Beware what lurks beyond … the furniture store? A24 just dropped the trailer for its upcoming horror movie Backrooms, which proves that sometimes the most unsettling things lurk in liminal spaces.
Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a man who discovers that there is a secret, seemingly endless space beyond the walls of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. So he assembles a team to explore the fluorescent-lit hallways and rooms. As they film their adventures with a handheld camcorder, they discover oddities, like a room where mannequins seem to pop out of the floor. Mostly, though, the space is just yellow-lit, empty and vast. And that might be the most chilling thing about it.
The new movie, which also stars Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve, is based on a series of short films that Parsons launched on YouTube in 2022, under the name Kane Pixels. Set in the 1990s, the series follows a fictional research institute, Async, as it studies a mysterious alternate dimension known as the Backrooms, or “the Complex.”
The concept of “backrooms,” however, is not original to Parsons. It stems from a 2019 post on the message board site 4chan, in which a user asked people to share “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” One user posted a photo of a yellow-tinged room that resembles the imagery in the Backrooms trailer.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in,” a 4chan user wrote of the image at the time. “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
And, thus, the creepypasta was born. (Internet sleuths eventually discovered that the original “backrooms” pic came from a 2003 blog post about the renovation of a HobbyTown store in Oshkosh, Wis.)
Parsons is not the only horror filmmaker to get his start on YouTube. Curry Barker, known for his sketch comedy videos with partner Cooper Tomlinson, posted his feature Milk & Serial on YouTube for free in 2024, before scoring a theatrical release for his movie Obsession, which comes out in May.
Backrooms arrives in theaters on May 29, 2026.
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