Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has moved from a handful of YouTube shorts into a feature-length A24 thriller, turning the 20-year-old into the youngest ever to work with the studio. The project takes the empty corridors, dead malls and office floors he once built on a laptop and pushes them onto a bigger screen, where the same fluorescent-lit spaces now frame a full horror film.
That shift matters because Parsons built the original Backrooms shorts himself in the 2020s with free 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects, making the leap from internet experiment to studio movie feel unusually direct. For readers tracking where the next wave of horror is coming from, this is the kind of move that shows how quickly a web-born idea can become a commercial film, the same way other online filmmakers have recently crossed over in headlines such as the box-office surge around Obsession and other YouTube projects.
The film follows Clark, an architect turned furniture store owner, who finds a portal to a mysterious realm of backrooms in the basement of his showroom. From there, the movie turns ordinary offices, dead malls and other in-between places into a maze of endless replication, all under fluorescent lights and drop ceilings. Parsons has said the idea grew out of a feeling that culture is getting stuck in a monoculture, and he pointed to the drop ceiling as one of its clearest symbols.
That is part of what gives Backrooms its pull. Offices and malls are built to be passed through, not admired, and liminal spaces have long been treated as the leftovers of modern industrial design rather than places to fear. The film takes those ignored non-places — airports, department stores, corridors and all the blank architecture that people usually forget — and turns them into the source of dread.
Parsons said he wanted to capture the feeling of infinite bureaucracy on screen, and that is where the project’s unsettling logic lands. The fear is not from monsters alone but from repetition itself: the same room, the same light, the same hallway extending again and again. What remains unanswered is how far the feature will go beyond the short-form premise that made Backrooms a cult phenomenon in the first place, but for now the story is simple enough. A teenager’s internet horror sketch has become an A24 movie, and the empty office down the hall is suddenly part of the nightmare.
