Backrooms Is the Horror Movie Turning Internet Lore Into Existential Dread
A viral internet horror concept gets the feature treatment, and director's filtering of videogames and YouTube aesthetics into corporate dread actually lands.
Internet horror concepts rarely survive the jump to feature film. Backrooms is the exception, and it's become one of the most talked-about horror releases of the year for good reason.
From Liminal Space to Feature Film
The backrooms concept started as internet lore: an endless, fluorescent-lit maze of empty office space that shouldn't exist but somehow does. The film adaptation takes that unsettling, familiar-but-wrong aesthetic and builds a real narrative around it, following the mysterious Async Research Institute as it investigates the phenomenon.
The story centres on Clark, a furniture store owner and failed architect played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who discovers the backrooms accessible through his store's basement. He explores the space alongside his therapist, Dr Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass as an Async scientist and Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell rounding out the cast. The film is the feature debut of director Kane Parsons, who built his name on the original Backrooms YouTube series that spawned the wider internet mythology.
Why It Works
What separates Backrooms from a straightforward monster movie is how it filters videogame and YouTube video aesthetics into its vision of a diseased, corporatized netherworld. The Institute investigating the backrooms can be read as a stand-in for almost anything causing modern existential dread, and the film leans into that ambiguity rather than over-explaining it.
A Modest Budget, a Big Return
Backrooms was made for a reported $10 million by A24 alongside North Road Films, 21 Laps Entertainment, Atomic Monster, Phobos and Oddfellows Pictures, and it has gone on to earn more than $400 million worldwide, split roughly evenly between domestic and international audiences. Critics have been just as enthusiastic, with reviewers praising Parsons's "startlingly assured feature debut" and its mesmerising, dreamlike visual concept.
From YouTube to the Big Screen
Parsons's original Backrooms short first surfaced online in early 2022 and quickly spread across horror and creepypasta communities, spawning countless fan-made spin-offs, wikis and alternate-reality-game style lore before A24 came calling for a feature version. That grassroots following is part of why the film's box office return looks so lopsided against its budget: it arrived with a built-in audience that had already spent years theorising about what the backrooms were and where they came from, long before Ejiofor's character ever set foot in one.
Details: Directed by Kane Parsons, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, 110 minutes, distributed by A24. Currently in theatres and available to stream.
Verdict
Like the backrooms themselves, the film is as much about what you bring into it as what comes out of it. If you missed it in theatres or want to see what the internet's been talking about, this is the spooky season must-watch of the year.
