On the first days of filming The Backrooms Movie, Chiwetel Ejiofor said the cast kept getting lost on the set.
“Especially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure that’s the way,’” he said. At one point, he added, “Get me some help!”
That was the point of the set. The film was shot on a 30,000 sq ft maze of apparently random corridors and chambers, carpeted and fluorescent lit, with the same sickly yellow wallpaper running through it. Ejiofor said that by the end of filming, “There was stuff that we were doing by the end of the film that I was just like: ‘This is among the most bizarre things I have ever been involved in.’” The film, a buzzy A24 horror freakout, starred Ejiofor alongside Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass.
Behind it was Kane Parsons, who was 20 years old when he directed his first feature film in 2024 and had never made one before. He had been making films since he was a small child and said he had made several hundred of them. “It’s something that I didn’t ever make enough time for in the past,” he said, before adding that growing up with YouTube meant “there’s a lower requirement to go out and consume through a cinema.” He also laughed off the scale of the moment, saying, “sorry, I’m a rambler.”
The film grew out of an internet obsession that started with a single photograph taken in 2003. That image, showing a vacant shop space in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was posted in May 2019 on a 4chan message board that invited users to submit disquieting images that just feel off. From there, Backrooms became an online phenomenon, then a feature film.
Parsons said he saw the leap for what it was. “I recognised it as a big, potentially jarring, leap forward,” he said. He also admitted, “I have no idea how all of this spiralled to the place it’s at now.” Still, he said, “I was there, and I know I wanted to make the movie, and I knew how to make what I make online.” And, he added, “when it comes to the actual creative direction, knowing what’s wanted, that’s there.”
That is what makes The Backrooms Movie unusual today: it is not just another horror release, but the rare case where a web-born nightmare moved from a message board image to a studio feature without losing the disorienting idea that made it catch fire in the first place.
