Backrooms (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Backrooms, a 2026 horror film directed by Kane Parsons, was financed for under $10 million. It still carried Parsons to the top of the box office, making him the youngest filmmaker ever to get there. The story it tells begins in a furniture store with an electricity bill nobody can explain. The owner is a man struggling with drink and a recent divorce. His therapist is working through grief of her own. Somewhere beneath the showroom floor is a place that does not belong to any map. How does a series of short internet videos grow into a studio release? What lies in those endless rooms, and what lives there? And how did critics and audiences judge a film that trades jump scares for dread?

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• 2. From Kane Pixels

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  On the 7th of January 2022, Kane Parsons began posting an anthology of short videos called Backrooms to his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. The idea came from an internet creepypasta of the same name. Several studios soon approached him about stretching the series into a feature film. In February 2023, the adaptation was officially announced, with Parsons directing in what would be his first feature. A24, Chernin Entertainment, Atomic Monster and 21 Laps Entertainment came together as the production companies. James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins are credited as producers. Roberto Patino was first set to write the screenplay, but Will Soodik took over the job. Parsons has named a surprising shelf of influences for both the series and the film. They include the Portal video games, the television series Mr. Robot, and the films One Hour Photo from 2002 and Punishment Park from 1971. The anime Paranoia Agent is on that list too.

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• 3. The Basement Wall

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  The film opens in 1990, in a room of scientists from the Async Research Institute. They are watching recovered footage shot by a researcher named Naren Warne. He had gone into a vast extradimensional space and was separated from his group. Something unseen chased him and attacked him. Years later, Clark runs a furniture store that is barely staying afloat. He hires an electrician to find out why the lights flicker. The electrician discovers three colored breaker switches fitted at an odd angle, wired to nothing inside the building. Clark has by now moved into the store himself. The irregularities lead him down to the basement, where a glowing slit shows in a wall. He pushes through and falls into the Backrooms. This is a maze of dull yellow rooms, long hallways and warped furniture, silent except for the hum of fluorescent tubes. Clark finds Naren's belongings and flees back to the store with a creature on his heels. Unknown to him, an Async scientist named Phil has watched it all on a surveillance camera. When Clark tells his therapist, Mary Kline, she is skeptical. So he recruits his assistant manager Kat and her boyfriend Bobby to help film proof. In a steeply sloped corridor, Bobby is ambushed and apparently killed. The three are dragged into an unexplored area and separated. Clark runs through disordered spaces until humanoid figures chase him into a dead end. He sets down the camera to answer Kat's voice. Then something picks it up, and Kat screams for him to look behind him.

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• 4. Mary Below

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  Mary receives an answering machine message in which Clark says he will not be coming back. Elsewhere, Phil is watching television with his family when he spots Clark in a commercial for the furniture store. Mary goes to the store, finds the doorway and steps through. She finds Clark, and he chokes her unconscious. She wakes tied up in a space made to look like a dining room. Around her stand crude human imitations that the Backrooms produces, watching without expression. Clark opens a refrigerator to show her Kat's severed head. He wants their therapy sessions to continue as role-play, and Mary refuses. She tells him the real reason his wife left was his refusal to own his failures. For a moment he comes back to himself and frees her. Then a towering, deformed copy of Clark arrives, wearing the costume of the store's pirate sultan mascot. Clark dies trying to calm this Pirate. It turns on Mary, and she runs across vast, surreal spaces until she is cornered in a flawed replica of the showroom. There she fights it off with a piece of cement taken from her childhood home. By accident she sets off an Async gas trap. Scientists in hazmat suits subdue the Pirate and take her to their headquarters. In an interrogation room, Phil explains that Async once built MRI machines, until the company found the Backrooms and turned to mapping them. Mary repeats Clark's own description of the place as a faulty, misremembered copy of reality. When she asks whether she will be released, Phil dodges the question. The film then drifts back into the Backrooms. Mary's memories of trauma shape the spaces, and the last one is a badly copied interrogation room. In it sits a fractured, silent version of Mary herself.

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• 5. The Cast

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  In May 2025, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Cristin Milioti entered negotiations to headline the film. Ejiofor was confirmed the following month, by which time Soodik was on his latest draft. Milioti's deal fell through, and Renate Reinsve was cast in her place in June. Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture store owner who is also a failed architect. Reinsve plays Dr. Mary Kline. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia were added in July. Duplass plays Phil, the Async researcher. Bennett plays Bobby, and Maxwell plays Kat. Jogia plays Naren Warne, the explorer from the 1990 tape. Two more roles carry much of the film's menace and history. Robert Bobroczkyi plays Pirate Clark, the giant entity in the mascot costume. Krista Kosonen plays Nora Kline, Mary's mother. Jogia had been a fan of Parsons's original web series before he joined. His part is relatively small, yet he recalls spending extensive time with Parsons discussing the lore of the film.

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• 6. Building the Yellow Rooms

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  More than 30,000 square feet of Backrooms sets were built across four sound stages. Parsons designed the liminal environments in the 3D software Blender. Production designer Danny Vermette then adapted those digital designs into physical construction. Vermette compared fitting the sets together to playing Tetris. The build used 37,000 square feet of wallpaper and 29,000 square feet of carpeting. Much of it was sourced locally in Canada, to avoid the effect of U.S. tariffs. The designers also stressed verticality, so that actors found the environment physically harder to move through. People reportedly got lost on set. Principal photography began in Vancouver on the 7th of July 2025, under the working title Effigy. Filming wrapped on the 14th of August 2025. Edo Van Breemen and Parsons composed the score together. Over the end credits plays The Word Becomes Flesh, a track by Boards of Canada from their album Inferno. The soundtrack also features Ulterior Motives, a well-known former lost media song. The Caretaker's B1 - All that follows is true appears as well.

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• 7. Critics and Audiences

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  Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of B-. Those surveyed by PostTrak gave it a 68% positive score, and 53% said they would definitely recommend it. Critics were warmer. Amy Nicholson of the Los Angeles Times saw less a conventional horror film than the experience of a moving Salvador Dali painting. Dan Bayer of Next Best Picture said Parsons arrived as a fully formed filmmaker, with exceptional control of imagery, pacing and dread. He also praised Reinsve and Ejiofor for conveying emotion with subtle acting when the script is sparse. Owen Gleiberman of Variety noted how Parsons builds fear from mood, sound design and eerie visuals rather than jump scares. He compared the film's empty spaces to Eraserhead, Skinamarink and The Shining. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian singled out the oppressive atmosphere and the yellow-lit images. Sonny Bunch of The Bulwark found the themes overly explicit, yet called the film "tremendously effective." Beatrice Loayza of The New York Times was harsher about the script. She wrote that it "cobbles together ideas about trauma and the mysterious workings of the unconscious, and sprinkles on some metaphors about gentrification as a repression of the past for good measure." Lex Briscuso of IGN called it "a truly terrifying cinematic rabbit hole." Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire said Parsons and Vermette "have a hell of a time conjuring spatial uncanniness with images we've never before seen on the big screen."

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• 8. Opening Weekend

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  Backrooms premiered at the Aero Theatre on the 7th of May 2026. South Korea got it first in general release, on the 27th of May. A24 released it in the United States on the 29th of May. In early May, projections suggested an opening weekend of around $20 million. By release week, forecasts had climbed to between $40 million and $50 million. The film took in $38.4 million on its first day alone. Its opening weekend came to $81.5 million domestically and about $118 million worldwide, the biggest opening in A24's history. As of May 2026, the film had grossed $81.4 million in the United States and Canada. Other territories added $36.5 million, for a worldwide total of $117.9 million. Parsons has said he is not done with Backrooms. He told audiences that things were "in the works right now." The YouTube series that started it all is set to continue as well.

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