The backrooms is one of the internet's favorite pieces of modern folklore: an infinite maze of empty yellow office rooms with damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights, the place you supposedly end up when you glitch out of reality. Creators have turned it into a whole genre of AI video, fake recovered camcorder tapes wandering the yellow rooms, and the format is having a bigger moment than ever this year.
The new Backrooms template on EmpirioLabs locks in the whole look for you: recovered 1990s VHS camcorder footage, first-person handheld walking POV, mono-yellow wallpaper, stained office carpet, drop-tile ceilings, tape grain, chroma bleed, washed-out color, and a burned-in camcorder timestamp. You describe the scene, the template does the analog horror.
See it in action
This clip came straight out of the template on Seedance 2.0 Pro, from the one-click prompt idea "A dark figure at the end of the hallway":
What you need
An EmpirioLabs account with a few dollars of credits. That is it. The template is text-to-video, so there is nothing to upload: open it, type a scene, generate. It runs on Seedance 2.0 Pro by default and also works on Seedance 2.0 Fast, Wan 2.7, Kling O3, HappyHorse 1.1, Hunyuan Video 1.5, PixVerse V5.6, and more, so you can trade speed against fidelity.
How to make a backrooms video
1. Open the Backrooms template
In the playground template browser, pick Backrooms. The recommended model loads automatically and the mode is locked to text-to-video with ambient audio on, so the fluorescent hum comes with the clip.
2. Describe the scene
Type what the tape should show, or click one of the built-in ideas. The endless yellow rooms are the classic, but the template also nails the white-tiled poolrooms, an infinite parking garage, a fixed CCTV frame where something crosses the far room, the lights dying section by section down a corridor, and the noclip moment where the floor gives way under an ordinary office.
3. Generate and post
Generate at 9:16 vertical for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Five seconds is the sweet spot for a loop; chain a few scenes together if you want a longer wander through the rooms. The camcorder timestamp, tape grain, and unsteady handheld framing come out of the box, so the result reads as recovered footage without any editing.
Using the Backrooms template via the API
Pass the template slug on the video generation endpoint along with your prompt:
curl https://api.empiriolabs.ai/v1/videos/generations \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $EMPIRIOLABS_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "seedance-2-0-pro",
"template": "backrooms",
"prompt": "Walking POV through endless yellow rooms, something moves in the far doorway",
"aspect_ratio": "9:16",
"resolution": "720p",
"duration": 5
}'The request returns a job id; poll /v1/jobs/{job_id} until it completes and download the MP4 from the result.
定价
There is no extra template fee. A generation bills at the normal pay-as-you-go rate of the model you run. On Seedance 2.0 Pro today that is $0.139 per second at 480p and $0.300 per second at 720p, so a five-second 720p backrooms clip is about $1.50, and a 480p test run is about $0.70. Current rates for every supported model are on the pricing page.
Backrooms wallpapers too
The template ships with an image sibling for stills: pick the Images tab in the template browser and the same recovered-VHS look renders as 16:9 wallpapers, from the endless yellow hallway to the poolrooms. It runs on Seedream 5.0 Lite by default.
Try Backrooms now
Open the Backrooms template in the playground, browse the full template catalog, or wire it into your app with the Generation Templates API docs.
