From the mind of visionary YouTube creator Kane Parsons, making his feature-filmmaking debut, comes a dread-inducing cinematic nightmare, poised to define a new era in horror storytelling. Directed by Parsons from a script by Will Soodik (Westworld), based on the series by Parsons, Backrooms unveils previously unknown dimensions to Parsons’ chilling universe and brings the CG found-footage series into the live-action realm, announcing the arrival of a singular new voice in horror cinema.
Following a strong opening weekend in South Africa and a record-breaking international debut, BACKROOMS continues to attract audiences eager to experience one of the most talked-about horror events of the year. Directed by 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons and inspired by his viral online phenomenon, BACKROOMS has become a global sensation, earning more than $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend and setting new records for acclaimed studio A24. The film transports audiences into an unsettling labyrinth of endless rooms, flickering lights and impossible spaces, creating a uniquely immersive cinematic experience that has captivated horror fans and newcomers alike.
“For me, Backrooms is the cumulative result of a societal exhaustion with this industrialised monoculture we’re slipping into,” says Parsons. “Repetition and patterns in society become like sensory deprivation — eventually the brain tries to find meaning and construct from all the incoherent noise. When people are isolated from society, they become disconnected and conspiratorial thinking arises. How terrifying would it be if that was your existence forever, and all you could do is experience it over and over again?”
The Backrooms series originated from a singular image of an empty yellow-walled room lit by fluorescent lights posted anonymously to 4chan in 2019. The image — later identified as a Wisconsin hobby shop photographed circa 2003 — became a creepypasta, or internet horror legend, taking on new life across message boards through its expanding lore and lexicon.
For example, “no-clipping,” or exiting the solid bounds of reality, grew out of the desolate expanse of drop ceilings, carpeted floors, and patterned walls that over time became the Backrooms.
Like any cultural phenomenon, the Backrooms started developing its own lingo. The phenomenon also cemented specific visual motifs. While there were numerous core elements the film adaptation had to get right in its journey from still image to web series to big screen, there was one supremely important element Parsons knew fans would intensely scrutinize on the big screen… the wallpaper.
“The wallpaper is there because it comes out of the original image and was always a key factor in describing the Backrooms,” says Parsons. “The wallpaper also works as a fingerprint of a location — it’s a kind of physical marker that helps underscore the idea that the Backrooms is
building itself.”
Building on the in-world secrets of the Backrooms with its Easter eggs and unexpected detours, Parsons is excited by the prospect of continuing the universe he first created as a teenager posting to YouTube.
“It’s always been about preserving the same feeling, and the same way of delivering information, but gradually giving more visually and narratively to get to the root of the mechanism by which this place operates,” Parsons says. “Where is it drawing from? Where did these buildings come from? What is it building itself out of?”
Fans of Parsons’ Backrooms mythos and universe have been posing these questions since 2022, when the online community began creating and sharing their own variations on Parsons’ otherworldly realm. The evolving Backrooms legend remains active across robust Reddit, Wiki and Discord communities, in addition to Parsons’ three million YouTube subscribers, most of them hyper-attuned to every newly revealed detail of his transfixing world.
Fans in turn craft and post their own art, narrative riffs, deep-dive analyses, and explainer videos, theorizing over the secrets of the Backrooms mythology. This new kind of fandriven IP creation is the first to make the leap to Hollywood, where its continuity and creative integrity is ensured by Parsons’ overarching vision for the universe.
And while the film uncovers startling revelations that are sure to deepen the lore for fans, it also invites new audiences to experience the Backrooms for the first time – a strange and terrifying place whose unsettling mystique may not only point to inexplicable external forces, but perhaps more horrifyingly,
inward.
As the Backrooms pull Clark and Mary ever deeper into its endless maze, the only way out is to confront the emotional and psychological wounds that got them trapped there in the first place. This anchor point grounds the surreal Backrooms in an utterly human perspective, and the truism that while many answers can be known in life, others remain unknowable.
Defying the jump-scare driven tropes in mainstream horror, the big-screen Backrooms explores the psychological and existential terrors of original characters, including an architect-turned furniture-store salesman, his haunted therapist, and a mysterious scientist. For Parsons, utilising the cinematic format was a natural progression of the story world he spent years building on a computer.
“I come from a very ARG (Alternate Reality Game), web series-centred space and I wasn’t trained on the conventions of traditional filmmaking,” Parsons says. “Making this movie was an incredible lesson in balancing what would work for a theatrical audience while also staying true to what I’ve created
on YouTube.”
Taking the Backrooms from internet legend to big screen, Parsons creates a new benchmark in horror cinema around an uncanny space that feeds off of modern disconnection and the human brain’s unquenchable thirst to find meaning in the unexplainable.
With Backrooms, Parsons gives us an unsettling framework for understanding the cacophony of our collective fears and anxieties — and the allure of giving into them.
“The Backrooms is the quintessential thing that would prey on our curiosity and our desire to know more — and to piece together meaning from what seems to be random noise,” says Parsons. “It’s about going down the rabbit hole and arriving at a place where you see that the industrialised scale behind this crisis is affecting many more people than just Clark. It’s everywhere.”
Set in 1990 and based on Parsons’ viral web series, Backrooms follows furniture salesman Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as he makes a startling discovery in the basement of his showroom — a portal, bathed in yellow fluorescent lights and littered with familiar objects, leading to an eerie maze of endless office space. Shaken by what he discovers there, Clark is also drawn to its anomalies. He enlists his sceptical employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help chart its unsettling expanse of impossibly constructed rooms and corridors, where strange noises hint that something otherworldly may be lurking in the shadows. When Clark goes missing, his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), confronting buried traumas of her own, finds herself lost in the Backrooms searching for answers, and a way out.
Liminal Horror
Parsons was just 16 years old when, inspired by an internet creepypasta, he used the open-source 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects to create what was initially intended as a visual effects test. Uploaded to YouTube in 2022, the nine-minute short THE BACKROOMS (FOUND FOOTAGE) garnered 20 million views in its first two weeks and has been dubbed “the scariest video on the internet.”
While still in high school, Parsons began expanding the concept of his initial Backrooms clip, creating 22 additional episodes, and developing its own mythos as it exploded in popularity across the internet. To date, the web series has amassed 216 million views, spawning its own online ecosystem of fan subreddits and YouTube videos dissecting its canon in detail.
The Backrooms phenomenon and its pervasive, infectious dread is rooted in the liminal-space aesthetic built around haunting images of transitory, banal or anodyne thresholds. Often captured in images of man-made environments devoid of people, these spaces are ripe with the uneasy sense that something within is off, or “wrong” — whether physically, spiritually, or psychologically. These desolate settings become a new kind of trap, fraught with terror and menace: an abandoned mall emptied out of shops and consumers; a long, empty hallway leading nowhere; and in Backrooms, a surreal maze of uncanny office rooms laden with details that don’t quite add up.
“The Backrooms feel ordinary, but by the very nature of their extreme ordinariness, it becomes quite disturbing,” says Ejiofor. “You feel like you should be reasonably safe because you’re in an empty office space — but because something isn’t quite right within its confines you feel even more vulnerable.
That feeling is the starting point for why the Backrooms is so horrifying.”
What makes liminal spaces so unsettling?
Stripped of their intended purpose, these desolate places conjure a disquieting sense of nostalgia within the viewer.
“The liminal feeling, whether it be the transition between physical or emotional locations or in-between states, turns into a horror that harkens back to the subtle details of childhood,” says Parsons. “It’s
exploring the past that gets left behind — and the longing to return to the past that doesn’t exist.”
Adds Renate Reinsve, who plays Dr. Mary Kline: “There are so many things inside us that we can’t tap into — and there are specific things we can only access in our subconscious. We have very limited knowledge of the vast neurological system within us.”
There is a familiar shorthand in the banal, office-like space that Clark first enters when he stumbles into the Backrooms, where buzzing fluorescent lights cast drab carpeted chambers in a sickly yellow sheen. “There is probably no better symbol for that kind of monoculture than a drop ceiling,” says Parsons.
Yet beyond that prickling sense of unease, tangible and sinister threats await. In his web series, Parsons established an expansive world in which unlucky humans encounter this limitless space seemingly made up of the sum of the external world — and the volatile entities known as “Still Lifes” within.
The film broadens our understanding of what the Backrooms are capable of — and how they function as a “direct tumour” on reality, in the words of its creator.
“What if it’s not only buildings and objects that can be replicated, but also human beings,” wonders Parsons. “What if we’re not special in any particular way? What if we’re just clumps of cells that can be copied by this place, like mutations?”
As the popularity of Parsons’ BACKROOMS grew, Hollywood production companies began calling with interest in developing it for the big screen. In 2023, a year after the web series debuted, Chernin Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment, and Atomic Monster teamed up with A24 to back Parsons’ feature debut.
Parsons went through the story beat by beat with screenwriter Will Soodik
Ensuring that his ideological north star remained in sight while expanding his Backrooms world into uncharted cinematic territory. Now 20, Parsons makes his feature directorial debut with Backrooms, becoming the youngest director in A24 history. From production design to VFX to musical score, which he
Co-composed with the Canadian musician and immersive sound producer Edo Van Breemen, the filmmaker worked closely with key department heads to ensure that the film preserved strict continuity with the established world of his series.
“Every step of the way in making this film, I’ve felt like we’re advancing the premise of the Backrooms while respecting its core audience,” says Parsons. “Our goal was to deliver for those who know about Backrooms without alienating newcomers. I think it remains an honest interpretation of its own origins.”
James Wan, who serves as a producer on the film and is the world-builder who pioneered the SAW, CONJURING and INSIDIOUS franchises, recognised a kindred spirit in Parsons through his own DIY filmmaking origins. “The horror aspect of this project comes from a very psychological standpoint, and
Kane taps into the growing fascination with liminal spaces,” says Wan. “With his Backrooms shorts, Kane proved that he was very capable. He knows what he wants and he understands this world so well that as producers, cast and crew, we trust his vision. Having someone like that as a leader goes a long way.”
Parsons is not just making a film. He is shaping a genre, and he is only just getting started.
At just 20 years old, Kane Parsons, better known to millions online as Kane Pixels, is redefining what the future of horror looks like. A self-taught filmmaker and visual effects prodigy, Parsons first burst onto the scene with THE BACKROOMS FOUND FOOTAGE, a hauntingly atmospheric YouTube short that went viral and has since amassed more than 190 million views. With its analog horror aesthetic, immersive world building and eerie sense of psychological dread, the film quickly cemented Parsons as a visionary new voice in genre storytelling.
Upcoming, Parsons will make his highly anticipated feature directorial debut with BACKROOMS for A24, Parsons is bringing his singular vision to the big screen. Based on the universe he created, the film is being produced by two genre heavyweights: Shawn Levy, known for STRANGER THINGS and DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE, and James Wan, known for THE CONJURING and M3GAN 2.0. The project marks a rare
partnership between 21 Laps Entertainment and Atomic Monster, underscoring the industry’s belief in Parsons’ unique talent. With more than 3 million YouTube subscribers and a devoted online fan base, Parsons has cultivated an expansive and deeply engaging mythos around THE BACKROOMS, which continues to evolve across digital platforms. The upcoming feature is expected to build on the uncanny realism and existential horror that made the original short a cultural phenomenon while introducing bold new dimensions to the nightmare.
Will Soodik wrote BACKROOMS for A24. Soodik also wrote ALTAR for A24, which is currently in post-production. Previously, he was Co-EP in the NEUROMANCER room for Apple TV+ and Co-EP on WESTWORLD for HBO. Will’s other credits include ASH VS. EVIL DEAD on Starz, DAMIEN on A+E, BORGIA, and HOMELAND. His feature script GOD’S COUNTRY is being produced by 6th & Idaho and Ara Keshishian.
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