Backrooms is having a moment, and the data backs it up. It is sitting in the top three on the movie charts, it is the number two most viewed article on Wikipedia, and its director is climbing the trending lists alongside it. The film hit theaters globally on May 29 through A24, and it represents one of the most unlikely paths from internet folklore to studio horror that the industry has ever seen.
The origin story is the part most people do not know. The Backrooms started as a YouTube series in January 2022, made by a kid named Kane Parsons who was sixteen at the time. He built the whole thing in Blender and After Effects in his bedroom, and the series racked up nearly 190 million views off the strength of its eerie analog horror aesthetic. When James Wan, the filmmaker behind Saw and Insidious, first jumped on a Zoom call to discuss a film adaptation, he was joined not by an agent or a manager but by Parsons' dad, because Parsons was still in high school. Now twenty, Parsons directed the feature himself, making him A24's youngest feature director.
For anyone unfamiliar with the source material, the Backrooms is a piece of viral creepypasta built around a single unsettling idea. You "no clip" out of reality and find yourself trapped in an endless labyrinth of yellow wallpaper, damp carpet, and buzzing fluorescent lights, with something lurking just out of sight. Parsons expanded that premise into a richer mythology set mostly in the 1990s, centered on a fictional research outfit called the Async Research Institute that discovers the space, refers to it as the Complex, and watches missing persons cases skyrocket as people get pulled in.
The film keeps that DNA but scales it up dramatically. The plot kicks off when a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. The cast is serious: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, with a producer roster that includes James Wan, Shawn Levy, Osgood Perkins, and Peter Chernin. Production reportedly built over 30,000 square feet of physical Backrooms sets, so much that crew members apparently got lost inside them. Parsons even co composed the score, just as he did for the web series.
Why does this thing resonate so hard? Part of it is the liminal space phenomenon itself, that uncanny dread of empty hallways and abandoned spaces that feel wrong in a way you cannot articulate. Part of it is generational. An entire cohort grew up on this exact piece of internet folklore, and seeing it rendered on a real screen with real money behind it feels like validation that the stuff they loved was always cinema. The early critical buzz has called out a handful of sequences as among the most striking horror scenes of the decade.
Here is my honest take. The most interesting thing about Backrooms is not the movie. It is the pipeline. A studio handed real resources to a self taught twenty year old who made his name on YouTube and let him keep his vision intact, and the gamble appears to have paid off. Parsons has already hinted that future chapters might even return to YouTube where it all started, which would close the loop in a way the industry rarely allows. If you grew up wandering those yellow halls in your headphones at 2 in the morning, this one is for you.