Backrooms lands in cinemas this Friday, hoping to follow in Obsession’s footsteps and become the latest 2026 horror box-office hit. It’s currently tracking for a US opening of at least $20 million which might surprise you for a horror, but that’ll likely be because you’re unaware of the viral hit it’s based on.
The new movie marks the feature directorial debut of Kane Parsons who went viral on YouTube for his Backrooms series, based on a creepypasta (an Internet horror legend) that spawned from a 4chan thread. If that all sounds like gibberish to you, we’ve got you covered with an explainer here.
In the big-screen adaptation of Backrooms, we see furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discover a strange doorway in the basement of his showroom, which leads him into the titular liminal space. For its leading star, the movie was as much of a discovery for him as it is for his character.
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Related: What are the Backrooms? Explaining the viral horror sensation
“I didn’t know anything about the Backrooms initially. I knew a little bit about liminal spaces and how there was something happening with that online. I was sent this and an introduction to Kane’s world and what he’d created,” Ejiofor explained at a post-screening Q&A following the movie’s world premiere at Beyond Fest.
“I specifically was really engaged with how Kane had created something that was so detailed, a world that was so full, that was really what got me was just how conceived this world was.
“I think that when you’re working with a director, the joy of it is working with a director who really understands the world that they want to create. With Kane, it was that and just so much more. He was instrumental in the creation of the world. He knew every corner of it, and that was incredibly fun to play around in for me and to try to understand his perspective on it.
“The psychology of it, I felt, was really rich. This is a character who’s very damaged and is trying to work his way through that, and is also in this conflict of what his mind is telling him about his own reality. All of those things reflected in the nature of Backrooms was just very apparent to me and I was excited about that, engaged with it.”
Unlike her co-star, Renate Reinsve – who plays Clark’s therapist Dr Mary Kline, who also gets pulled into the strange world – knew about Backrooms, but didn’t know she was watching videos created by Parsons.
“When Kane called, I was a little bit skeptical for that world which was something so specific being made into a movie,” she recalled.
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Related: Backrooms hailed as “perfect” as new trailer lands
“It came down to our first conversation, how he talked about this, how he respected that process from making this into something very specific and taking care of the atmosphere, and not making it into something plot-driven or something that is the usual horror movie that you see, but something that is like very specific for what it is itself. That drew me in.
“After that conversation, we were talking about quantum physics and we were talking about all these big themes in like one and a half hours, I was so exhausted after that conversation and I was like, ‘Yes, okay, I want to do this’.
“The character really trying to figure out her own life and going in circles trying to help other people, not getting out of her own loops and actually getting caught in both that really horrible space, but also going in circles within herself, was a really interesting existential layer to that.”
Backrooms is released in cinemas on 29 May.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.