A24 has released Backrooms, a Hollywood horror film that turns Kane Parsons’ internet nightmare into a feature-length release on Friday. Parsons, who began the project as a teenager on YouTube, directed the adaptation himself.
That alone is enough to put the film on the entertainment map. Parsons started the Backrooms mini-series at 16, and the channel built more than 200 million views by the time A24 brought him in as its youngest ever director. For fans who have followed the yellow walls, fluorescent hum and creeping dread since the first clips, the move from browser window to studio film is the reason the title is suddenly everywhere today.
The original Backrooms idea dates to 2019, when anonymous 4chan users were asked to post disquieting images that felt off. One post of an abandoned office space with mustard yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting became the seed of a larger online horror mythology. Parsons turned that concept into a YouTube mini-series and used Blender to build environments he could never afford to construct in real life.
On the film, A24 pushed that idea much further. The studio built a 30,000 sq ft set based on Parsons’ Blender designs, giving the movie the kind of physical scale his online work could only suggest. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a frustrated furniture store salesman who is struggling after the breakup of his marriage, while Renate Reinsve plays Mary, his therapist. Clark discovers the store’s route to the Backrooms, and the space begins to prey on their unresolved traumas.
That is where the film starts to pull away from the series even as it keeps the same sickly glow. Parsons has said he wanted the movie to feel distinct from the YouTube series while still resembling it, and he has described the appeal of giving the world a stronger sense of real physicality. He also said the story works better when the audience can buy into the characters to a greater degree, which helps explain why the feature leans harder into Clark and Mary than the early videos ever could.
The result is a studio horror release built from creator culture, but not simply copied from it. Backrooms still carries the abandoned-room nightmare that made the idea travel so far online, yet A24 and Parsons have shaped it into something broader, with mental health at its center and a larger emotional pull. The open question now is not whether the internet concept could reach Hollywood — Parsons has already done that — but how far this version can travel beyond the comparison that made it possible.
