Breaking down the lore behind A24’s upcoming creepfest, the viral internet horror transformed into a YouTube phenomenon.
If you saw the ominous sixty-second official teaser for A24’s upcoming feature film Backrooms a few weeks ago and were left thinking “WTF?!,” we can’t blame you. The teaser shows a stark room with only a chair, a shelf, a piece of clothing, and a few random items that give the impression of a lived-in space. The viewer then hears, “I found something,” spoken by one of the film’s stars, Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the camera begins to descend, taking us through different levels featuring what seems to be the same room, each with subtle changes; perhaps the chair is larger, absent, or even integrated into the floor.
“I found a place,” Ejiofor continues. “It’s massive in there and just goes on and on and on. All these rooms…this place builds them. Actually, more like it remembers them, and the more times it remembers something, the less it does.” Ejiofor says that last part as the viewer descends into a totally different space entirely, one that feels familiar, but off. Not “was Sinbad really a genie in a movie” off, rather, that feeling of something not being right, no matter how familiar the vintage yellow that encompasses the area feels. Something is off, and figuring out WTF is going on in “The Backrooms” has completely captivated certain segments of the Internet over the last seven years. What’s interesting, really, isn’t what’s going on in whatever “The Backrooms” is. It’s that sense of eerie familiarity that’s had enough folks enraptured that the combined forces of A24, James Wan’s Atomic Monster, and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps came together to bring the viral vision of 20-year-old Kane Parsons (whose take on the Backrooms meme exploded on YouTube and is the basis for Backrooms, his directorial debut) to life.
So, what are the Backrooms? Why were they so popular? And how did they get turned into a film? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Because the Internet
Much like most of the weirdest content on the Internet, the Backrooms began on 4chan, as part of the growing culture of shared horror known as creepypasta. Notable creepypasta includes Slender Man, Jeff the Killer, and the SCP Foundation. There was an image that looked super familiar to those who grew up during a certain era. It depicted a series of empty rooms with yellow-ish interior lighting. But due in part to the picture being taken at an odd angle combined with the unsettling vibes, the image received the following reply in May of 2019 that truly set this idea of “the Backrooms” into motion.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”
For those unfamiliar, “noclip” is a gaming term that refers to a player’s ability to walk through walls or floors, usually achieved by altering the game’s code in some way. So, in the mind of that anonymous writer, this room is what happens when you somehow fall out of sync with your current reality. You’re transported to a yellow-hued environment of endless rooms (are they doctor’s offices? Daycares?) that may contain something lurking within its infinity. That’s a heavy twist, one that resonated with many on 4chan, filling Reddit with stories and adding lore. Hundreds of thousands of people online were freaked out by an image from some renovation work on a building in Wisconsin back in 2002 that gave the collective internets the ick. A lot of that has to do with the concept of liminal spaces and the eerie vibe some empty rooms or areas (old offices, classrooms, malls, etc.) give off.
“The Backrooms” and that fear crept into pop culture. Dan Erickson, creator of Apple TV+’s hit series Severance, incorporated the creepy vibe of “the Backrooms” and liminal spaces into the series. “Then there’s stuff like ‘The Backrooms,’ which is a weird online urban legend,” he told Inverse. “There were a lot of disparate influences.” The vibe you’d get when following characters down the endless corridors within Lumon Industries likely felt like, say, that time you got lost at the new doctor’s office, or made you remember the anxiety you may have had when entering your first corporate job, all those endless cubicles and conference rooms.
But these are all just ideas, right? Terrifying tales typed under the blue hue of an office, bedroom, or wherever 4channers 4chan. It wasn’t until the aforementioned creative Kane Parsons decided to bring the concept to life via his own “Backrooms” series on YouTube that the game seemingly changed.
The Web Series
In January of 2022, Parsons kicked off his “Backrooms series with “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” which he created at the age of 16 for his Kane Pixels page using Blender 3D software to show what happens when you noclip into the Backrooms.
The short starts off simple enough, with a crew working on a film when, suddenly, the cameraman slips out of his reality and is dropped right into the Backrooms. Armed with a camera and intense curiosity, he walks through endless corridors, with turns leading to rooms with no outlets and long hallways that suddenly fill with gigantic creatures on hot pursuit. The cameraman makes his way through the yellow hallways and sees larger, more expansive spaces before descending into the stairwells to re-enter the Backrooms.
At the time of this writing, that first video is sitting at 71 million views on YouTube. The full 22-video series expands upon the Backrooms lore, introducing viewers to Async, the company that has been studying the Backrooms since they opened that can of worms back in the ‘80s (and is also interestingly the name of one of the production companies on Backrooms film). Almost 200 million collective views later, and Parsons has one of the doper internet-to-Hollywood stories we’ve seen in a while. Random internet lore turns into captivating web videos that A24 wants to produce? It’s par for the course in today’s Hollywood.
The Internet Fuels the Machine
This Backrooms concept wasn’t limited to just Reddit, Severance, and Kane’s YouTube series. There were several games created based on Backrooms lore, and it even appeared in the incredibly terrifying MyHouse.WAD Doom mod that told a fascinating story while paying homage to a variety of internet memes, with extensive stages featuring the Backrooms and liminal spaces.
Backrooms is the latest example of studios capitalizing on Internet trends in hopes of translating viral content into box office success. In 2023, the indie horror maestros at Blumhouse faithfully adapted the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game franchise into two successful movies. The first film became an unexpected hit, bringing in nearly $300 million at the box office off a $20 million budget. Chris Stuckmann, an early YouTube film critic since 2009, recently made his feature directorial debut with Shelby Oaks, a horror film inspired by the Paranormal Paranoids series he created and released on YouTube. And just this year, popular gamer Markiplier directed, wrote, produced, edited, and starred in Iron Lung, a film based on a popular video game with roughly an hour of gameplay that has already grossed in $50 million on a reported $3 million budget. Hell, A24 previously released Zola, which infamously started life as a viral tale told solely through tweets. Those are only a few examples, but they prove Internet stickiness is proving to be a reliable way to get people to part with their cash.
With Hollywood continuing to max out studio back catalogs as well as those of Nintendo, Hasbro, Mattel, DC, Marvel, and Image Comics, it makes sense that producers would noclip into a deeper pool of unique, original stories: the Internet.
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