Weirdcore & Dreamcore

• Start from a found or snapshot-quality photograph of an ordinary place with nobody in it (a playground, classroom, mall, corridor or carpeted room) and keep it low-resolution, compressed and grainy, as if recovered from an old hard drive or an early digital camera; for dreamcore, wash it in pastel tints that can tip into lurid brightness.
• Put one thing in it that does not belong: a disembodied eye or mouth pasted into clouds, wings or darkness, a faceless, shadowy figure standing in a doorway or, in the softer dreamcore, a spiral or optical illusion, and cut it in roughly so the edit shows.
• Speak to the viewer in one short line ('are you lost?', 'nothing is real'), typed small in a plain default face in out-of-place red, or in white inside a black rectangle laid over the picture, never as designed lettering.
• Leave the frame empty and unexplained: no grid, no brand polish, no ornament beyond a stray piece of clip art, no caption that says where or when; let the vacant space and the missing context carry the unease.
• Aim for anemoia rather than a joke: borrow the look of late-1990s and 2000s amateur pictures, clip art and childhood places so the image feels remembered but not one's own, and keep the tone sincere.
• In video, cut abruptly between stills and short loops under slowed, lo-fi or wordless music, so each transition feels like waking in a different room.

Online, with no single founder: image posts in Reddit communities such as r/Weirdcore and r/Liminalspace, growing out of creepypasta-forum and 4chan lore and spreading on TikTok and YouTube from 2021 (the #dreamcore hashtag had passed 923.7 million TikTok views by October 2021). It grew beside the liminal-space imagery shared on 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr in 2019, which 4chan's Backrooms thread of May 2019 became closely associated with, takes its look from the low-quality pictures shared on an older internet, and cites the dream games LSD: Dream Emulator (1998) and Yume Nikki (2004) as influences. Valentina Tanni's Exit Reality (2023) traces it back to vaporwave's spectral reworking of the web's own imagery in the early 2010s

1. Wikipedia, 'Weirdcore' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weirdcore): also called Oddcore, Strangecore or Creepycore; popularised in the early 2020s; liminal spaces, low-quality photos, surreal messages, nostalgia and anemoia; 'influenced by the general look and feel of images shared on an older internet'; red out-of-place text ('are you lost?', 'nothing is real'); black rectangles as voids holding text; eyes and mouths in angel wings, clouds or darkness; faceless figures; empty playgrounds, classrooms and malls; fragmented, abrupt transitions; Yume Nikki and LSD: Dream Emulator as influences; Kyle Edward Ball consulted r/Liminalspace and r/Weirdcore for Skinamarink (citing Isaac Feldberg, RogerEbert.com, 7 January 2023)
2. Wikipedia, 'Dreamcore (aesthetic)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcore_(aesthetic)): precise origins unclear; 'gained popularity in the late 2010s through early 2020s'; TikTok and other communities in the early to mid-2020s; hazy, recognisable old settings, kenopsia, low-fidelity imagery, optical illusions, clouds, long corridors; overlaps with weirdcore and liminal-space imagery; Dreamcore (2025) game based entirely around the aesthetic
3. Wikipedia, 'Liminal space (aesthetic)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic)): spread on 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr in 2019; spike in March 2020 with lockdown photographs of empty spaces; r/LiminalSpace over 500,000 members and #liminalspaces over two billion TikTok views by November 2022
4. Wikipedia, 'The Backrooms' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms): 4chan /x/ thread of 12 May 2019; the 2002 Oshkosh, Wisconsin photograph identified in May 2024; 'mono-yellow' and fluorescent hum; Kane Parsons' 'The Backrooms (Found Footage)', January 2022, presented as a 1990s VHS tape; A24 film released 29 May 2026
5. Wikipedia, 'Skinamarink' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinamarink), 'Yume Nikki' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yume_Nikki) and 'LSD: Dream Emulator' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD:_Dream_Emulator): Skinamarink premiered at Fantasia on 25 July 2022, set in 1995, lit largely by a CRT television; Yume Nikki by Kikiyama in RPG Maker 2003, first shared on 2channel on 26 June 2004; LSD: Dream Emulator by OutSide Directors Company and Asmik Ace, PlayStation, 22 October 1998, conceived by Osamu Sato from a dream diary
6. Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold, trans. Anna Carruthers (Rome: NERO Editions; Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2024; Italian edition NERO, 2023), ISBN 978-961-7173-46-8 (Aksioma) / 978-88-8056-254-2 (NERO) (https://aksioma.org/exit-reality): from vaporwave's 'spectral' reworking of the web's native imagery in the early 2010s to the backrooms and 'the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore'
7. Jack Riewe, 'Dreamcore, Sister To Weirdcore, Is The Internet Aesthetic Packed With Uneasiness', Nylon, 10 November 2021 (https://www.nylon.com/fashion/dreamcore-aesthetic-weirdcore): #dreamcore at 923.7 million TikTok views in October 2021; 'optical illusions, spirals, clouds, long hallways, and déjà vu'; Jordan Gretzner, Kayla Moore, Kelsey Blevins; dreamcore 'based in surrealism', 'the same feeling as a David Lynch movie'; Gretzner's posts 'usually touch on themes of existentialism and derealization'
8. Rachel Finn, 'What is "Dreamcore" and why is it all over TikTok?', i-D, 13 June 2021 (https://i-d.co/article/dreamcore-tiktok-aesthetic/): 'pastel colours and lurid brightness'; pink clouds; empty playgrounds and shopping malls; slowed-down music; @jgretznerd and his 'Dream Train' video of 'pink clouds and waterfall trees'; 'aesthetic that can cause a panic attack', from a @unttochable video
9. Ian Dean, 'What's the Weirdcore art trend, and why does it feel so familiar to me?', Creative Bloq, 29 July 2025, syndicated by Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/whats-weirdcore-art-trend-why-120000121.html): 'evolved from early Creepypasta forums and 4chan lore'; TikTok, YouTube and Reddit; creepy text overlays, broken typography, glitchy edits, 'anti-design: misaligned elements, dated UI', clip art and old photos; green-hued hallways; 'you were never meant to be her' 'scrawled across abandoned landscapes'
10. Jia-Yu Song, Won-Ho Choi and Ru Li, 'What Makes People Like Dreamcore Aesthetics? The Role of Trait Nostalgia in Preferences for Dreamcore Imagery', Empirical Studies of the Arts 44(2), 2026, 529–551 (online 10 July 2025), doi:10.1177/02762374251356955: dreamcore images fall into darker/eerie and warmer/comforting groups, both liked more by people high in trait nostalgia
11. Yingcan Zhou, 'The Nihilistic Future of Post-internet Era: Analysis of the Production Mechanism of Core Aesthetics', Communications in Humanities Research 28, 2024, 24–30, doi:10.54254/2753-7064/28/20230029: core aesthetics built from amateur editing, low-quality imagery and thematic compositions around fear and nostalgia
12. Tlön Industries/Montraluz press release, 'Surreal bodycam psychological horror game Dreamcore launches January 23rd on Xbox and Steam', Games Press, 10 December 2024 (https://gamespress.com/Surreal-bodycam-psychological-horror-game-Dreamcore-launches-January-2): Montraluz, an Argentine studio (dateline Buenos Aires), published by Tlön Industries; launch on 23 January 2025; 'surreal first-person, body-cam psychological horror game'; 'loosely inspired by the "backrooms" memes'; the Eternal Suburbia world inspired by the cottages of Level 94 of the Backrooms wiki
13. W3C, Understanding WCAG 2.2, Success Criterion 2.3.1 Three Flashes or Below Threshold (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/three-flashes-or-below-threshold.html)

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