally been a case of adding minotaurs to a maze. This is a story-world that initially centred on being lost and alone in endless, empty hallways, to which contributors have, over time, introduced a wide range of monsters and other enemies, as well as several distinct video-game-like ‘levels’. That said, we can conceive of minotaurization not only as the process of turning a story about loneliness and spatial dread into a story about fighting monsters, but more broadly as the process of introducing elements of conflict, backstory, characterization, and clarity into a horror narrative previously distinguished by monotony, disorientation, isolation, and a lack of linear, eventful narrative progression. What I call ‘maze horror’ does often involve a literal maze-like space, and minotaurization often involves literally adding monsters, but in a wider sense minotaurization is the evolution from one kind of horror storytelling (maze-like, focused on disorientation, monotony, mystery, and a lack of linear plot) to another kind (minotaur-like, focused on active conflict, plot, and the gain of concrete knowledge).

I will argue that in the collaborative storytelling structures we tend to find in digital horror folklore—in which contributors work asynchronously, sometimes without direct contact with other contributors, and with little or no centralized coordination—the minotaurization of a horror story-world is essentially inevitable. As onion-souls’s post and its responses suggest, the process I call minotaurization is a recognizable one for many digital horror practitioners and audiences. By delineating this narrative phenomenon, I hope both to add to our understanding of how digital horror folklore changes over time and to illuminate one way in which different modes of storytelling—collective versus single-authored, delimited versus limitless, temporally defined versus asynchronous—can shape the kinds of stories it is possible to tell.

A note on method and positionality: some of this material was gathered through directed searches of relevant forums and social media spaces, but much of it arises from my long-term engagement with online horror fiction communities, both as a scholar and as a reader-participant. The older creepypasta works and SCP narratives mentioned in the following,Footnote³ Tumblr’s delineation of the concept of liminal spaces, and Jessi Sheron’s discussion of the Backrooms are all texts and discourses I came to as a reader-participant over a period of years. For this article I re-examined formative points of circulation, for instance by locating the archived version of the original SCP-173 4chan post on the Lost Media Wiki,Footnote⁴ reading the original Slender Man discussion on the Something Awful Forums,Footnote⁵ and using directed searches on Tumblr to trace early articulations of the liminal spaces discourse. My gathering of the Backrooms material was more focused and took place between 2022 and 2025, centring on Kane Parsons’s The Backrooms (Found Footage) YouTube series; I explored the major Backrooms wikis, searched relevant tags on Tumblr, and read Backrooms-related subreddits to gain a sense of how audiences and contributors respond to the Backrooms’ growth and evolution.

Any discussion of these collaborative story-worlds must necessarily be selective—in this case leaving out, for instance, Backrooms storytelling on TikTok. Similarly, my readings of audiences’ and participants’ commentary and responses cannot represent a full range of opinion; instead, quotations have been selected to reflect recurring themes and trends in these communities.

Digital Horror Folklore, Collaborative Storytelling Processes, Maze Horror, and Minotaur Horror

Before going on to look at minotaurization in practice, I will briefly situate the collaborative story-worlds I focus on here in the wider context of digital horror folklore. This section also outlines my conception of how horror story-concepts grow into story-worlds on the Internet, drawing primarily on the framework developed by Colás et al. (Citation2017) for analysing collaborative storytelling systems, and expands on what maze horror and minotaur horror mean in the context of storytelling on the Internet.

House of Leaves was published a quarter-century ago, in the earliest days of born-digital horror storytelling. Since then, the Internet has become home to many loosely connected storytelling communities and networks that invent, elaborate, and spread narratives centred around horror concepts. Often these narratives spread in an urban legend-like way, with those who share or participate in the telling of a story making some kind of claim of authenticity or truth for it. Stories like these are called ‘creepypasta’—a derivative of the term ‘copypasta’, which originally described a short text or image transmitted through repeated copying and pasting so that the original source is lost, and thus, in the words of Bruce McClelland’s description of folklore, ‘doesn’t “belong to” an individual or group’ (McClelland Citation2000, 184). Studies of creepypasta frequently discuss it as a form of folklore (see, for instance, Shira Chess and Eric Newsom’s Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology [2015], Line Henriksen’s chapter on digital bestiaries in The Ashgate Companion to Paranormal Cultures [2014], Jeffrey A. Tolbert’s ‘“Dark and Wicked Things”: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief’ [2015], and Trevor Blank and Lynne McNeill’s ‘Boiling Over: Creepypasta, Slender Man, and the New Face of Fear in Folklore’ [2015]). In earlier work I explore links between creepypasta and urban legends, describing both as forms of ‘hoaxy’ storytelling, a term I use to describe ‘the interplay between markers of authenticity and markers of fictionality or fakeness in a narrative’ (Kvistad Citation2020, 964). An example of this hoaxy style of collaborative horror storytelling is ‘Dear David’ (2017–18), a long-running Twitter thread in which the author, Adam Ellis, purported to describe his own real-life experience of being haunted by a child ghost, and which many readers, regardless of whether they really believed the story, spread and engaged with as if it were true.

But not all collaborative horror storytelling on the Internet relies so heavily on markers of authenticity. For instance, while SCP Foundation storytelling draws on hoaxy elements through its use of the found-document format, the story-world itself is clearly and explicitly fictional. Narratives can also develop to become more or less hoaxy over time, as in the case of perhaps the best-known digital horror concept, Slender Man, described by Aaron Trammell and Anne Gilbert as a ‘nearly open-source horror meme’ (Trammell and Gilbert Citation2014, 401). The first Slender Man images were clearly presented as creative work, and the concept gained a hoaxier presentation as other creators began to collaborate on it.

As this suggests, digital horror folklore presents not only a range of approaches to ideas of authenticity and fictionality, but also to modes of collaborative storytelling. The SCP Foundation is a relatively centralized story-world; contributors post their entries to a single wiki where the community discusses, gives feedback on, and up- or downvotes the entry based on perceived quality. With single-authored hoaxy narratives like ‘Dear David’, the purportedly self-experienced stories on the Nosleep subreddit (where, according to the subreddit guidelines, ‘everything is true even if it’s not’Footnote⁶), or classic creepypasta stories like ‘Dionaea House’ (a house-that-eats-people story told through linked emails and blog posts), the audience might engage in collaboration by interacting with or discussing the story as though it were true, offering help or advice to the narrator, or disseminating the story to new readers. Or, as in the case of Slender Man, a single horror concept might be pursued independently by many different storytellers in different modes and media, often creating a loose, partially agreed-upon ‘canon’ of narrative details that go on to influence subsequent storytellers. This can also be thought of as a process of genre formation—see, for instance, Amy Shuman and Galit Hasan-Rokem’s description of genre as ‘not only a resource for communication [but also] one way that categories are imposed on people to restrict or obligate their communication’ (Shuman and Hasan-Rokem Citation2012, 67). These different collaborative modes inform the ways in which minotaurization might occur within a particular story-world.

To see what minotaurization looks like in practice, we need to consider the development of a collaborative story-world over time. Colás et al. (Citation2017) set out a framework for analysing both the process and the outcomes of collaborative storytelling. Their article is based on an empirical study in which participants work synchronously in teams to create a shared narrative, a situation that does not fully match the asynchronous, anonymous, and tacit co-creation we often see in collaborative digital horror. That said, many of their parameters are still illuminating for this discussion, in particular their use of the term ‘seed’.

For Colás et al., the seed is the idea or concept that forms the starting point for a collaborative storytelling process: a ‘description of the eventual pre-existing content before the beginning of the process, with details if there is a given “narrative setting” or “storyworld” (as a pre-set of descriptive information elements) and/or narrative content development’ (Colás et al. Citation2017, 632). Their work discusses purposely created seeds as a basis for collaboration, but as we will see later, the seeds of collaborative horror story-worlds can easily be found ‘in the wild’ online. Colás et al. also address the relationship between the seed and the storytelling structure that grows from it, noting that another parameter in collaborative storytelling is consistency: ‘if and how users take into account the seed and the other users’ created information, being or not concerned by the consistency of their own contribution’ (Colás et al. Citation2017, 634). They also note that consistency works differently in ‘the construction of a shared storyworld’—like the SCP Foundation, which is one of the examples they give, or the Backrooms—versus when participants ‘try to construct one single, consistent story’ (Colás et al. Citation2017, 653; both emphases added). In my discussion here, I will use the term ‘seed’ in Colás et al.’s sense, and describe what grows from the seed—stories, story fragments, and other creative responses—as ‘elaborations’. Like Colás et al., I use the term ‘story-world’ quite loosely to describe the full network of creative responses and meta-discourses that relate to and draw on a particular seed, whether or not they relate internally to each other. For any given story-world, distinguishing seeds from elaborations is not always easy. What we think of as a single story-world may be cross-pollinated by more than one distinct seed, and it is not uncommon for individual elaborations, especially highly popular ones, to act as seeds in themselves. Nonetheless, comparing a story-world’s starting-point(s) to its later developments helps us see how minotaurization happens.

At this point, I want to expand on my use of the phrases ‘maze horror’ and ‘minotaur horror’. The narratives and ideas that emerge from Internet horror storytelling communities cover, of course, as wide a range of topics as any other horror mode, and in some ways it makes no more sense to talk about a typical Internet horror concept than it does to talk about a typical horror film concept. That said, one concept that does recur in Internet horror, appearing as a narrative motif across multiple narratives and story-worlds, is also found at the heart of House of Leaves—the concept of a vast, disorienting, shifting, perhaps self-generating space that seems in some way inimical to human life: in other words, the maze. The Backrooms represents perhaps the most throughgoing use of the maze motif in Internet horror.

Beyond this use of the maze, though, I would argue that digital horror storytelling in general has an affinity with what I have described so far as maze horror: horror that centres on disorientation, monotony, a lack of concrete information, a lack of obvious external conflict, and a lack of linear, eventful narrative progression. Maze horror is unusually well suited to digital storytelling formats. An easily followed and clearly resolved plot undercuts the effectiveness of maze horror, meaning that it works best outside the bounds of traditional linear narrative, and the Internet is an ideal environment for fragmentary, non-linear storytelling.

As an illustration of how digital affordances can be used for maze horror, we might consider the narrative sometimes described as the first creepypasta avant la lettre: Ted Hegemann’s ‘Ted’s Caving Page’ (2001). Originally self-published by Hegemann on his Angelfire website in a series of sequentially published, linked diary entries, this story is almost entirely a straightforward and realistic description of the narrator’s exploration of a previously hidden passage in a local cave. According to an interview with Hegemann, the Caving Page was initially meant to be exactly what it looks like, a real caving journal, and most of the story is a description of his real-life experiences in caves (Botic Citation2020). The story’s possibly supernatural elements—strange sounds, unexpected rock movements, hieroglyphs on the walls—are relatively underemphasized. Most of the story’s horror comes from the narrator’s interactions with this profoundly inimical space, and from the use of digital storytelling elements: because it was published in ‘real time’, contemporary readers would have waited in vain for another update after the final entry, only gradually realizing that something must have happened to the narrator. In this narrative, then, the lack of resolution that would have seemed inartistic in a clearly fictional, conventionally published narrative works to the story’s advantage: its lack of artistry helps it feel like something other than art.

This kind of horror, then, thrives on the underexplained, the poorly structured, the anticlimactic, the boring. Where complete, well-crafted narratives encourage admiration, these qualities encourage readers to perceive the narrative as just possibly real (since reality is often underexplained, poorly structured, anticlimactic, and boring), and provokes the desire to explore further, to find our own way through the mystery—in other words, to engage with the narrative in the way we would engage with a maze.

How, then, do we conceptualize minotaur horror? Most broadly, we could say that minotaur horror is everything that is not maze horror; more narrowly, we could think of it as horror involving conflict with a clear, agential threat. This might be a monstrous being, but it could also be, for instance, a conspiracy that turns out to be behind everything. In minotaur horror, there are obstacles to be overcome and it is possible to fight and win. Because of its focus on conflict, minotaur horror is more likely to be linear, clearly plotted, eventful, and clearly resolved; its focus on specificity also makes it less likely to read as plausibly true. Where maze horror tends to rely on persistent disorientation and a lack of answers, minotaur horror often involves gaining information about a threat in order to attempt to defeat, escape, or overcome it. As this suggests, and as implied by the existence of distinct ‘levels’ in the Backrooms, there can be a game-like element to minotaur horror. When contributors and readers criticize the minotaurization of a story-world, they often do so by comparing it to a horror video game franchise, as when one poster in the Backrooms subreddit writes: ‘I don’t personally like that [the Backrooms has] become Five Nights at SCP: featuring Dante from devil may cry’.Footnote⁷ As a narrative becomes less maze-like and more minotaur-like, the reader’s experience of being lost transmutes into the experience of playing a game with rules and win conditions.

Maze and minotaur horror are loose categories, and there is no binary distinction to be drawn between the two. Works of maze horror often hint at the possibility of minotaurs—like Ted’s Caving Page’s teasing reference to the Hodag, a creature from American folklore—and minotaur horror, in turn, often draws on maze-like elements. Often it is more helpful to think of a work as leaning towards the minotaur-like or the maze-like, rather than being exclusively one or the other. That said, for any extended horror narrative, the minotaur-like is to some extent the default state. A lack of conflict, information, event, and agential external threats is easier to maintain in a brief or fragmentary narrative than in a longer story. As an example of the difficulty of maintaining maze horror in long horror narratives, we might look at the horror fiction podcast The Magnus Archives, which ran for five forty-episode seasons from 2016 to 2021. Each episode centres on a self-contained anecdote about a supernatural encounter, allowing for a focus on maze horror elements like disorientation, plotlessness, unknowability, and inexplicability. At the same time, the overarching plot arc gradually uncovers more of the story’s universe, until, two hundred episodes later, we are left with a clear understanding of this story-world as one in which agential factions battle each other for world domination.

At this point it is worth addressing the idea of minotaurization as a problem. In the case of The Magnus Archives, the gradual expansion of the audience’s understanding of the story universe was not accidental; rather, the decline of maze horror across the show’s run seems to have been a necessary trade-off. As the show’s writer says, ‘the biggest challenge is trying to keep everything unknown and scary while at the same time providing enough answers to the mystery that people are willing to stay around and learn more’ (Sims and Newall Citation2016). The conflict between the gain of concrete information that almost inevitably occurs when telling a story over any length of time, and the ambiguity and unknowability that so often play a central role in horror, is of course an issue in horror storytelling more broadly. Ann Radcliffe’s ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ makes an early, influential distinction between terror, which she relates to ‘uncertainty and obscurity’, and horror, which she relates to sudden, shocking knowledge (Radcliffe Citation1826). Stephen King picks up on this in Danse Macabre, describing terror as the ‘finest’ of these aesthetic-affective responses and adding a third category below both, the gross-out (King Citation1981, 10). Radcliffe’s and King’s ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ do not map neatly onto minotaur horror and maze horror, respectively, but there is clearly conceptual overlap here. In both these theorizations, horror (using the word in the generic sense) that relies on the dread of the unknown is seen as aesthetically superior to horror that involves a known and specific threat.

The corresponding idea that maze horror is aesthetically preferable is not an uncommon reader response, although obviously is also not a universal one. For our purposes here we do not need to see minotaur horror as inherently less valuable in order to note that even if no one really wanted minotaurization to take place—that is, even if no one actively wanted either to read or to write collaborative story-worlds that have a large number of minotaurs—it would happen anyway.

In order to see why this is the case, I will turn to the example of the Backrooms, a story-world with a distinctly maze horror seed that over the course of a few years grew to fill two wikis with creatures, rules, location descriptions, and lore. In the following sections, I discuss the Backrooms and one of its central texts, the short film The Backrooms (Found Footage) (Parsons Citation2022), as maze horror, and explore the relationship between seed and elaborations in this story-world via a comparison to other collaborative digital horror story-worlds.

‘Six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms’: Liminal Spaces, the Backrooms, and The Backrooms (Found Footage) as Maze Horror

In 2016, Tumblr user tootsie-roll-frankenstein posted a list of ‘places where reality is a bit altered’, including entries like ‘any target’ (referring here to the North American chain of stores), ‘abandoned 7/11s’, ‘hospitals at midnight’, ‘warehouses that smell like dust’, ‘empty parking lots’, and ‘inside a dark cabinet’. Users who reblogged the post added more suggestions: ‘unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips’, ‘your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep’, ‘the lighting section of home depot’, and ‘stairwells’.Footnote⁸ Another user, you-deserve-a-rhink, added a theoretical perspective:

While the concept of uncanny-feeling and ‘altered’ spaces was a presence in Tumblr and broader Internet discourse prior to this reblog chain, it seems to mark the point where ‘liminal spaces’ becomes a popularly used concept on the Internet. As we see from the listed examples, the concept of liminal spaces as applied by you-deserve-a-rhink has correspondences with its use in anthropological and sociological studies of space, although as Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis’s study of the ‘uncanny valley’ effect in physical places notes, such theoretical approaches rarely discuss ‘why many of these liminal spaces would elicit distinct eerie or strange experiences’ (Diel and Lewis Citation2022, 2). More specifically, we might link the Tumblr liminal space concept to Marc Augé’s concept of the ‘non-place’, which in contrast to, for instance, Yi-Fu Tuan’s description of ‘place’ as something ‘created by human beings for human purposes’ (Tuan Citation1975, 165) describes an interstitial or transitional space in which humans are not supposed to linger: ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé Citation1995, 77–78). A striking point of comparison with Augé’s focus on non-places as a product of late capitalism is the frequency with which lists of liminal spaces mention ubiquitous North American brand locations; Walmart seems to be experienced as especially liminal.

On Google Trends, searches for the phrase ‘liminal spaces’ is a near-flat line up to 2016, after which it picks up slowly. The next, sharp increase is in early 2020. In between these points, in May 2019, an anonymous user, in response to a thread on 4chan’s paranormal forum /x/ that requests ‘disquieting photographs that just feel “off”’, posts a photograph of a set of windowless rooms with yellow walls and brown carpet, lit by fluorescent lights.Footnote¹⁰ Another user responds to the image with two short paragraphs:

In this sense, the Backrooms story-world can be seen as having two distinct seeds, on 4chan and Tumblr, respectively. The Tumblr concept of liminal spaces is quickly attached to the 4chan seed and grows alongside it in popularity and reach. As mentioned, the phrase ‘liminal spaces’ does not really start to trend until 2020, coinciding with the initial COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe and North America—and, although this is a speculative link, with many people coming to experience their familiar surroundings as uncanny, disorienting, and entrapping. Backrooms-inspired content begins to appear on TikTok and YouTube; the Twitter account @spaceliminalbot gains hundreds of thousands of subscribers; and the Reddit forum r/liminalspaces as well as the wiki The Liminal Archives become places to share and discuss images of real-life and imagined liminal spaces. Then, in 2022, the search terms ‘liminal spaces’ and ‘Backrooms’ both spike following the publication of a nine-minute Backrooms-themed short film on the KanePixels YouTube account.

The Backrooms (Found Footage), which now has sixty-five million views, brought mainstream visibility to the Backrooms story-world. While Found Footage was only the start of then sixteen-year-old director Kane Parsons’s now extensive work with the Backrooms, its popularity, and the way in which it codifies many of the tropes and ideas that are now central to the story-world, makes it a useful site for exploring Backrooms storytelling in maze and minotaur terms.

In the first few seconds of Found Footage, our point-of-view character, a teenage boy, is shooting what seems to be a horror movie with his friends on an analogue video camera; the date on the clapperboard puts us in 1991. We get a brief sequence of the film’s monster, an actor in a monkey mask, crawling around a corner and scaring another actor. The director cuts the shot, and as the crew are resetting and the boy holding the camera backs up for a wide shot, he seems to fall through the ground. The screen shakes and goes black. The next thing we see is from the point of view of the camera lying sideways on the floor: a dull brown carpet, dull yellow walls, and fluorescent lights overhead.

The camera moves through the hallways we see in the original Backrooms image, expanded into infinity, as the protagonist tries to find his way out. (Of course, as in the original image, most of them are rooms. If we tend to think of these spaces, like those in House of Leaves, as hallways instead, it might be because a hallway is literally a liminal space; you are not meant to stay in it for longer than it takes to transition from one room to another.) There are occasional cuts from one featureless space to another, and we get the sense that the protagonist is in there for some time. The Backrooms sequences are entirely generated in Blender (an open-source 3D creation suite used to create visual effects, animations, and games), but because this is an imitation of analogue video, the low resolution and tape hiss help the scenery to read as almost entirely real; any lingering unreality feels appropriate to the setting. Some of the rooms are darkened and some are lit; there is a continual buzzing noise, presumably from the fluorescent lights. There are occasional traces of human presence in the form of drawings and writing on the wall, including at one point a childish scrawl of a window with the sun shining through it. There is some actual signage, although it is never helpful; a fire exit sign, for instance, turns out to lead back to more of the same endless rooms.

By contrast to the monster movie the protagonist is shooting in the opening seconds of Found Footage, the film he inadvertently ends up making is almost pure maze horror. This is not the entirely inhuman interior of House of Leaves, which has almost no architectural features and consumes or destroys anything brought into it, like the luminescent markers Navidson tries to affix to the ash-grey walls. Instead, this space feels like a purposeless, agency-less regurgitation of the lowest common denominators of human-made interiors: the walls are covered in the faded brown-on-yellow chevron wallpaper of the original Backrooms image; there is a window with a view of a vast, featureless courtyard with a flat ceiling overhead instead of open sky; there is occasional furniture, a waste disposal unit, a coil of rope. As with text produced by a large language model, it looks at first as if there is a human intentionality, or at least some kind of intentionality, behind these details, but closer interaction reveals them to be procedurally generated: there is design here, but no designer. Possibly the most striking effect of the film is the sheer loneliness of these empty affordances—the chairs that are not there to be used, the signs that communicate nothing, the windows there is no reason to look out of.

That said, there is a minotaur in Found Footage. It appears for the first time at the three minutes forty seconds mark and continues to flicker in and out of sight until the end of the film, when it comes upon the protagonist unexpectedly, apparently causing him to noclip back into our reality. From what we see in brief, blurry glimpses before the camera jerks away and the protagonist starts to run, the creature is in the shape of a large-headed stick-figure-like scrawl, sometimes moving upright, sometimes folding over gracelessly. But while it is wildly unsettling to see this figure in this context, it does not seem directly threatening; its jerky, stumbling movements and the bull-like lowing sound it makes seem confused, or perhaps, like the rest of the maze, lacking in agency. It feels as if this being might be either a fellow inhabitant of the maze—perhaps another victim of it, as the original Minotaur was—or simply a part of the maze itself. Even in the final encounter with the creature, all it actually does is eject the protagonist from the liminal space—although unfortunately, as the last seconds of the tape show, he clips back into our reality high in the air and plummets to the ground.

While Found Footage itself, then, is primarily a work of maze horror, its popularity would go on to play a key role in the minotaurization of the Backrooms. In order to see how this works, I will start with a closer look at the relationship between seeds and elaborations in two other collaborative horror story-worlds, before going on to compare them to the Backrooms.

‘The big organic collaborative creative horror thing’: Seeds and Elaborations in Two Story-Worlds

Even the biggest collaborative story-worlds tend to start small. In June 2009, Eric Knudsen posted the two first images of Slender Man to the Something Awful Forums, in a thread requesting Photoshopped paranormal images that look real. One of the now-famous images shows a group of children walking towards the camera, with the Slender Man figure appearing as a shapeless face at the back of the group; the other shows children playing in a playground, with the figure in the far background. In each case the image quality is low enough and the figure unclear enough that a viewer who is not looking for it might miss it entirely. The first photograph is captioned: ‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time …— 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead’ (Knudsen Citation2009). The second is described in the caption as

Here, then, we see the process by which a storytelling seed is collaboratively developed by a group of creators into something much more elaborate—although, of course, this thread was in itself only the starting point for a much wider process of elaboration, in which Slender Man became not only a story-world but a mainstream, multi-platform intellectual property. Especially worth noting here is that the seed, Knudsen’s first post, has two qualities also found in the seeds of the SCP Foundation and the Backrooms: (a) it presents a compelling horror concept, (b) in low, inconsistent, unclear, or incomplete detail.

Peck notes that this post is the first in the thread to include any kind of narrative with its images, but it is in several senses a fragmentary one. The Slender Man seed makes use of the hoaxy elements we now associate with creepypasta, presenting its Photoshopped images as the remnants of a lost archive. The supernatural element of both images is rendered with a light, almost ambiguous touch: in the group of children image, the figure is easily mistaken for the play of shadow and light; and in the playground image’s caption, an attempt is made to explain it as a film defect. Moreover, the storytelling is inconsistent: the second image caption uses a distanced, objective-sounding found-document style, while the first image also includes an unsourced first-person description of what seems to have been a violent mind-control event.

Peck’s discussion shows that the collaborators in the thread are compelled by the potential for developing and adding to these initial story fragments, but they are also aware that developing the concept too far will detract from the source of its initial appeal. In their meta-discussions of what makes for effective Slender Man storytelling, contributors consistently support less detail and less backstory. User Nurse Fanny argues that

As Peck’s discussion notes, the Slender Man images were not the first digital seed to grow into a large-scale collaborative horror story-world. One of the Slender Man thread contributors makes a comparison to the SCP Foundation: ‘i’m a big fan of the big organic collaborative creative horror thing that’s going on in this thread. reminds me of the ScP series’ (quoted in Peck Citation2015, 341). What is now the SCP Foundation story-world had begun two years earlier, in June 2007, when a 4chan user posted a photograph and an accompanying narrative to /x/. The photograph, although uncredited, is of sculptor Izumi Kato’s Untitled 2004, and shows a large, humanoid wooden sculpture with an oversized, baby-like head, leaning against a wall with its painted face turned to the viewer. The text is a description of a set of procedures for keeping the figure in the photograph, described as ‘SCP-173’, contained and harmless:

I would argue that in order for a horror fragment, narrative, artwork, or idea to become the seed of a story-world, it needs both of the qualities mentioned previously: first, a compelling central concept; and second, a sense of lacking detail, incompleteness, or sketchiness, a sense that it is possible to do more with the concept—to elaborate on it. The importance of the latter may be less obvious than the former, but can be illustrated with a comparison to other classic creepypasta narratives from the mid to late 2000s, like Michael Lutz’s ‘smile.jpg’ (initially published anonymously) and Kris Straub’s ‘Candle Cove’. Both these narratives, one about a photograph of a smiling dog that curses anyone who sees it and one about an online forum discussion on unsettling memories of an old children’s television show, are widely known and popular, but neither has inspired a large-scale story-world in the way that Slender Man, SCP-173, or the Backrooms seed did.

There are a number of possible factors here: SCP-173 and the Backrooms seed both have obvious world-building implications, and SCP-173 worked as a template for the format and genre features of future SCP narratives. But I would argue that an important factor is that while ‘smile.jpg’ and ‘Candle Cove’ are brief narratives with a strong sense of mystery and few real answers, they are very much full stories, not fragments. Both narratives have ‘punchline’ endings of the kind often found in traditional short horror stories: ‘Candle Cove’ ends with the revelation that the TV show being discussed may not have been real at all; ‘smile.jpg’ ends with the narrator freeing himself of the curse by passing it to you, the reader. When you finish reading these stories, they are satisfyingly finished; there are no obvious ragged edges or gaps to act as a starting point for your own elaboration. In other words, while both the Slender Man seed and the original SCP-173 start out with some minotaur elements (in that they both depict an at least implicitly agential and threatening being), in both cases the maze-like elements of these seeds—the incompleteness, the lack of a linear plot, the lack of consistency, the sense of unanswered questions—are what open them up to collaborative elaboration. Since, as we will see shortly, this kind of collaborative elaboration more or less inevitably leads to minotaurization, this means that the minotaurization of a horror concept emerges from its initial maze-like qualities. The existence of a maze calls for minotaurs.

‘People just keep adding more stuff’: Minotaurizing the Backrooms

Having explored the maze-like qualities that make a horror concept ripe for elaboration and thus, in turn, for future minotaurization, this section returns to the Backrooms to examine what happens in minotaurization, why it happens, and how it has affected this story-world.

Earlier, I described Kane Parsons’s film The Backrooms (Found Footage) (2022) as the beginning of mainstream visibility for the Backrooms. The relationship between Found Footage and the Backrooms seed has parallels in the Slender Man and SCP Foundation story-worlds. The Slender Man story-world gained visibility through Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage’s long-running web series Marble Hornets, the first episode of which was posted only days after Knudsen’s initial post, as well as through the 2012 game Slender: The Eight Pages, which opened the story-world to a younger audience (Chess and Newsome 2015, 35–36). The game Containment Breach (also 2012) played a similar role for the SCP Foundation. We might call these texts popular elaborations—contributions to a story-world that draw in a new or wider audience, and that help to shape future collaborators’ idea of the story-world’s themes and aesthetics. A popular elaboration both expands and closes down the potential of the story-world, exposing it to new potential collaborators while also colouring and perhaps narrowing their sense of what kinds of narratives this world can accommodate. In this way, popular elaborations like Found Footage, while they may have strong maze horror elements themselves, play an important role in the process of minotaurizing a story-world.

Writing on Twitter in 2022, only a few months after Found Footage appeared, horror artist Jessi Sheron says:

Why, then, is minotaurization more or less inevitable in this kind of storytelling? To echo Sheron’s analysis as well as my own arguments earlier, minotaurization is a consequence of people and time. The more people become involved in a story-world, the more likely it is that one of them will have a minotaur in mind that they want to explore in the context of this world. The minotaur might be an agential entity or creature, but it might also be some other element that adds specificity, clarity, conflict, and plot to the story-world—defining the original Backrooms spaces as Level 0 and placing more levels above it, for instance, or adding a shadowy group of overseers. And the more chance there is that this minotaur will be elaborated on by its creator or by others, given lore and powers, and joined by its friends, until, as one reply to Sheron’s tweets says, what you have is Pokémon—the story is no longer focused on unknowable horror, but on beings with different, specified strengths and weaknesses battling each other.

More collaborators make more minotaurs, although the same is not necessarily the case for more collaboration. The Slender Man thread contributors’ collective attempts to keep individual contributors from introducing too much clarity, characterization, and background suggest that direct interaction between collaborators might hinder rather than promote minotaurization. People tend to be less tolerant of others’ minotaurs than of their own, meaning that in a context where collaborators are giving feedback on or actively editing each other’s work, only the most effective minotaurs are likely to survive.

The second element is time. As discussed earlier, maze horror has an anti-plot quality; it is essentially horror vacui, driven by monotony and emptiness, not by event and conflict. This means, of course, that it is also potentially boring. House of Leaves is devotedly interested in boredom, exploring it both through the accumulating, near-illegible ‘cruft’Footnote¹⁵ of some areas of the text and through what Luka Bekavac calls the ‘particularly malevolent sensory deprivation tank’ of the house itself: ‘the place where one can die of thirst, hunger, cold and fear, but also—one would suspect—of boredom’ (Bekavac Citation2020, 326). As so often in this book, the fictional academic commentators in the text itself get there first:

Either the time or the people factor can be enough on its own to provoke some degree of minotaurization, as we can see in the slow build-up of lore in a long-running single-author horror podcast, or, conversely, in the narrative bloat that can occur over even a single tabletop role-playing session if too many players come in with ideas they are determined to include. But in a story-world that has plenty of both—and, relative to something like the SCP Foundation, less of a centralized collaborative structure to act as a restraint—minotaurization happens swiftly. In 2023, a fourteen-year-old Fortnite player posted their Backrooms-inspired build to r/thefortnitecreatives, and was praised by another user: ‘This is the first one I’ve seen that actually captures that original feeling of dread the original backrooms image invokes.’Footnote¹⁶ The original poster responds:

As we have seen, these discussion threads repeatedly refer back to the Backrooms seed, as well as to its most prominent elaboration, Found Footage. The thread just mentioned discusses how far the current state of the story-world reflects or diverges from the spirit of the initial seed, and contributors appeal to Parsons’s work as authoritative, naming it as a precedent for the introduction of minotaurs: ‘Some of the most liked backrooms stuff has stuff you mention like Kane pixels backrooms has monsters and a organization trying to understand it’. A 2024 thread starts from the premise that the minotaurization of the Backrooms is not a betrayal of the original concept, because the seed itself includes a reference to a minotaur: the thread title is ‘i never understood why people say the backrooms are supposed to be empty’, followed by a screenshot of the Backrooms seed and the text ‘it literally says that there is something else in there’.Footnote¹⁹ (For brevity, until otherwise noted, subsequent references are to this thread.) In the subsequent discussion, though, most contributors take the perspective that the minotaur reference in the seed text—the line ‘God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you’—is qualitatively distinct from the current minotaurization of the story-world. Several contributors see the purpose of including agential threats in the story-world, but still believe that ‘[a]dding in way too much can water down the experience’; as one contributor notes, ‘There has to be a fine line between empty liminal rooms and Chuck E. Cheese horror’. This underscores that minotaurization as a perceived problem, as opposed to as a neutral development over the life of a story-world, is a matter of degree rather than a binary. Contributors will have different views on the level of minotaurization they would prefer—but whatever that level might be, within this collaborative storytelling structure there is no way to stop there.

The minotaurization of the Backrooms is not unique, but it is unusually dramatic, and this seems to have to do with the seed and how the story-world relates to it. While discussions of the SCP Foundation rarely evoke the original SCP-173 as the yardstick against which all later SCP work should be measured, discussions of the Backrooms constantly refer back to its seed; these empty, yellowish rooms are at the heart of how contributors conceive of the story-world. The horror of SCP-173 is that it is clearly one of many entries about one of many anomalies; the horror of the Backrooms seed is the empty monotony of those six hundred million square miles. In both cases, elaboration risks detracting from the horror, but the SCP story-world is clearly more capable than the Backrooms story-world of absorbing contributors’ minotaurs while retaining the impact of the seed. I suggest that this is part of why the minotaurization of the Backrooms has affected the nature of the story-world so profoundly and taken it so far from its original seed.

Conclusion: ‘Whenever something spreads’

Any group of people working together to tell stories are likely to face difficulties; as Colás et al. note, ‘to accommodate that vast amount of contributions from different participants while keeping a narrative output which is meaningful in some way can be a challenging task’ (Colás et al. Citation2017, 628). What sets the collaborative digital story-worlds in this article apart is that they are horror worlds: the contributors to these story-worlds are all trying to create something scary. Issues that affect horror storytelling in general—in particular, the balance between giving too much and too little information, between monotony and an overload of plot, between emptiness and overcrowding—are exacerbated when working collaboratively in this digital mode, where contributors work asynchronously, sometimes without direct contact with other contributors, and with little or no top-down steering.

I have argued here that the Internet allows for uniquely effective maze horror, and certainly Internet storytelling is thematically interested in spaces that lack human scale and human intervention—perhaps all the more so as, with autogenerated content beginning to supplant human-generated content online, the Internet itself might start to feel like a non-space. But, conversely, the Internet is also a place where nothing is lost for long. In an interview, Kane Parsons notes that one of the reasons he set Found Footage in the 1990s was that the ability to geotag with an iPhone would make it ‘far easier to uncover the nature of this place’ (Mills Citation2024), and indeed in 2024 the previously unknown source of the original Backrooms image was found via the Wayback Machine. It was taken in 2002, in a race-car hobby store in Wisconsin that had been emptied of inventory due to water damage: another solved mystery.Footnote²⁰

The Internet may not be a space where maze horror can survive for long; as we have seen, the maze-like qualities of a story seed encourage its minotaurization. But even as minotaurization profoundly changes the nature of the seed, it spreads it to new readers and contributors and allows it continued life, albeit in an altered form. In an interview on the occasion of the SCP Foundation’s thirteenth anniversary in 2021, DrGears—one of the story-world’s longest-running contributors—is asked about the impact of the game Containment Breach, which in 2012 drastically increased the story-world’s audience. He says: