Hello internet. Welcome to Film Theory. The show that knows that going on to YouTube can be like no clipping into the back rooms.

Your mind in your own business when suddenly it's days later and you have no idea how you've watched so many padlock reviews.

A very, very beefy and very robust lock.

Oh, would you look at the shackle on that baby?

Shout out to lock picking lawyer, by the way, for teaching me way more about locks than I thought a human brain could consume. Anyway, today we're returning to

the mono yellow walls and ceaseless humbusing fluorescence of the backrooms. Case you need to catch

up, the backrooms is an analog horror series here on YouTube.com created by indie filmmaker

Kame Pixels. The initial video came uploaded in January of 2022 absolutely exploded in popularity,

gaining over 43 million views and becoming the seventh most watched video on YouTube of the entire year,

all thanks to its unique atmosphere, clever scares, and fantastic production quality.

It was also built for theorists like us, filled to the brim with awesome ideas and hidden lore for us to decode.

In fact, towards the end of the year, Steph and I even gave Kane Pixels a Streamy Award to honor him for all his incredible work.

But now, here we are. One year later from that initial upload, now with a story that spans four decades of time and 15 videos, plus a few secret videos mixed in.

The community has come up with a ton of ideas to explain this thing.

Everything from alternative realities colliding to the backrooms being an incarnation of the ancient Egyptian afterlife.

Our running theory here is that the world that we see in the backrooms is some sort of simulation,

like a giant video game or the Matrix. What we know of as the real world is the topmost layer of that simulation.

But below the surface, there's an infinite procedurally generated world of unused and cut content.

Stuff that either didn't fit or just wasn't good enough to make the cut for the real world.

And while I still believe that to be the case, today I wanted to take a step back and reset. The Backrooms is a tricky series to talk about.

Nothing is presented in chronological order, and things tend to jump back and forth in time with some earlier videos

referencing events from later videos that haven't technically happened yet.

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