Backrooms
| English
Director:
Kane Parsons
Cast:
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Genre:
Horror
Language:
English
Movie Rating:
tba
Release Date:
-
Subtitles:
English, Bahasa Melayu, Chinese
Runtime:
0 minutes
Synopsis
A mysterious doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom, opening into the Backrooms — an endless, nightmarish maze of yellow-walled office rooms, damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights.
When one of her patients vanishes inside, a therapist ventures into the disorienting dimension to rescue him. But the deeper she goes, the more the Backrooms begin to feel less like a place and more like a glitch in reality — a trap built from isolation, obsession, memory and fear.
Blending psychological dread with liminal space terror, Backrooms turns ordinary empty rooms into something deeply wrong, where every corridor feels familiar, every sound feels too loud, and escape may not be part of the design.
Origin
The Backrooms started as a 4chan creepypasta in 2019. On the paranormal board /x/, an anonymous user asked people to post images that felt strangely “off”. One of the images showed a dull, empty indoor space with yellowish walls, carpet and fluorescent lights. Another user replied with a short horror description about “no-clipping” out of reality and ending up in the Backrooms — an endless maze of empty rooms where something may be wandering nearby.
From there, the internet took over. Fans expanded the myth with different “levels”, dangerous “entities”, survival rules and new stories. The Backrooms became one of the most famous examples of liminal space horror — horror built around familiar places that feel abandoned, wrong and impossible to escape.
The modern Backrooms boom grew even bigger when Kane Parsons / Kane Pixels released The Backrooms (Found Footage) on YouTube in January 2022. His analog horror style made the Backrooms feel like a lost VHS recording of a secret experiment gone wrong.
Fun Facts
The Backrooms did not start with a monster. It started with a room — and that is what makes it so creepy. The fear comes from emptiness, repetition and the feeling that reality has broken.
The original Backrooms image was eventually traced back to a HobbyTown store renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. So yes, one of the internet’s creepiest horror myths came from a very real renovation photo.
Kane Parsons was only 16 years old when he created his viral Backrooms short film, using Blender and Adobe After Effects.
The Backrooms is strongly linked to liminal space horror — the fear of empty malls, corridors, offices, schools and places that feel familiar but somehow wrong.
For the A24 movie, the safest confirmed credits are: Directed by Kane Parsons, written by Will Soodik, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass also listed in wider cast sources. A24 currently lists the release date as 29 May 2026.