Now I'm Always Looking For Backrooms 

Have you guys heard of these backrooms? The secret liminal spaces lurking on the other side of the ones we inhabit every single day? I look for them all the time now since watching Backrooms, a movie with a concept and flair so tantalising I think my brain is literally still stuck wandering its fluorescent hallways.

Kind of like the characters in the movie, I stumbled upon the world of Backrooms blindly. I was completely unaware of this film's internet backstory, nor did I know about the director, Kane Parsons, or the web series he'd created about it. But once the credits on Backrooms rolled, I was hooked, as nothing but a good conspiracy can do. I felt like we'd only scratched the surface of a strong original concept in modern horror, but that need for answers works both for and against Backrooms.

To set the scene, Backrooms originated as a generic post on a 4chan thread, featuring a picture of a stark, yellow-lit hallway with mouldy carpet and fading wallpaper. The picture gained attention for how uncomfortable it made people. Eventually, someone added a creative piece of lore to it, suggesting that if we're not careful, we could noclip into this place, “The Backrooms”, an endless fluorescent maze of hallways, where something stalks within.

The post became a well-known creepypasta, aka an online horror urban legend. In 2022, at just 16-years-old, Kane Parsons took this fable and turned it into a viral web series, which documented a company trying to research (and survive) the Backrooms. Now in 2026, we have a movie adaptation from Parsons and A24, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and produced by horror legends like James Wan and Osgood Perkins. It's an absolutely insane prospect for your first feature film, but Parsons manages to take it in his stride. He is the modern architect of the Backrooms after all, and this movie is a very promising debut.

In the film adaptation, Backrooms takes things from the perspective of Ejiofor's Clark, a depressed furniture store owner with anger issues and a failed career and marriage. He's taking therapy with Reinsve's Mary, the somewhat renowned author of a self-help book. One day, Clark noclips through to the Backrooms in the basement of his furniture store and decides to take a camera and some staff down there to figure it all out. Try as the movie might to make me care about these characters, the Backrooms themselves are the real star, and any moment spent not exploring their faded wallpapered halls feels like one wasted.

A good chunk of this film is framed through first-person camcorder footage (the same style Parsons uses in the web series), and despite a huge change in screen size, it still absolutely works. It conjures parallels with The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, both found footage masterpieces, but it works especially well in a setting like the Backrooms, where the space is claustrophobic and dizzying, and you never know what you'll find by peering around the next corner.

Parsons proves himself a master of tension in Backrooms. He will inevitably be compared to the likes of Markiplier (Iron Lung) or Chris Stuckmann (Shelby Oaks) as one of the YouTubers who has broken into Hollywood filmmaking, but his style actually reminds me more of Zach Cregger. Parsons knows how to subvert the jump scare. He is patient and pushes the audience past their comfort zone. He knows when to hold back from showing a monster, and when to display it in full for maximum impact. Zach Cregger shows similar mastery in Weapons - and I think we can all agree we want more of that.

The set design in Backrooms is easily the MVP. This film is a labyrinth of endless hallways filled with buzzing fluorescent lights and shifting odds and ends. It reminded me a bit of Severance - if Severance was on steroids - or my poorly made Sims 2 house that was full of unexplained walls and halls. You'll never know what you'll find around each corner in the Backrooms: a misplaced stop sign, half a couch, an ominous drawing. It's a liminal space come to life on screen, populated with anything you could imagine, or anything you may fear.

That's also where the problem with this movie lies. The Backrooms is designed as an illogical space. The idea of it is such an engaging mystery; it inherently makes you want to know more. As a logic seeker, I love it when a plot comes together, but in the case of Backrooms, I actually wish they'd left more unsaid.

By attempting to explain the Backrooms, the movie takes away its power, because no explanation will ever be as good as what the audience was imagining. Providing answers also means adhering to an internal logic, and I'm just not sure Backrooms has that. Things get progressively stranger without any rhyme or reason, so in the end, you're encouraged to just connect the dots in whatever way works for you. The Backrooms become what you make of them.

That becomes frustrating, particularly when the film tries to provide anything narratively coherent for its characters, and it just doesn't come together. Despite Ejiofor and Reinsve's best efforts, their characters bear the brunt.

While Backrooms isn't perfect, it's still an incredible display of atmosphere and tension from a first-time feature director. My biggest takeaway remains that nothing beats a great concept. Logic and flaws aside, that's what has stuck with me in the days since seeing this movie.

I left the cinema wanting to dive deeper into the lore of this world and to watch everything Parsons has done before. It made me look differently at long hallways and question the buzzing of fluorescent lights. It inspired me to find other creepypastas that would keep me up at night and ponder what they would look like if they became movies.

Even now, several days after seeing the movie (shout out to Peliplat for the early screening!), I still find myself looking for the Backrooms everywhere. The thing is, I live in Vancouver (where Backrooms was filmed), so I might actually find them.