They Let Him Cook 

Backrooms stuck with me more than I thought it would. Maybe it’s the fact that I forgot to take my meds two days in a row. Maybe it’s because I watched the movie at 10am on a Monday and then went to work right after. Or maybe it’s because I knew I had a looming 90 minute transit ride out to Burnaby after work to grab a package from the post office and then take another 90 minutes back home — in the rain. But man, did I feel like shit for the rest of the day after I watched this thing.

I wanted a bit more from it having just walked out of the theatre, but I’m becoming more content as the week has gone on. I have been eagerly been awaiting this film since it was announced back in 2023, yet managed to remain mostly unspoiled. Saw the trailer once. Didn’t see a single review. Not even a synopsis in sight.

I suppose I expected the same as one might get from a video game adaptation — something that explains the lore and mechanics from the ground up, like Minecraft, easing the viewer into a world they’ve (presumably) never set foot in before.

But Backrooms is not that kind of adaptation.

It’s no separate canon like Marvel Comics and the MCU. It is not a retelling of the same story like The Last of Us. The film is an extension of the existing world established by Kane Parsons' original webseries.

And that distinction matters.

The film doesn’t take your hand and build from the ground up. This is no origin story, hero’s journey, or guided tour through the mythology museum. This film and the events contained within are a mere fragment — a drop in a much larger, infinitely expanding ocean. The Backrooms are already vast. They have been for quite some time. And the big scary corporation at the center of it all is just as bewildered as everyone else. There are no answers to give. There are only questions to ponder.

Which, in hindsight, is kind of the point — but also not what I was expecting walking in. Maybe that shouldn't have surprised me.

Because for all the discourse surrounding YouTubers breaking into Hollywood, Kane Parsons doesn't really feel like a YouTuber anymore. At least not in the way people usually mean it. He's not making prank videos. He's not filming reaction content in front of an LED-lit bookshelf. He wasn't handed a studio budget because he mastered the sacred art of creating a clippable moment on stream that could make the rounds across the algorithm.

He was already making movies.

The only difference was that his studio happened to be Blender, his crew consisted largely of himself, and his theatrical distributer was the YouTube upload button.

The comparisons practically write themselves. The Philippou brothers went from RackaRacka videos to directing two of the best horror films of the decade with Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. David F. Sandberg jumped from microbudget shorts to Lights Out and eventually Shazam!. Chris Stuckmann finally got his long-gestating horror feature off the ground. Markiplier even turned his own house into a complete render farm. Every year the wall separating internet creators from traditional filmmaking gets a little thinner.

But Parsons feels different.

Most filmmakers spend years learning visual effects, production design, editing, cinematography, screenwriting, and directing before eventually specializing. Parsons accidentally speedran the entire skill tree before he was legally allowed to buy a beer.

The original Backrooms shorts were largely a one-man operation. Writing. Directing. Animation. Visual effects. Sound design. Music. Worldbuilding. The kind of workload that would normally be divided among multiple departments was instead being handled by a teenager shrimped over a computer somewhere while the rest of us were probably arguing about whether the Snyder Cut actually existed.

And the thing that always impressed me wasn't necessarily the visual effects. Plenty of talented artists can make convincing digital hallways at low res. But Parsons had the confidence and storytelling prowess to deliver the full package right from day one.

The original videos never felt like fan fiction desperately trying to explain themselves. Parsons understood something fundamental about liminal horror that countless imitators immediately missed. The Backrooms are not frightening because of what they are.

They're frightening because of what they might be. What they could contain.

Every unanswered question creates ten new ones. Every glimpse around a corner suggests another impossible corridor stretching somewhere beyond the frame. There’s no puzzle waiting to be solved, or mystery to be uncovered. There is only a perpetual engine of dread.

Which is precisely why handing the feature adaptation to literally anyone else would've been a disaster.

One of my biggest fears going into this movie was the possibility of a studio executive somewhere demanding answers. A scene in a boardroom. A giant exposition dump. Some poor scientist pointing at a hologram and explaining the exact molecular composition of The Complex while Hans Zimmer foghorns rattled the theatre seats.

Thankfully, nobody appears to have made that mistake. If anything, the film doubles down on the ambiguity.

The Complex remains an infinite sea of noise. The corporation studying it understands almost nothing. The people trapped inside it understand even less. Everyone is mapping. Cataloguing. Building theories. Drawing connections between scattered fragments of information. Nobody is arriving at certainty. Which, if we're being honest, is exactly how the Backrooms fandom has operated for years.

The movie understands that the obsessive theorizing wasn't a side effect of the phenomenon. It was the phenomenon. That attention to detail extends all the way down to the physical construction of the film itself. And trust me — Backrooms fans notice details. These are people who can probably identify wallpaper patterns the way Star Wars fans identify Glup Shittos and obscure background droids.

The production reportedly tested fifty variations of wallpaper before landing on the exact pattern, texture, and colour palette they wanted. 30,000 square feet of carpet and wallpaper were installed across enormous practical sets spanning multiple studios. Parsons insisted on putting actors inside real spaces whenever possible rather than dropping them into endless green-screen voids, and you can feel it.

The rooms possess weight. The corners feel tangible. The fluorescent lighting doesn't simply illuminate the environment — it presses its full weight against it. Every hallway seems to continue forever even when your brain knows it's terminating somewhere behind a soundstage wall in Vancouver.

There's one sequence involving a descent through layer after layer of increasingly distorted architecture that left my stomach feeling like it had missed a stair step. You know that split-second sensation when your foot expects solid ground and discovers empty air instead? The movie somehow recreates that feeling for a full minute. It's nasty stuff. Complimentary.

More importantly, Parsons understands that liminal horror lives and dies through atmosphere. The wallpaper matters. The drop ceilings matter. The carpet matters. The weird proportions matter. The sensation that you've somehow been here before matters.

Without those details you're just wandering through empty office space. With them, you're trapped inside a waking memory that's begun decomposing around the edges. And that's ultimately why I'm rooting so hard for this movie and for Parsons even when parts of it didn't entirely click for me. Because films like this shouldn't exist.

A twenty-year-old filmmaker taking one of the internet's most beloved pieces of collaborative horror mythology and turning it into an ambitious A24 studio release sounds like the sort of thing executives usually workshop into oblivion. The rough edges get sanded off. The weirdness gets focus-grouped into submission. The original voice disappears beneath layers of commercial compromise.

Instead, somehow, they let him cook.

Not perfectly. Not flawlessly. But genuinely.

The result feels authored in a way that so many modern franchise films simply don't anymore. You can sense the same obsessive mind behind both the YouTube shorts and the feature film, now operating with bigger tools and more collaborators rather than abandoning the identity that made the work resonate in the first place.

And honestly? That's the thing that lingered with me most after the credits rolled. The fact that someone looked at a teenager making weird Blender videos on YouTube and said, "Yeah. Give him thirty thousand square feet of practical sets and see what happens."

We need more of that.

Whether it's the Philippous, Parsons, Sandberg, Barker, Stuckmann, Markiplier, or whoever emerges next from the strange digital soup currently incubating tomorrow's filmmakers, the pipeline is proving itself. Talent is talent. Vision is vision. Sometimes the next great horror director isn't waiting outside Sundance with a screenplay.

Sometimes they're uploading found-footage nightmares after finishing their homework. And sometimes they're responsible for making a grown adult spend an entire rainy commute through Burnaby wondering if reality might have a seam in it somewhere.

Which is either the highest compliment I can give a Backrooms movie...

or a sign that I really need to remember to take my meds.