From YouTube to a movie set, director Kane Parsons has brought Backrooms to life on the biggest scale yet.
A24’s upcoming horror movie is based on Parsons’ viral web series that began in 2022 and expands on the 2019 4chan post that inspired the concept. The Backrooms film will follow furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who discovers a seemingly endless liminal dimension in the basement of his shop. He begins exploring the space, prompting his therapist (Renate Reinsve) to investigate.
Written by Will Soodik and produced by James Wan and Osgood Perkins, among many others, Parsons secured a bigger budget and an all-star cast to bring his vision to life, and he took care to make the film a layered experience even if he had to cut some things along the way.
“There’s a bunch of stuff that I thought would be [in the film] that [isn’t],” Parsons said when asked if he had to cut any ideas from the movie. “[But] it’s a weird film. There’s a lot of strange things,” he teases. While Parsons used 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects to complete his original videos, they built over 30,000 square feet of Backrooms for the film, which led to people getting lost on set.
As for how the Backrooms actually work, Parsons has had a lot of time to hone in on the rules of the space. In doing so, it has allowed the first-time director to tell a story through the look and feel of the Backrooms as much as the plot itself.
There’s such a specific language that I’ve had a handful of years now to really clarify and get really into a habit with. It’s called The Complex in the film and in my series. 
But the Backrooms, the way I build all the Backrooms [and] the way we compose each of these frames, there’s a very strict logic to the way this place builds itself, the way it works, what can happen, what can’t, event-wise and architecturally.
There’s definitely architectural trends throughout the film you can track. And they tell stories. There are places being replicated over and over again. And there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t notice on the first watch. Maybe a second watch.
The Backrooms are a hallmark of the liminal space aesthetic and the lore has expanded greatly since the original viral post, which inspired people on subreddits to share their own creepy stories about the Backrooms. The fandom eventually split as the mythology grew, with some preferring the original idea of the Backrooms, which is the simpler yellow wallpapered halls and rooms featured prominently in Parsons’ film and videos.
Parsons is seemingly sticking to this more stripped-down look — most of what has been shown from Backrooms takes place in those yellow rooms or in the suburban setting seen in the image above. There is also a glimpse of a poolroom, which is another “level” of the Backrooms, though it seems more in line with the yellow rooms than some of the wilder poolrooms imagined by fans.
That restrained approach seems in line with Parsons’ overall vision for the film. He touched on his inspirations for Backrooms, citing the original photos that inspired the 4chan post, which was from a furniture store in Wisconsin. But he also expanded on the psychological aspects of the Backrooms, too: “I would say, for me, The Backrooms has felt aligned with what sort of happens when someone goes through sensory deprivation on the individual level.”
You go in an empty room and the body, the nervous system, needs stimulation so badly, [but] it’s deprived of it. So it starts to find noise and information in the pattern of the walls [and] it starts to take that noise more seriously than it normally would. It lowers its threshold of what it’s willing to accept. And so it starts to be more open to providing or constructing or contriving, as a profound meaning, things that are otherwise just noise.
Backrooms, like Parsons’ web series, appears to play on the fear of what isn’t there just as much as what is. Due to limited resources while making the original series, Parsons relied on quiet scenes set in strange locations to drum up fear, making the settings familiar but just off enough to unsettle. That, coupled with disturbing sound design, makes for a memorable horror experience and one that is ripe for the big screen.
As part of its presentation at CCXP, A24 also shared an exclusive clip from the film. In the footage, Clark can be seen in his furniture store after hours, lying on one of the beds while drinking a beer and watching television when, suddenly, the screen switches from the commercial he’s watching to a security camera-like image of a yellow hallway. When he goes to investigate the power glitch in the basement of the furniture store, he “noclips” out of reality and into the Backrooms.
A24 is set to release Backrooms in theaters on May 29. Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Mark Duplass round out the cast. Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson also produce.
Release Date
May 29, 2026
Runtime
105 Minutes
Director
Kane Parsons