From Viral Internet Lore to the Silver Screen: The Haunting Rise of 'Backrooms'

A movie poster featuring a single sheet of monochromatic yellow wallpaper might seem innocuous at first glance, but for millions, it triggers an immediate sense of dread. This is the premise of Backrooms, Hollywood’s newest horror entry, a film that understands its demographic is more captivated by whispered anxieties than by traditional horror staples like monsters or gore. The "Backrooms" themselves are defined as unsettling, transitional zones—such as abandoned office blocks or endless corridors—that appear to have no exit.

The phenomenon originated in 2019 on the message board 4chan, where users were challenged to share images that felt inherently "wrong." One anonymous contributor posted a photograph of a desolate office space characterized by fluorescent lighting and mustard-yellow walls. The accompanying text described the terror of "noclipping" out of reality—a gaming term for glitching through the world—into a dimension defined by the smell of damp carpet, the maddening hum of lights, and hundreds of millions of square miles of randomly segmented, empty rooms. The post warned that if you heard something moving nearby, you were already in trouble.

This digital creepypasta evolved into a massive YouTube mini-series led by Kane Parsons, who was just 16 at the time. Utilizing the CGI software Blender to create environments beyond his financial means, Parsons built a world that would eventually garner over 200 million views. Its popularity caught the eye of A24, the studio responsible for the Oscar-nominated The Substance. The studio enlisted Parsons, now 20, to adapt the concept for cinema, making him A24’s youngest director. The film premiered on Friday, with Parsons offering a stark piece of advice for survival: "Make peace with it before anything else, because I don't like to give false optimism."

In 2023, Parsons set out to translate this isolating hellscape to the big screen while maintaining the aesthetic of his YouTube series. He noted that the primary excitement of the project was leveraging a Hollywood budget to add "real physicality," ensuring the movie felt distinct from the digital original. To achieve this, the production team constructed a massive 30,000-square-foot set based on Parsons’ initial Blender designs. This approach mirrors his first viral video, "Found Footage," which utilized shaky 90s camcorder footage to capture the eerie yellow office and has since amassed 80 million views. "I think it lets us buy into the characters to a greater degree," Parsons explained.

Written by Will Soodik, the A24 adaptation uses the Backrooms framework to delve into mental health issues. The film stars Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture salesman reeling from a divorce, and Renate Reinsve as his therapist, Mary. As their relationship frays, Clark discovers a portal to the Backrooms within the store, a space that begins to manifest and exploit their unresolved traumas.

The cinematic appeal of the Backrooms taps into a specific online anxiety regarding "liminal" or transitional spaces. According to Meredith Banasiak, a neuroscience and architecture expert who studies the connection between buildings and human wellbeing, hallways and doorways frequently provoke this fear due to the "doorway effect," a cognitive phenomenon that confuses memory. "When spaces start blending together, the way we remember blends too," Banasiak noted. The Backrooms amplifies this concept, serving as a physical manifestation of memories "dissolving into themselves." This is echoed in the film by Clark’s line to Mary: "The more times [the Backrooms] remembers something, the less it does." Banasiak’s research, alongside other academic studies, indicates that trauma survivors often find such spaces particularly distressing. The Backrooms has since cultivated a dedicated community, including a prominent forum on Reddit.

Source: BBC News Generated at: 2026-05-29 16:03:04 UTC