Backrooms Movie: A24’s Horror Adapts Viral Internet Legend

A24 is set to release a feature-length horror film, Backrooms, on May 29, directed by Kane Parsons. The film adapts Parsons’ viral YouTube short films, which themselves originated from an internet urban legend.

The concept of the “Backrooms” first emerged in 2019 on 4chan, where an anonymous user described it as a disconcerting space accessible by “noclipping” out of reality. The initial post depicted an empty room with yellowed wallpaper, a moist carpet smell and the hum of fluorescent lights. This description quickly became a widely circulated copypasta, inspiring a collaborative expansion of the Backrooms lore, including the development of numbered “levels” and the imagined existence of entities within the space.

Parsons brought the concept to life with his found-footage style short films, released in 2022, which garnered millions of views and prompted calls for a larger adaptation. A24 responded by greenlighting the feature film, with Parsons directing.

A recently released teaser for Backrooms offers a glimpse into the film’s unsettling atmosphere. The teaser depicts a descent through variations of the same unremarkable room, with subtle distortions – melting furniture, shifting walls, and vanishing doorways – creating a sense of unease. A voiceover suggests the space possesses a form of memory, stating, “And the more it remembers something, the less it does.”

The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. According to A24, the film is based on Parsons’ wildly popular YouTube horror series of the same name.

James Wan, known for his function on horror franchises like The Conjuring, Saw, and Insidious, is involved in the project, though his specific role has not been detailed.