The Backrooms movie will be released in theaters on May 29.
Liminal spaces – dreamy and nostalgic locales defined by their specific use as a transient space that you don’t spend much time in but remember at least somewhat fondly – are a common part of our everyday lives. They are everywhere, and we all use them, but nothing has perverted their real-life harmlessness more than the phenomenon known as the Backrooms. What started as a benign yet unsettling image and barely 80 accompanying words on a message board became a horrifying sensation. Now, we’re welcoming a fully-fledged mainstream Backrooms movie into the world by a debut filmmaker who cut his teeth on Blender and YouTube, bringing the concept from a two-dimensional terror to a viscerally real experience. So how did we get from internet fodder to promising youngblood visionary Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels)? Noclip with me, and let’s explore the history of the Backrooms.
Backrooms Begins
It all started, as some of the craziest things on this planet do, on 4chan. In May 2019, an anonymous user posted an unsettling image of an empty, sickly yellow, carpeted room with patterned wallpaper to the site’s paranormal board. The image didn’t just come out of nowhere, though; it presumably has a history of being circulated on message boards throughout the 2010s. Even within this thread, the anon user posted in response to a prompt looking for photos that were “disquieting” and “just feel off.”
Despite its innate strangeness, the picture seemed relatively unimportant among a slew of other images within that thread… that is, until another anonymous user decided to reply to the post with a paragraph that instantly brought the concept to life in a stark, undeniable way.
“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.” Paired with the unsettling image, that description was the shot heard round the world.
We now know the image was actually one of many documenting the 2003 renovations of a HobbyTown toy store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but at the time, it seemed so unnatural and not of this world that it was hard to perceive as anything other than quietly sinister, which is what the Backrooms quickly became in the eyes of the internet. Online culture devoured the concept quickly, dissecting every letter of the original text and hypothesizing what horrors could be concocted out of its simplicity.
It started evolving within the greater Reddit community, with creepypasta-style stories popping up in various subreddits before the concept became big enough to warrant its own subreddit, r/Backrooms, where users bounced around the image-text combo as a springboard for a whole host of ideas. Once that was up and running, fans had a homebase to theorize, conceptualize, and talk about what terrified them about the concept, and they took every opportunity to do so. In fact, this is where the Backrooms itself started to expand, not just the fanbase that latched onto it.
Backrooms Levels Up
The concept of the Backrooms as this vast expanse of decaying office-style rooms that went on for more time than the human mind could possibly comprehend… well, that was only the beginning. Fans began coming up with different Backrooms “levels,” often linked together through a mysterious elevator one would presumably have to find if they found themselves noclipping through and getting stuck on that level. Oh, and if you’re new to the Backrooms, noclipping is the concept of falling through the real world in an unmarked, inconspicuous space and ending up in the Backrooms, which borrows from the video game concept where a character might glitch out and splice through a wall or item during gameplay.
The idea of adding various levels – ones that echo the incredible creativity the Backrooms concept is known for today, like the gym-style Playrooms or endlessly tiled Poolrooms – as well as various different entities that could dwell within those levels didn’t exactly jibe with the entirety of the fandom that had blossomed around the Backrooms. When these ideas started taking hold, another subreddit sprouted up – r/TrueBackrooms – that catered to fans who wanted to stick to the conventional lore as it was originally presented without the creativity of extra levels and expansions both serious and meme-like.
The Backrooms fandom continued to grow, however, because of expansion, transforming from a 4chan and Reddit-based infatuation to a popular indie video game subject and taking over video-forward platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. And if you’re reading this breakdown with even a wisp of knowledge of the Backrooms, chances are YouTube rings some bells when paired with the creepypasta-style approach; that’s because, despite far from humble beginnings elsewhere on the internet, YouTube is where the Backrooms really became a genre-defining, unmissable horror world.
Backrooms Breaks Containment
Enter Kane Parsons, a 16-year-old animator and artist who was at that time posting on YouTube under the handle KanePixels. In January 2022, he changed the horror concept forever with “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” a short film that followed a young man in the 1990s who noclips into the musty yellow expanse while making a movie with friends. The project was far from the first vision of the Backrooms as a concept, but it was certainly the first to break containment in such a major way.
Much of that can be attributed to a few elements that would come to be what fans would expect from Parsons’ work. He did an excellent job of skillfully crafting a reality that played well under imaginary circumstances, and the level of realism the filmmaker was able to achieve easily hooked audiences. By employing combinations of voice acting and skilled Blender and After Effects work, the viewer is both immersed in story and in 1990s shot-on-video aesthetic, which works in favor of the realism anyway. Lastly, the broad scope of lore that Parsons managed to shape – even in this first film, where the viewer is left with more questions than answers – was, and is, nothing short of intricately impressive, clearly highlighting the mind of a confident storyteller. Parsons’ video quickly climbed in viewership, and is now sitting at an incredible 77 million views. He appeared to have had big plans for the concept long before he uploaded the first video, and the short expanded days later from one film to a full-blown series, one that currently sits at 22 videos total.
As might be expected, the Backrooms lore expanded in conjunction with the series, which showed audiences what it was like to get stuck in the Backrooms, and worse, what would eventually become of you if you met your end there. It gave viewers exactly the feeling communicated by the original 4chan image and description, down to the buzzing office interiors and the utterly menacing entity that stalks its halls, yet it became so visceral and immersive in a way that only filmmaking can be. Parsons also wasn’t satisfied to just create the conventions of the Backrooms in his image; he took it further and introduced Async Research Institute, a private company who was the first to make contact with what we call the Backrooms, and explore them and what they can do.
The series quickly became focused on the staff of Async doing explorative walks to map the Backrooms. The videos built intrigue as they started to build a new set of lore specific to Parsons’ series. Async unlocked access to the space known to us as the Backrooms – ”the Complex” in the YouTube series – as part of Project KV31, which fans came to discover is a program intended to eliminate the continual need to build more storage compounds and residential housing for humans on Earth. Their hope is that, by using the Backrooms as the infinite space it appears to be, they can solve any potential obstacles that would arise from overpopulation on Earth.
That doesn’t go exactly as planned. The series shifted again to focus on humans in dire circumstances within the Complex, though this time those humans were Async workers entering of their own free will and not random bystanders unintentionally noclipping out of existence. In watching these workers face obstacles and adversaries the regular people in the story previously faced – which includes an entity that seems to be bacterial in nature but no less sentient or utterly terrifying – and trying to demystify them with futile results, it gave the series a great sense of depth and dread that made it compulsively watchable.
At this point, the series is technically still ongoing. The last entry in the series, “Static Dead End,” was uploaded to YouTube less than a year and a half ago, and Parsons is certainly known to take long breaks between entries of projects. That said, there has been something way bigger demanding his attention: the natural progression of his impeccable small screen work in this concept to the world of cinema.
Backrooms on the Big Screen
Just over a year after Parsons’ first short hit YouTube to universal acclaim, A24 announced that they had joined forces with the filmmaker to bring his version of the Backrooms story to life in a feature film. And now, a little over three years after that, the film is debuting in theaters worldwide. Let’s be real – it’s an incredible achievement to have your hard work noticed in a way that allows you to bring your vision into reality on a major scale. It’s a feat every filmmaker dreams of, but it can also be daunting, especially if you’re tackling a concept with a dedicated following and all of the expectations they bring with them.
That might explain why Parsons seemingly decided to tackle a wholly different story within the world of the Backrooms for his 2026 feature debut. The movie follows a man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who owns a furniture store, and finds an entrance to the Backrooms in its basement. Naturally, he’s amazed by what he finds, and opts to let his therapist (Renate Reinsve) in on the secret. In glimpses fans were able to get ahead of the film’s release, Ejiofor’s character also employs teens to help him go into the Backrooms and find out more about it… which undoubtedly leads to some terrifying results.
But how much is the film going to actually tie into the series? Well, as someone who has been lucky enough to see the movie early, I’ll tell you two things. First, the movie is going to connect to the Async lore while also acting as another cautionary tale about the ill-fated souls who come in direct contact with this puzzling and frightening space. This isn’t exactly news; Parsons previously made it clear in the lead-up to release that the movie and the series are absolutely operating within the same universe — and he makes good on that promise in several satisfying ways.
For one thing, fans might recall a small element from one of the more recent installments of the series that has shown up in footage from Backrooms trailers, one that certainly sparks some intrigue. In “Found Footage #3,” an installment uploaded in September 2024, the video’s protagonist stumbles upon a cardboard cutout of a caveman in one of the meandering hallways. Ejiofor’s character appears to also stumble upon the same cutout during his own discovery of the Backrooms, which absolutely could be a link to the Async side of the universe Parsons built. Whether there’s a direct tie-in or just Easter eggs, though — and I simply can’t tell you the answer to that — the film is still actively crafting the start of what could be considered a major horror canon.
One thing that does appear fairly certain is that there looks to be an element of memory loss at work in the movie, especially when you take into account the film’s very first teaser. That visual highlighted different levels of the Backrooms, ones that seemed to be shifting into different versions of one another as the camera panned down the floors. Ejiofor’s character has also been heard in the trailers noting the behavior of the Backrooms as if it’s “remembering” things, but that the more it remembers things, the more it essentially forgets how they truly were and can only replicate a fractured idea of it.
It’s a smart way to go about bringing this story to the masses, as it relies on the terror of the Backrooms themselves and what it means to be lost within them. It could so easily go lore-heavy, which admittedly would please the die-hards, but this is a solid entry point that should hopefully grab the attention of Backrooms fans and newcomers alike.
That said, it seems pretty certain that the project isn’t solely a psychological horror story. It looks as though an entity — either the one we already know from Parsons’ series or something totally new — will appear in the film at least once, which is something that has long been a source of debate for fans. Some feel that having a monster within the Backrooms dulls the terror of the vast loneliness and inevitability of that demise, while others think it significantly raises the stakes and actually deepens the psychological torture of the concept. No matter which side of the debate you land on, there’s no denying that audiences love a creepy monster, so it’ll probably prove to be the right move to include that menace in this first big mainstream Backrooms film.
If the box office is on Parsons’ side, once the film is out in the world, the chances of expanding on this world in subsequent films is very high. It’s even possible that we’ll see the Async Research Institute and their efforts to domesticate the Backrooms on the big screen, at least in some capacity. But right now, the future of the Backrooms – both Kane Parsons’ version and the open-source concept as a whole – is as limitless as the Complex itself, and it might just be time to get lost.
