Horror in Acid-Yellow Corridors: “The Backrooms” Transforms a YouTube Phenomenon Into a Cinematic Nightmare
According to the CinemaDrame News Agency, Imagine if The Blair Witch Project sent its shaky-cam characters into the shifting, mind-bending architecture of Alex Garland’s Annihilation instead of a dark forest; only then can you grasp the eerie, deconstructive, and at times dizzying atmosphere of The Backrooms. The film marks the feature directorial debut of Kane Parsons, produced by A24.
Parsons adapted the film from his immensely popular 22-part YouTube series, which was originally inspired by an internet horror story (creepypasta) on 4chan. This digital urban legend centers on explorers who slip into a windowless office building with acid-yellow walls, a space that expands into a shifting labyrinth of rooms and hallways. Every corridor and door leads to nowhere, and the environment seemingly feeds on the existential and psychological fears of anyone who steps inside.
The 20-year-old Parsons is the youngest director ever hired by the prestigious studio A24. At just 16, he taught himself Blender and, by combining it with Adobe After Effects, created short, unsettling “found footage” videos told from the perspective of individuals who entered these backrooms and never returned.
In the cinematic adaptation of The Backrooms, we follow the story of Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor—a sofa salesman with a broken marriage and forgotten dreams of becoming an architect, who now manages a furniture showroom in California.
The film opens with a high-tension prologue set in June 1990, a period diehard fans know marks the beginning of the story’s core anomalies. Paying homage to its roots, the movie begins with a found-footage sequence showing a researcher in a hazmat suit who has lost his colleagues in the maze of the backrooms. Holding a handycam, he guides us toward the team’s makeshift headquarters: a desk cluttered with floppy disks and wires trailing from bulky computer towers. However, a highly hostile entity is stalking the cameraman—a creature we catch only fleeting glimpses of before the video cuts out, and a reflection on a television screen reveals another group of researchers watching the tape.
In the real world—a place that feels isolated and suspenseful in its own right due to the wide staging the director places between characters—Clark splits his time between the furniture showroom and therapy sessions with his psychologist, Dr. Mary Klein, played by Renate Reinsve. Mary is a renowned psychologist and self-help author who harbors her own painful past. Flashbacks reveal that watching her childhood home get demolished to make way for a high-rise triggered emotional crises rooted in past family trauma. While these digressions initially slow the narrative momentum built during the thrilling opening, they become the primary key to decoding the overarching mythology of The Backrooms in the third act.
Meanwhile, it is revealed that due to his divorce, Clark is now living inside his own showroom on the mattresses put up for sale. He and an electrician struggle with inexplicable power outages and mysterious new fuses appearing on the breaker box. One night, Clark flips the fuses and discovers an anomaly on the other side of a basement wall—a portal he passes through like a permeable membrane, entering the familiar, urine-colored labyrinth of the backrooms.
Before Clark stands a menacing heap of chairs, desks, and sofas, as if the subconscious of the furniture showroom has erected a mocking monument to his failed life. As he presses forward, more doors lead to dead ends or further yellow-tinted corridors where objects defy gravity, occasionally growing out of the ceilings and walls.
Parsons and production designer Danny Vermeulen have crafted a bizarre, uncanny space with visuals unlike anything seen on cinema screens before. Describing these images, as Clark attempts to explain to a skeptical Mary using a strange hand-drawn map, is “like describing a dog to someone who has never seen one and then asking them to paint it.”
This is where fans of postmodern literature and Mark Z. Danielewski’s unsettling experimental novel House of Leaves will find immense pleasure. That book, about a house whose interior dimensions are larger than its exterior and continuously expand, essentially birthed the 21st-century fascination with liminal space horror. The Backrooms brings us closer to the terror a cinematic adaptation of that book could possess, such as when Clark asks his assistant Kat (played by Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (played by Finn Bennett) to explore the expanding corridors of the backrooms while anchored by a long rope.
Naturally, this plan goes horribly awry, and the subsequent underground house-of-horrors chase sequence doubles the film’s thrills. Later, when Clark stops showing up to therapy, Mary goes to the showroom herself, enters the backrooms, and encounters a much vaster network of structures the size of a small city.
By the end of the film, an ambiguous mythology takes shape: Are these corridors, doors, and everyday items—like shoes half-submerged in the floor or chairs dangling from the ceiling—reflections of the psyche of those who enter? Or is the space itself constructing a set from its own dreams about itself? Whether the film is deep art or merely a highly compelling episode of The Twilight Zone is up to the viewer.
The screenplay attempts to anchor the story in a psychological realism that might have felt cheesy without the brilliant performances of the cast. Chiwetel Ejiofor masterfully portrays a melancholic, depressed individual gradually driven to madness as he tries to play detective in liminal spaces, while Renate Reinsve (the Norwegian star of The Worst Person in the World) proves she has immense potential for the horror genre.
The Backrooms is a film that will likely resonate most with younger audiences, but remember the first horror movie you ever saw that completely altered your worldview; for many people, this film will be that exact work.
