Today marks the release of Backrooms – a film that has generated considerable buzz for – just maybe – redefining the horror genre. This is a new kind of Hollywood movie, born entirely online and made by a 20-year-old.
The film originated from a ‘creepypasta’ – the internet term for an online urban legend. In 2019, someone posted a photograph on platform 4Chan, of an empty room with yellow wallpaper. From this single image, an elaborate mythology took shape across Reddit, YouTube and TikTok: the idea that you could slip through a crack in reality and find yourself in an infinite maze of identical corridors – ‘Backrooms’ from which there was no escape. A sprawling, participatory horror universe was built entirely by strangers online – a ghost story authored by thousands.
Director Kane Parsons was 16 years old when he encountered the image. Armed with the open-source 3D software Blender, he made a nine-minute short based on the Backrooms lore that he uploaded to YouTube in 2022. Dubbed ‘the scariest video on the internet’, it amassed 20 million views in its first two weeks. He kept going, producing 22 more episodes that sent viewers deeper into the Backrooms – each new level more reality-defying than the last. Now, production and distribution company A24 has adapted the series into a feature, with Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) leading the cast and horror world-builder James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious) producing.
The leap from fan-driven IP to Hollywood feature could herald a genuinely new model. The talent is self-generative, the audience pre-existing, and studios are taking notice. But beyond the business logic, there is something fresher at work: in a flailing film industry, a channel for genuinely niche, genre-defying creativity to reach a mainstream audience.
The architecture of fear
Backrooms follows Clark (Ejiofor), a furniture salesman who discovers a portal in his showroom basement – a fluorescent-lit threshold opening onto an eerie, labyrinthine office space that appears to go on forever. He enlists his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help chart its impossible geometry, where strange sounds suggest they are not alone.
The horror here is not a monster or a ghost, but the Backrooms themselves. Spaces like these – abandoned offices, shopping centres, hotels, schools, car parks – are known as liminal spaces: ‘threshold’ environments caught between states of use and disuse, presence and absence. They are not inherently supernatural, yet they feel unsettling because they are stripped of their expected function. Research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology has proposed that liminal spaces occupy an uncanny valley not of faces, but of architecture: familiar, but somehow off. ‘The Backrooms feel ordinary,’ Ejiofor has said, ‘but by the very nature of their extreme ordinariness, it becomes quite disturbing. You feel like you should be reasonably safe because you're in an empty office space – but because something isn't quite right within its confines, you feel even more vulnerable.’
The aesthetic is not new. It can be felt in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the 2013 video game The Stanley Parable, the 2022 horror film Skinamarink, and Apple TV+'s Severance (whose creator specifically cited the Backrooms web series as a visual influence). Yet Backrooms marks the first instance of liminal spaces – and specifically their cult online presence, with countless pages, communities and pieces of content dedicated to them (the 'r/LiminalSpace' subreddit draws 232,000 weekly visitors) – being the central inspiration for a major film.
Building the maze
Creating this strange dimension was, understandably, quite a feat – particularly as it was filmed predominantly on real sets. ‘[Kane and I] figured the best way to approach [the build] was to mock everything up in Blender. When he sent over the original Backrooms layout file, it crashed my computer,’ recalls the film’s production designer, Danny Vermette. ‘Operating at the scale that we chose, we had to be particular with what we decided to build practically and what would be VFX.
‘We worked on adding verticality to the 30,000 sq ft practical sets, rather than just a plane of flat endless rooms,’ he continues. ‘We wanted to create something that our talent would be able to interact with in ambitious ways. Climb, crawl, squeeze – ensuring their level of discomfort.’
Parsons and Ejiofor on the Backrooms set
Vermette, working with art director Alan Derksen and set decorator Trevor Johnston, spent three months constructing those 30,000 sq ft across four soundstages. A total of 32,000 sq ft of wallpaper was printed and 27,000 sq ft of carpet laid. The scale was such that production coordinators had to issue maps to stop cast and crew from getting lost. ‘The layout of the sets kept us on edge during filming,’ says the production designer. ‘There was some comfort to the space because it was recognisable – but it becomes more and more overwhelming as the maze unfurls.’
The wallpaper – and that defining sickly yellow – required a month of development and 50 separate camera tests to perfect. ‘We had to do so many variations because it looks so different on a computer screen versus on a film set under our lighting scheme,’ he explains. Different floral and chevron patterns shift subtly throughout the film, hinting at a space that is not merely abandoned, but actively mutating.
‘I think we're so used to spaces being constructed for our comfort: our homes, our workplaces, the grocery store,’ Vermette adds. ‘Enter a world where the usual rules don't apply, where people and comfort don't exist, and you are greeted with something immediately bizarre and unsettling.’
Sound also played a crucial role. Working with composer Edo Van Breemen, Parsons developed a sonic environment built around low-frequency hums, fluorescent buzzes and distorted ambient textures. The film also incorporates a fan-favourite track, 'Six Forty Seven' by Instupendo, which has become synonymous with liminal imagery on internet platforms – another thread connecting the film back to its online origins.
The modern spectre
Anthropologically, the concept of liminality originated from Arnold van Gennep, who described transitional phases where identity is temporarily undefined – the period between adolescence and adulthood, for example. That underpinning may explain why liminal spaces so resonate with younger generations navigating an increasingly disorientating world.
For Parsons, the Backrooms are a symbol with a sharp contemporary edge: ‘They are the cumulative result of a societal exhaustion with the industrialised monoculture we're slipping into,’ he has said. ‘When people are isolated from society, they become disconnected. How terrifying would it be if that was your existence forever, and all you could do is experience it over and over again?’ There is, he suggests, no more fitting emblem of that monoculture than a drop ceiling.
Backrooms, therefore, defies the jump-scare-driven tropes of its genre. Instead, it is a reflection of of existential dread – the horror of a life defined by repetition, emptiness and psychological disorientation. ‘We are in the midst of an era of profound loneliness, where our lives are increasingly lived online. There is a distinct sense of repetition,’ says Vermette. ‘I think people are resonating with the aesthetic and tone of Backrooms because it captures that feeling. And all of us, in our own way, are looking for the way out.’
'Backrooms' is in cinemas from today.