Backrooms

There’s a reason horror keeps coming back to the shopping mall. George Romero put zombies in one in 1978. Dan Bell built a whole YouTube series around walking through empty ones. The internet’s liminal-space obsession runs on photos of abandoned food courts. And this October, The Consumed puts you on the night shift at one. So what is it about a dead mall that gets under our skin? 1. It Was Built for Crowds A mall only makes sense full of people. Its wide concourses, endless benches, and food court seating for hundreds were all designed around a crowd. Take the crowd away and the building starts to feel wrong, like a stage after the play has closed. That gap between what a space is for and what’s happening in it is the core of liminal horror. Your brain keeps expecting people, and nobody comes. ...

When people ask me what The Consumed is like, the shortest answer I’ve found is: it’s the Backrooms meets Resident Evil. That sounds like two things that shouldn’t go together. The Backrooms is about wandering through empty, endless space where nothing happens, and that’s the scary part. Resident Evil is about managing scarce resources while something very much does happen to you. The Consumed puts both in one dead mall, and it works better than it has any right to. ...

I already wrote a quick explainer on The Consumed. This post is about where it comes from. If you’ve spent any time in the strange corners of the internet over the last ten years (analog horror tapes, Backrooms lore, dead-mall YouTube, vaporwave albums with a Roman bust on the cover), The Consumed will feel like someone gathered all of it into one building and handed you the keys. Literally: you’re the night security guard. ...