Perhaps you take an unfamiliar turn. Maybe you walk through a slightly crooked door. Or you simply just leaned against a wall and found yourself falling. It was innocuous enough, but the thing is, now you’re in this uncanny liminal space. And no, that thing you maybe saw out the corner of your eye? That wasn’t your imagination. Welcome to the Backrooms. Here’s a useful guide.
The Backrooms movie looks like it’s well on the way to becoming a cultural phenomenon. The opening weekend for the creepypasta-inspired horror flick saw it leap to the top of the box office with a huge $81.4 million gross in the U.S. alone, making it the biggest-ever opener for distributors A24, and matching last weekend’s opening figures for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. It also makes its director, Kane Parsons, the youngest-ever director to top the box office charts at just 20.
But for some who are less wired into the weirder parts of the internet, this is a picture that’s seemingly come out of nowhere. So what exactly are the Backrooms, and why is everyone so very excited about this new horror movie?
Enter the Backrooms
Like so many modern horror concepts, the Backrooms began as a meme on 4Chan. In 2018, someone anonymously posted an image of a yellow room where the walls just didn’t fit right. Its grim, mustard-yellow carpet, flocked wallpaper and tiled ceilings made it feel weirdly timeless, while the incongruous arrangement of walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling gave it an uncanny, unsettling vibe. It created a big reaction, but the most important was a reply that read,
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
There a myth was born, and the evocative photo and this perfect description led to the concept spreading across Reddit where lore began to be established. It led to the broader internet topic of “liminal spaces,” which itself has birthed so much more creepypasta content in the years since—the notion of these in-between spaces, locations that exist between other more concrete places. Since then, the meme’s influence has reached as far as hit TV shows like Severance and American Horror Story, as well as a near-endless number of video games. But perhaps most impactful was Kane Parsons’ YouTube video The Backrooms (Found Footage).
Only 16 years old at the time, Parsons created a VHS-like nine-minute short, made in first-person and created using Blender and Adobe After Effects, that showed someone falling into the Backrooms and attempting to escape a deeply creepy scribble of a monster. It was stunning.
The monster was Parsons’ own addition to the lore, while the video also drew from other locations that had been established on Reddit. It was a massive hit, and Parsons went on to create a series of other videos that further established the story of his own Backrooms vision. Later short films showed government researchers entering the Backrooms via an established entry point and attempting to map its seemingly impossible corridors, as well as even farther reaches into the liminal space’s “levels.” In total, 15 shorts were created on the YouTube channel, all while Parsons was a teenager, but with a depth of understanding of film and horror that most veterans would envy.
From meme to movie
Soon, word was out that independent production company A24 had signed Kane Parsons up to create a feature-length movie based on his YouTube shorts. This was 2023, and A24 had recently secured a string of hits including The Whale, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Noah Baumbach’s stunning White Noise. Parsons was still only 17, and his hiring raised a lot of eyebrows. However, A24 surrounded him with a lot of experienced talent, with producers including Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins, and a script by Ash vs Evil Dead writer Will Soodik. The movie then went on to cast top-tier talent, with Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) as the lead, alongside Norwegian star Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) and the endlessly brilliant Mark Duplass (Creep, Safety Not Guaranteed).
Rather splendidly, the film casts Ejiofor as the owner of a furniture store, and its in his place of work that he accidentally discovers his way into the Backrooms. This is a lovely choice, because in 2024, after Parsons began work on the movie, the location of the original image was finally discovered. It turns out to have been a picture taken in 2002 when a Wisconsin furniture store was being renovated before turning into a branch of HobbyTown.
And, well, it all seems to have worked out rather well. Kane Parsons is now the youngest-ever director with a number-one movie at the box office, and Backrooms equaled a Star Wars movie for its opening weekend. It has 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and a very respectable 77 on Metacritic.
