Basics

What Are the Poolrooms? Where the Blue-Tiled Water Spaces Came From

Published: 2026-09-06

An indoor pool with nobody in it. Blue tile, lukewarm water, a ceiling with no windows. The Poolrooms are one of the most widely shared images in the whole liminal-horror space — unsettling and oddly nostalgic at the same time. Here is where they came from.

The abandoned Azure indoor swimming pool in Pripyat — The Azure pool in Pripyat, near Chernobyl. The water is long gone; the memory of the space is not. Photo: Timm Suess (CC BY-SA 2.0), Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Poolrooms Came After the Backrooms, Not With It

This surprises people: the Poolrooms were not created as part of the Backrooms. They began as Dream Pools, a series of 3D renders published in 2020 by Jared Pike, an American visual artist.

Pike started making them during the pandemic, partly as modelling practice, using Blender. He deliberately built in things real pools do not have — under-lit sections, unnaturally uniform tiling, proportions that do not match the human body — to produce spaces that read as familiar and wrong at once.

He has said the point is to never show what is there. Reveal what is lurking around the corner and the fear evaporates. That restraint is the whole trick.

How They Became Level 37

As the renders spread, people online connected them to the Backrooms mythos on their own. Before long the Poolrooms were being described as Level 37 of the Backrooms: a relatively safe layer, flooded with lukewarm water.

That is a community addition, not official canon — but since the Backrooms has no official canon in the first place, mergers like this are entirely normal.

Frightening, or Calming?

Reactions split cleanly in two. Some people read the Poolrooms as liminal horror. Others find them quiet, soothing, even nostalgic.

That ambivalence probably comes from the fact that most people have been in an indoor pool as a child. Echoing noise, chlorine, cold tile. Take those remembered sensations and subtract only the people, and nostalgia and unease arrive together. That state is precisely what the term liminal space is trying to name.

An indoor public swimming pool in Obihiro, Hokkaido — A Japanese municipal pool. The moment the voices stop, the space starts to mean something else. Photo: Yasu (CC BY-SA 3.0), Source: Wikimedia Commons

Spreading Into Video, Games and Film

In 2022 Kane Parsons' YouTube series absorbed Poolrooms-style spaces. In 2024 the Finnish developer Tensori released the horror game Pools. And the 2026 A24 film Backrooms carries the same lineage of imagery.

In other words: what began as one artist's practice pieces is now a shared image spanning several media.

Where to Find That Feeling in Japan

The flooded blue labyrinth itself is not real, but places with a similar atmosphere are. A municipal pool after closing, a shuttered aquarium, a bathing facility out of season — what they share is a space built to echo with voices, with the sound removed.

LIMap records places like these with their locations. Always check opening status and whether access is permitted before visiting.

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