To understand why so many people care about Backrooms and why so many people were skeptical that a 19-year-old could pull off a feature adaptation, we need to start long before A24 came calling, when the idea of "the Backrooms" was already one of the internet's most fascinating and popular horror creepypastas.
For the uninitiated, the idea of the Backrooms dates back to a photo that was posted on 4Chan (Yup, that 4Chan- ew!) back in 2019, where a commenter posted:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old, moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you.”
The Backrooms arrived at an interesting cultural moment of the late 2010s with an online and in-person explosion of interest in "liminal spaces." Online, photographs of empty malls, abandoned offices, school hallways after hours, and other transitional spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and also… just a little bit off would go viral on places like Reddit and Twitter.
These images tap into what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called the unheimlich, or in English, “the uncanny,” an imperfect translation but best understood as something that is “oddly familiar.” The uncanny is in things we recognise, but become unsettling because there is something just a bit off about them, whether we can put our finger on it or not. Where Freud wrote about the unheimlich in relation to wax figures, the Backrooms creepypastas brought this idea to physical spaces.
Within a few months of the original 4Chan post, indie creators were making their own Backrooms video games for players to enter and try to survive the Backrooms for themselves.
Not long after, in 2022, 16-year-old “Kane Pixels” (as he was known on YouTube), better known now as Kane Parsons, uploaded his first short film, The Backrooms (Found Footage), using Blender and Adobe After Effects. Parsons ended up making 24 more episodes of the Backrooms, every video expanding the lore and mythos of the Backrooms, much of which original fans of the YouTube series will be delighted to see aspects of in the new A24 feature.
By the time A24 announced a feature adaptation, Parsons had already spent years building one of internet horror’s most ambitious and detailed mythologies. Not everyone, however, was convinced he was the right person to bring it to the big screen.
There’s been a lot of talk recently online of people trying to denounce 20-year-old director Kane Parson’s debut feature, Backrooms. How could a 19-year-old (at the time of filming) possibly manage the demands of a professional film set and academy award nominee talent like Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value)? Some have even had the gall to claim the film was ghost-directed by some of the huge horror producers signed onto the project, like James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins.
This led to Mark Duplass publicly coming to Parsons’ defence, stating, “uhhh… I was there! I suspect one of the reasons I was hired was because I mentor a lot of young filmmakers, and they may have thought it’d be good to have someone there who’s sensitive to that, and I was prepared to help out. [...] What happened was, he didn’t need any of us! He was intensely prepared. He spent the last five years of his life building out one of the most detailed mythologies I’ve ever been a part of. [He] worked incredibly closely with his crew, particularly his [Director of Photography] on shot design, and was very sensitive, calm and smart in dealing with actors. So, for those of you who have all [of] these thoughts… were you there?”
KING SHIT! We love an experienced Hollywood creative standing up for and defending a young up-and-comer for the work they deserve to be credited for!
Backrooms will not only delight creepypasta fans like myself, but also work successfully as a standalone film for new fans unfamiliar with the online lore. While longtime viewers will appreciate the references, mythology, and visual callbacks to Parsons' original YouTube series, newcomers are never made to feel as though they've arrived halfway through a conversation. The film carefully balances mystery with accessibility, revealing just enough information to orient viewers without over-explaining the unknowable qualities that make the Backrooms so creepy in the first place.
A large part of that success comes down to the cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor brings a grounded emotional weight to the material that keeps the film anchored even as reality begins to fracture around him, while Renate Reinsve once again demonstrates why she has become one of the most exciting performers working today.
Just as impressive is the film's production design. Translating the Backrooms from grainy internet folklore and found-footage aesthetics into a large-scale theatrical experience could easily have stripped away the core uncanniness of it all. Instead, Parsons and his team understand exactly what makes these spaces so uneasy: endless rooms, confusingly angled tunnels, and doors with too many (or too few!) knobs are created with obsessive attention to detail, preserving the unsettling feeling that these environments exist just outside the boundaries of reality.
And if you happen to, for some reason, love this particular shade of mono-yellow, A24 has released a Backrooms wallpaper just for you! A24 is showing us once again why they are one of the funnest production and distribution companies out there. Their Midsommar or Pearl Christmas tree toppers or their Everything Everywhere All At Once hotdog fingers show that they are doing movie merch in a funner and more creative way than anyone else out there.
But back to the Backrooms of it all!
Parsons demonstrates a remarkable confidence in visual storytelling. Rather than relying on lengthy explanations or lore dumps, he trusts the audience to sit with the ambiguity of the Backrooms, allowing atmosphere, composition, and sound design to do much of the narrative heavy lifting. It is a difficult balance to achieve– especially in a debut feature– but Parsons pulls it off with confidence.
It turns out that 2026 may just be a year of horror for the books. Horror fans have already been gifted with 28 Years Later: Bone Temple, Hokum, Obsession, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, Forbidden Fruits, and Passenger, and we’re not even in June yet!
Personally, I can’t wait to see what Kane Parsons does next. Whether it’s a sequel to Backrooms or something else entirely, I will be seated for whatever he comes out with next.
Looking to read more on internet-mythology-turned film? That’s exactly what I wrote about in Film East’s newest anthology Art/Film edited by Shelby Cooke and featuring the work of our genius editor-in-chief, Umnia El-Neil. I’m crossing the pond soon to meet Umnia and our co-contributors for a panel on Art/Film at the BFI Library in London, U.K., on June 8th, and we’d love to yap movies and art with you there! Tickets for the event can be purchased here.