Kane Parsons’ Backrooms idea has crossed from YouTube shorts into a feature-length A24 thriller, turning a homegrown horror concept into one of the year’s sharpest studio moves. At 20, Parsons is now the youngest director ever to work with A24, and the film gives his online nightmare a larger cast, a bigger frame and a commercial path that did not exist when he was making it in Blender and Adobe After Effects.
That is why the Backrooms movie rating search is spiking now: people want to know what this strange internet horror has become, who made it and how far it is going. Parsons built the original series with free 3D software and editing tools, then watched a premise rooted in empty hallways and dead silence move into the hands of a studio known for pushing offbeat genre work. The new film follows Clark, an architect turned furniture store owner played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, after he finds a portal to a mysterious realm of backrooms in the basement of his showroom. Renate Reinsve plays Dr. Mary Kline.
Parsons has said the idea grew out of a feeling that culture keeps narrowing in on itself, and he called the drop ceiling one of the clearest symbols of that flattening. It is an oddly fitting image for a project built on liminal spaces — offices, dead malls and other places that feel like they were left behind by the world. Dead malls became part of that online fascination in the early 2000s, and the first image to push liminal spaces into wider conversation appeared in 2003 during the renovation of a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
That gives Backrooms its unease. The horror is supposed to come from absence and rules no one can fully see, yet the movie keeps grounding that fear in the most ordinary commercial spaces imaginable: showrooms, department stores, office floors and mall corridors. The contrast is what makes it work. In the film, as in the giallo tradition Parsons points to, the building itself becomes the monster. Dario Argento did that in Suspiria and Inferno; Backrooms is chasing the same idea in a more modern, internet-born form.
What happens next is the part still left open. A24 has the feature now, but no release date or distribution plan has been set out, which means the jump from viral concept to theater-ready movie is complete in one sense and unfinished in another. For Parsons, that is the real milestone: a YouTube horror series made by a teenager with free tools has become a studio feature, and the rest is now a release calendar away.
