There’s something deeply eerie, yet calming about the Backrooms.
Maybe it’s the long, empty hallways that become memories of places time left behind. Those yellow–walled, musky–carpeted rooms take us back to someplace that feels nostalgic and once lived–in—or maybe they just serve as a source of reprieve in a world that feels fast and finite.
The idea of the Backrooms began when an image of an abandoned building went viral online. Users soon labeled it as creepypasta—a horror legend copied and spread across the internet. This particular horror legend warned that people could “no–clip” or glitch out of reality and into the Backrooms, an endless maze of yellow–walled rooms. Teenage Kane Parsons became fascinated with this creepypasta, and was inspired to create a story that went with it. His YouTube short films—animated entirely by himself using Blender and Adobe After Effects—generated massive fandom across the internet. Now, Parsons is changing the entertainment industry at large with his A24–backed feature, Backrooms, which surpassed $80M domestically at the box office its opening weekend.
Adapting material from his YouTube channel, kanepixels, Parsons was challenged to deliver a story that fit a more traditional narrative structure, while still delivering an uncanny, lore–heavy experience for existing fans. His previous films lean more heavily into world–building—precisely what makes them so brilliant. Some videos are presented as leaked research videos from the fictional research division Async, the government–sponsored organization that discovered the Backrooms. Other videos are ‘found footage’ of everyday people no–clipping into the Backrooms. Through his use of first–person POV and extensive world–building, Parsons gives us complete control and ownership over the stories he builds, allowing us to discover the uncanny world of the Backrooms ourselves.
One can tell that he takes his craft seriously, pouring his passion for storytelling and filmmaking into his art. His slow, deliberate pacing, use of misdirection, and ambiguity challenge today’s expectations for movies made for the big screen. Yet, Backrooms still makes for a wildly entertaining ride where viewers are bound to lose themselves in Parsons’s endlessly mind–bending, yellow–washed horror.
Set in the same universe as his short films, Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an unfulfilled furniture store owner struggling to put his life back together. He regularly sees a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve), who tries to help him remedy his life challenges. Clark’s reality changes after he discovers an entrance to the Backrooms in the basement of his furniture store and ventures inside to prove its existence to the world.
An architect by nature, Clark becomes obsessed with mapping the Backrooms—and, in so doing, mapping his own inner psyche. He finds a new home in the eerie, endless yellow hallways and buzzing fluorescent lights—a place where he’s free to be himself.
When he doesn’t respond for weeks, Mary decides to venture after him in the Backrooms. But the Clark she discovers is not the same one she last saw at her office. Clark seems to have gone full Jack Torrance, binding Mary to a chair and threatening her life. His mind unravels while he explains why he cannot leave the Backrooms. The most surprising moment of the film comes when Mary insists that Clark doesn’t have to leave—but more importantly, that despite his flaws, he doesn’t have to change who he is.
What makes this adaptation particularly successful is Parson’s reliance on what now feels like “old school” ways of filmmaking. For starters, Parsons made Clark appear to be the main character, but populates the film with flashbacks and trippy dream sequences from Mary’s childhood about her paranoid mother (Krista Kosonen) who was later committed to a mental asylum. After following Clark for the first half of the film, Parsons switches our attention to Mary and brings us closer to her character as she ventures into the Backrooms. Mary is finally revealed as the film’s true protagonist after she confronts Clark, and the story pivots to follow her attempted escape.
Parsons also uses unconventionally slow pacing for the modern attention span. Thanks to scrolling and social media, theatrical releases need to rely on shock factor or explosive action to keep the viewer engaged. But Parsons relies on the same type of suspense that made his Backrooms YouTube series so compelling in the first place. Both the opening scene and Clark’s discovery of the Backrooms are filled with long takes simply following a character as they wander through the Backrooms. The opening scene looks like something straight from Parsons’ YouTube channel: a found footage–style POV wandering through the Backrooms until we hear a frightening noise nearby and end on a jump scare.
Perhaps what makes this film feel like a nod to the nostalgic, trippy films out of the ‘80s and ‘90s is Parsons’ use of the uncanny. The Backrooms are described as being alive, preserving memories of the people who visit in the form of creatures like the Still Lifes. And like human memories, these physical memories of people are copied so much that they become distorted. Additionally, the creature known as the Entity (played in this film by Robert Bobroczkyi)—popularized by Parsons’ short films—takes the shape of a monstrous version of Clark dressed in a pirate’s uniform, seven feet tall as he chases Mary across the Backrooms. It’s these unsettling details from Parsons’ shorts that make Backrooms feel like an evolution of the world that has already spent years haunting popular imagination.
Nobody could have predicted the massive cult following that a single image and caption would generate. Yet somehow, we’ve been drawn to the idea of yellow rooms that bleed into infinity. We could lose ourselves in them. But we could find ourselves in them, too.
