We have to start with the origin story, because if you don’t know it, the whole thing hits different once you do. The Backrooms began as a single image posted to 4chan in 2019. Someone slapped a caption underneath it. That caption became a creepypasta. The creepypasta spawned more images, 3D renders, and a whole subculture of people building out the lore. And then, in 2022, a 16-year-old named Kane Parsons posted a found-footage short to his YouTube channel Kane Pixels, and the internet absolutely lost its mind.
That series, which runs about 20 episodes, has accumulated somewhere around 25 million views in total. It’s not long-form content by any stretch; some episodes are brief, but the craft is undeniable. Parsons used Blender and After Effects to create something that felt genuinely unnerving, grounded in what the hosts describe as a “liminal space” aesthetic.
Yellow walls. Buzzing fluorescent lights. That carpet. You know the one. It’s the carpet that makes your skin crawl from across the room, and it’s everywhere in this movie. We talked about how it somehow makes you feel like the air itself smells like mold and old socks. That is a visual achievement, by the way.
So A24, James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins all got behind this thing and handed the keys to a 20-year-old for his feature directorial debut. Kane Parsons is now A24’s youngest-ever feature director. And after seeing Backrooms in theaters on its wide release day, we are here to tell you: good call, everybody.
What the Backrooms Actually Are (The Two-Minute Version)
The film is deliberately surface-level on lore, which makes sense, and we’ll get to why. But understanding even the basic skeleton of what the Backrooms are actually helps you catch things as you watch. Here is the short version.
Somewhere in the late 1980s, a company called Async was conducting particle-acceleration experiments. The idea was to create a pocket universe, essentially a dimension of unlimited real estate. Think about that for a second. Imagine having infinite space.
Theoretically, you could store things in there, build office complexes, and entire neighborhoods. Unlimited. The appeal is obvious. The problem is that they actually succeeded, and they had no idea what they were dealing with. The pocket universe began collapsing in on itself and onto our world simultaneously.
People started “no-clipping” into it, which means they’d just… slip through. End up there. And because this was a space-time situation, the timelines inside don’t match the timelines outside. People would get lost. People would die. And the things that live in there now? They are not friendly. That’s kind of how it was created, and yes, it is as weird as it sounds.
Describing this movie is like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog and then asking them to draw it.
As Arthur puts it, quoting the film itself. “So it’s just gonna be kind of like a dog from a distance, but once you get closer, it’s just fucked up and weird.“
That quote, honestly, tells you everything.
Plot, Cast, and the People Meaghan Clocked in the Dark
The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a struggling furniture store owner and failed architect who, through a run of electrical problems in his store’s basement, stumbles directly into the Backrooms. He starts exploring. His employees, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett, who Meaghan eventually placed as a Targaryen from House of the Dragon), show up to help.
Eventually, Clark’s therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), grows concerned when he disappears for what is, given the warped timelines in there, an unknowable stretch of time. She goes looking for him and ends up inside the Backrooms herself, fighting her way out before something in there finishes the job.
Chiwetel Ejiofor deserves a bigger conversation than he usually gets. Meaghan said it in the car on the way home, and we are saying it again here: this man is phenomenal in every single project he touches, and he does not get enough credit for it. We saw him last year in Life of Chuck. Fantastic.
Here, the two-stage arc he plays is the most impressive part of the entire performance. Early Clark is a guy with excuses, someone who has a hard time owning his own behavior, someone who drinks too much and isn’t great at being told so. Sounds familiar for this month’s horror lineup, actually. We saw it with Adam Scott’s character in Hokum, we saw it with Bear in Obsession. Clark fits the pattern: the male protagonist who is not quite as decent as he believes himself to be.
But then there’s late Clark. What we eventually encounter is someone who has been in the Backrooms long enough that he has come completely unraveled. We don’t know exactly how long. The timelines are messed up in there. What we do know is that he’s been in there long enough to come out the other side of sanity, and Ejiofor plays that disintegration with complete conviction. We believed every second of it.
Renate Reinsve (of The Worst Person in the World fame) plays Mary. She’s a Norwegian actress whom Meaghan hadn’t seen in anything before, and she holds her half of the film solidly. Mark Duplass appears later in the film as Phil, an Async employee, and his face on screen caused both hosts to immediately clock where they knew him from (Creep, if you haven’t seen it, go fix that immediately). Avan Jogia plays Naren Warne, another Async employee whose timeline situation gets complicated fast. Originally, the role of Mary was going to be played by Cristin Milioti, which would have also been great.
And then there were the horror easter eggs Meaghan caught. Philip Granger, who plays the electrician, is the same guy who played the sheriff in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, the one who gets a board of nails through the head. A woman named Robin appears at Mary’s dinner party early on, played by Katharine Isabelle of Ginger Snaps trilogy and Freddy vs. Jason fame. She has no lines. She just gestures animatedly in the kitchen. And one of Phil’s kids is played by Sawyer Fraser, who just this year played Jude in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on Netflix. Meaghan caught all three of these in the dark, which is a skill set.
The Atmosphere Did Something to Us
Here is the thing about the set: they built 30,000 square feet of it. Real. Physical. Three-dimensional. Crew members were reportedly getting lost in it during production. And you feel that. There is a quality to practical sets that no amount of CGI can fully replicate, which is the sense that the people on screen are genuinely existing inside a space that exists. The performances reflect it. The reactions feel grounded in a way that they might not if everyone was staring at green screens.
The signature aesthetic, maintained directly from the YouTube series since it’s the same director, is the yellow-carpeted, fluorescent-lit, liminal office hell that the Backrooms are known for. The carpet is disgusting. The lights hum. Meaghan described looking at scenes and just feeling like everything smelled. That is the atmosphere working exactly as intended.
But the film doesn’t just stay in the Backrooms for its full runtime. It’s set in 1990, and boy, does it commit to that. The furniture in Clark’s store, the style of everyone’s clothing, the shitty local business commercials he films for himself. Kat and Bobby are dressed in that particular early-nineties college student aesthetic: baggy shorts, specific color palettes, and collar shapes that you don’t see anymore. The time period is worn in. And then the Backrooms themselves, which absorb parts of our world and copy them slightly wrong, have furniture and even full houses in them that match that same era. The whole visual language of the film holds together in a way that feels thought-out rather than accidental.
The sound design deserves its own sentence. This is not a traditional score situation. The music is closer to what Arthur describes as “liminal music,” a genre that grew out of the Backrooms subculture itself. The trailer uses a track called 647. In the film, the sonic texture is part of what makes the thing so relentlessly uncomfortable. You can hear the buzz of the lights. It doesn’t let up much. There are a couple of moments of levity, brief and well-timed, but the tension is basically constant.
The Ghost-Directing Rumor and Why It’s Garbage
There has been some chatter online suggesting that Kane Parsons wasn’t actually directing Backrooms, that someone else was steering the ship while he got the credit. Meaghan called this “bitter” and she’s not wrong. Some of this suspicion comes from the caliber of people attached as producers: James Wan, Shawn Levy (Stranger Things), and Osgood Perkins, all of them serious names in the horror space.
The logic seems to be that a 20-year-old couldn’t possibly have been in charge when those people were in the room. Mark Duplass addressed this directly, posting online that Kane was in complete control, more so than many directors three times his age. The actors who were actually there confirmed it. This seems like the end of the conversation, and yet.
It’s worth noting, just to close the loop, that Kane Parsons had already demonstrated a coherent creative vision for this universe at 16 years old with tools that regular people can learn to use. He had ideas. He had a world. And the production trusted him to bring it to the screen. Smart call.
Our Digs, and What This Month Has Told Us About Horror
We’re both sitting at 8.5 digs right now, with the understanding that this one might need to settle before we know if it goes higher. It’s a film that you leave with more questions than you walked in with, and that’s not a complaint. That’s exactly what it’s going for.
The implications of the larger Backrooms universe, all the people who might be no-clipping in somewhere right now, all the things that live in there, the nature of the entities, and where they came from: none of it gets fully answered, and the movie is better for it. You sit with this kind of film for a while. You and your friend Dan need to watch it so you two can have the 11:30 PM conversation that it deserves.
Comparing it to Obsession, which we also loved this month, isn’t really useful. They’re genuinely different films. You can prefer one. You probably can’t rank them against each other in any meaningful way.
What we can say is that this month in horror has been something. Not a single remake. Not a sequel, not a prequel. Pitfall, Hokum, Obsession, and now Backrooms. All original. All doing well.
None of these movies are bombing
Arthur noted. “They’re doing fucking well.” And they are. That YouTuber-to-horror-director pipeline that Curry Barker opened up a door on is producing results, and Backrooms is the most expensive, most high-profile proof of it yet. Whoever was in that meeting at A24 and said yes to a 20-year-old YouTuber with a Blender and a vision: good job.
Kane Parsons is already thinking ahead. Arthur is already thinking about what gets opened up for him next, whether that’s a Backrooms expansion or something entirely new. The only thing left to do is watch the YouTube series first. Then rewatch the film.