That headline is not a dig. In the minimum of time (less than a minute), the first teaser for Kane Parsons‘ much-hyped feature film debut “Backrooms” does plenty to build atmosphere, dread, and curiosity.
If taken on a frame by frame basis, this first look at his A24 feature is as mundane as it gets, honing in on increasingly empty rooms that don’t seem nefarious at all. They look like your childhood best friend’s rec room after his family moved out, or the break room at that boring retail job you had in high school. Until, of course, they start flipping by in quick succession, changing and morphing in off-kilter ways. Furniture? Fading. Windows? Disappearing. People? Not a one.
The much-anticipated film is based on Parsons’ popular viral found-footage YouTube horror series “The Backrooms,” some of which you can check out right here. The film is directed by Parsons and written by Will Soodik, who previously wrote for various series like “Westworld,” “Homeland,” and “Ash vs Evil Dead.”
The film stars some major names: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. It’s Ejiofor we can hear in the teaser’s voiceover, as he guides us through a series of increasingly empty rooms in a massive space that he tells us are built by the space itself. “Actually, more like it remembers them,” he says. “And the more times it remembers something, the less it does.”
As IndieWire reported in June, A24 greenlit the film last summer, based on the property directed by 19-year-old series creator Parsons, who was be the youngest director in A24 history when production started just weeks later.
While plot details for the film have been kept (predictably and understandably) under wraps, the YouTube series used the found-footage format to gradually build a horror universe about liminal spaces that exist in our world without fully conforming to our reality. The slow builds and homemade special effects helped the eerie videos build a loyal following.
A24 will release “Backrooms” in theaters on Friday, May 29. Watch the film’s first teaser below.