Kane Parsons’ Backrooms idea has crossed from YouTube into an A24 feature, turning a low-budget internet nightmare into a studio thriller. The 20-year-old filmmaker made the original shorts with Blender and Adobe After Effects, and he is now being described as the youngest person ever to work with A24.
That shift is why the project is drawing attention today. Backrooms is no longer just a name attached to an online horror concept; it is a feature film now set around Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark and Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, giving the idea a bigger cast and a wider audience at the same time.
In the film, Clark is an architect turned furniture store owner who finds a portal to a mysterious realm of backrooms in the basement of his showroom. The movie moves through offices, dead malls and other eerie places that feel in-between other places or left behind by the world, the same kind of setting that helped Parsons’ shorts spread in the first place.
Parsons has said the idea is rooted in a larger unease about modern life. “We have been trending for a few centuries into a spiral of industrialism,” he said, adding that “We’re kind of getting stuck in this monoculture.” For him, “There is probably no better symbol for that kind of monoculture than a drop ceiling.”
The story also reaches back to the internet’s first flirtation with liminal spaces. The first image to bring that idea into online conversation was posted in 2003 during the renovation of a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a photo that fit the same half-used, half-abandoned feeling Parsons wanted to capture on screen. His aim, he has said, was to create the feeling of infinite bureaucracy, which is part of why the Backrooms world has been so effective as a horror premise.
That premise still leaves the film with a built-in limit. The Backrooms universe presents a strange realm with unexplained rules, but nothing is known about which entities govern the endless space or what lies beyond the doorways and corridors, and the feature has not yet said how far it will go in explaining any of it. The adaptation may have moved the concept into mainstream distribution, but the original mystery remains intact for now, with no release date or next step announced.
