In recent years, multiple popular YouTubers have successfully made the leap into horror filmmaking, and A24’s Backrooms may be the most ambitious example yet. Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, Backrooms follows therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) as she searches for her patient Carl (Chiwetel Ejiofor) after he vanishes into a strange alternate dimension hidden behind his furniture store.
Though Backrooms is based on an internet creepypasta, Parsons popularized the concept through his viral YouTube shorts, transforming an online myth into one of the internet’s defining modern horror phenomena. With his feature-length debut, Parsons joins the list of online creators-turned-filmmakers, including RackaRacka (Talk to Me), Chris Stuckmann (Shelby Oaks), Markiplier (Iron Lung), and Curry Barker (Obsession). The film also continues the rise of liminal horror stories like Skinamarink and I Saw the TV Glow.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Parsons joined Ejiofor and Reinsve to discuss bringing Backrooms to the big screen, transforming the story from a series of low-budget shorts into a thoughtful, character-driven narrative.
Backrooms turns liminal horror into a haunting character study
Similar to NEON’s liminal horror hit Exit 8, Backrooms captures the terror of the ordinary and the mundane, transforming regular spaces into something deeply unsettling. Beneath this surreal sci-fi horror is a story about how people find comfort in their daily routine, even if it means trapping themselves in isolation.
Both Mary and Carl feel trapped in unfulfilling lives, but Carl especially longs to break free. After failing to achieve his dream of becoming an architect, he settles into a dead-end job at a furniture store, where the Backrooms offers him an escape from his depressing life. Parsons reinforces these themes with the film’s nostalgic 1990s story, liminal visuals, and found-footage-inspired filmmaking style.
While speaking to Digital Trends, Ejiofor described Backrooms as a “psychological investigation” of Carl, whose mind becomes linked to the film’s ever-shifting maze.
“What I loved was that this character was [he] had a real complexity that mirrored the experiences that he was going through in the Backrooms in a way that I found really bizarre but also really compelling, and there was something that was explaining in Carl’s psychology, there was something that I found was explaining the environment, in a way, that I found… I understood it as a feeling. And I felt like that was very deeply cinematic to me,” said Ejiofor.
Throughout the film, the Backrooms seem shaped by Carl’s memories. This endless maze is filled with furniture from his store and props from one of his commercials, symbolizing how his work has consumed his life. The movie ultimately uses familiar things to build an unnerving environment filled with oddities such as mauled seagulls, warped street signs, and distorted, humanoid creatures.
This empty, repetitive space also reflects how alone he is in his everyday life. At the same time, Backrooms shows how Carl’s isolation is partially self-inflicted. By retreating deeper into the Backrooms, Carl symbolically withdraws into his own mind, where he can be the person he always wanted to be. His obsession with mapping the Backrooms echoes his dreams of architecture that he failed to realize in the real world.
Backrooms breaks down the fragile line between doctor and patient
Though Parsons had a rich online mythology to draw from for his film, one of the most compelling, unique elements of Backrooms is the dynamic between Mary and Carl. Due to his divorce and depressing job, Carl repeatedly turns to Mary for therapy, with the two often acting out moments from his failed marriage during their sessions.
Although Mary tries to help Carl with his problems, Backrooms makes it clear that she is also a human grappling with her own emotional issues. Her traumatic childhood drove her to try to support others as a therapist, publishing a self-help book that doesn’t reach as many people as she hoped.
Over time, the film reveals that Mary does not have all the answers. Like Carl, she was trying to make sense of all the chaos in their life – chaos that manifests in the Backrooms themselves.
Speaking to Digital Trends, Reinsve said she was “fascinated” by how the Backrooms’ environment mirrored what the characters were going through.
“The characters, up against each other, had kind of the same, similar structure, in a way, that mirrored what was going on in the Backrooms, and it was so many layers of…the psychology of it, but also pointing towards what’s happening to our world, with technology, development, and it was so many things that drew me in,” said Reinsve.
At the end of the day, Backrooms shows that Carl had to be willing to change in order to improve his life. Instead of trying to fix his personal issues, Carl continues complaining about how unfair the world has been to him, which only hurts him even more. This message made for a surprisingly deep and mature story from a young filmmaker.
What’s the verdict on Backrooms?
In the end, Backrooms presents a mind-bending, nerve-wracking nightmare about how people can let their daily routines consume them. Whether they involve running a furniture store or trying to understand the Backrooms themselves, the movie shows how people can isolate themselves in an emotional prison, which physically appears as an infinite, liminal maze filled with horrors and mysteries that ultimately go unanswered.
Parsons confidently presents such a bold, insightful story and injects it with nail-biting suspense, surreal imagery, an eerie soundscape, and exceptional cast performances. All this makes Backrooms one of the most impressive horror debuts in recent memory.
“This all comes from a place of spending several years building…it comes from an existing mythology, is what I mean to say,” said Parsons. “And it, the vector that I’ve explored on YouTube is very much been a science fiction one, where you get a pretty deep, thorough understanding from a human perspective, where you don’t get clear answers, but you get a pretty decent, you’re able to put together an understanding of what this place is or what the circumstances are, generally.
Backrooms premieres in theaters on May 29, 2026.
