By now, everyone knows the deal with Backrooms: At 20 years old, Kane Parsons is the youngest director in A24’s history and his feature debut set the record for the studio’s highest-grossing film domestically, having crossed the $100 million mark after just five days. The film, which draws from the Sonoma County, California-born YouTuber’s viral 22-episode web series, is rooted in the uncanniness of liminal spaces, and the eerie wrongness of lingering somewhere we are meant to pass through.
It follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former architect now running a discount furniture store, who discovers a portal in the basement that opens onto something vast and wrong: an infinite drop-ceilinged maze of filled-in pools, random pony walls, half-sunken furniture jutting out from the carpet and drywall, and steep corridors that no building code would sanction.
The set was impressively upholstered in 27,000 square feet of grimy carpet and even more aggressively unpleasant yellow wallpaper, a key texture in the Backrooms universe. Set in 1990, Parsons’s project not only sidesteps the problem of cell phones but also taps into a version of the past that the director never himself experienced—one that his generation recognizes only through photos and inherited cultural memory. There’s a funny kind of nostalgia for a place you’ve never been that can be its own liminal sensation.
With his ambitious debut, Parsons is disciplined enough to resist lore bloat, or the pull toward over-explaining the story’s mythology, which the Internet has spent years elaborating on to baroque levels. The restraint is evident, even if it sometimes works against itself in the form of thinly constructed characters. You might say that Parsons trades the concept’s essential mystery for a tidier allegory, delivered through emotional confrontations between Clark and his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve)—and, eventually, an MRI scientist (Mark Duplass) studying the phenomenon.
Each of them feels too underdeveloped to bear the weight placed on them. If one is feeling charitable, one could argue that the characters’ inconsequentiality is the point: the Backrooms are an indifferent, ever-expanding organism that absorbs those who enter, neutering all sense of individuality and purpose. (The less charitable read would be that this is what happens when too many cooks are in the kitchen. Among the film’s laundry list of big-name producers: James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins).
Still, Backrooms is ultimately less a character-driven horror film than an attempt to capture a contemporary anxiety. Parsons translates a distinctly Internet-native sense of dread—that doomscroll feeling—to the big screen in a way we haven’t seen before. It’s not merely an aesthetic flourish; it’s the film’s core organizing principle.
One question, which Parsons is by no means the first filmmaker to face, haunts the entire enterprise: Can a found footage YouTube video, built on rawness, cheapness, and the friction of the amateur filmmaker, survive the move to a studio budget? Does the upgrade strip out the grit?
To help you decide, we’ve compiled a list of the 5 things you should know about Backrooms.
1. It all started with a meme…
In 2019, before Backrooms the movie and the YouTube series, an anonymous user on 4chan’s paranormal message board (the Internet’s campfire for ghost stories and worse) asked users to post “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.'” From the deluge emerged a photograph of an empty, slightly off-kilter room. The caption: “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.” The haunting description and image (later identified as a mid-construction HobbyTown location in Wisconsin) aestheticized the concept of liminal spaces, coining the concept of Backrooms.
2. … and went viral during the pandemic (for obvious reasons).
Backrooms content found its moment during Covid lockdowns, when the idea of being trapped in an indeterminate interior space hit more powerfully than it might have otherwise. The image had already been circulating as creepypasta (Internet folklore passed around and elaborated on by users), but the pandemic gave it new urgency. Reddit threads proliferated with photos and fan wikis fleshed out the mythology: The Backrooms accrued levels, creatures, and rules.
At the time, Parsons, then a teenager, was honing his visual effects skills using the open-source software Blender. In January 2022, under the username KanePixels, he uploaded the first video in his series.
3. The void predates the meme.
The dread conjured by Backrooms (the movie and the YouTube show) and Backrooms the crowdsourced images may channel the darkness and disaffection of the Internet, but that sensation is much older than the digital era. Writer H.P. Lovecraft built his own philosophy (cosmicism) around the terror of scale, and of spaces and forces so vast they render human cognition irrelevant.
Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves, about a house with an interior vastly larger than its exterior, might be a more direct precursor. Danielewski constructed that book’s entire structure (footnotes, competing narrators, and the typographical chaos of fonts and colors) around the same core fear articulated by the Backrooms posts. House of Leaves fans will get the gist of Backrooms immediately.
4. Parsons is the poster child of the YouTube-to-studio pipeline.
Parsons isn’t the only filmmaker making the jump from online videos to theatrical releases. The Philippou brothers made Talk to Me for A24 in 2022, drawing on a similar online filmmaking background. Kyle Edward Ball directed Skinamarink in 2023—a $15,000 feature shot in his childhood home that leaked online before its festival premiere and went viral anyway. Damian McCarthy, the Irish director behind Oddity and this year’s Hokum (a witch-haunted-hotel film starring Adam Scott) got his start uploading his horror shorts to YouTube. And Curry Barker released his micro-budget found-footage film Milk & Serial for free on YouTube in 2024, parlaying the attention it received into last month’s Obsession, which Focus Features acquired for $15 million and which has since grossed over $100 million theatrically.
What’s interesting about the cohort is not that they leveraged DIY Internet acclaim into king-making marquee movie deals—that’s just how the industry works now. It’s that their films are genuinely strange. None of them seems to be succumbing to the sanitizing force of the IP machine. Whether that’s because online horror self-selects for a weirder audience, or because these directors never had to pitch to a room, is a question worth sitting with as Parsons’s film plays to the widest audience the community has had yet.
5. The real Backrooms is… the Internet itself.
Welcome to a new kind of rabbit-hole horror that maps perfectly onto our era of Internet-as-lived-experience. The sensation of following an algorithm into a space with no exit, where time warps, where you forget why or how you got to where you are. The spaces in the film mirror the way we consume media on the Internet: one corridor opens onto another, each room defying the desire for resolution. People emerge changed, or don’t come out at all—it could be the logline for a horror film, or it could be a simple description of what happens when the human brain goes online.
What to watch next:
- Cube (1997): A group of strangers is trapped in an inexplicable, deadly maze with no exits and no explanation offered.
- Exit 8 (2026): An adaptation of a Japanese indie game in which you walk a looping subway corridor watching for anomalies.
- Severance (2022-present): The offices of Lumon are essentially the Backrooms with an HR department.
- One Hour Photo (2002): The Robin Williams drama about a photo technician who becomes obsessed with a family whose photo he develops, has been cited by Parsons as a direct tonal influence on the film.
- It Ends (2025): Another existential Gen Z horror movie, and a notable companion piece to Parsons’s film, follows four friends as they turn onto a road with no exit.
- Vivarium (2019): Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are a young couple who view a house and cannot leave the development where every street loops back. The suburban development and life are an infinite trap.
- Inland Empire (2006): David Lynch’s epic starring Laura Dern.
- Chain (2004): Jem Cohen’s documentary about the global mall landscape, shot across eleven states and six countries, weaves in a
- Annihilation (2018): A sci-fi thriller set in a fictitious zone where physics has stopped cooperating. Read Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy on which it’s based, too.
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