Backrooms: Kane Parsons turns internet mythology into an unsettling and inventive horror

In 2002, a photograph was taken inside a building in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, that had until recently been a furniture store and would soon be acquired by the chain HobbyTown. The picture shows a windowless, empty space with off-lemon walls, ceiling lighting panels and apparently random partitions. Ten years later, it circulated online as an example of “disquieting images that just feel ‘off ’”. 

In 2019, an anonymous user on the 4chan site commented “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…” Others chipped in, elaborating on the mythology of the Backrooms – an unending liminal space which has many precedents and parallels in literature (Borges’s ‘The Library of Babel’, 1941; J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Enormous Space’, 1989; Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, 2000), art (M.C. Escher’s paradoxical prints), film (Stalker, 1979; Cube, 1997; The Blair Witch Project, 1999), television (the 1968 Doctor Who story ‘The Mind Robber’; Twin Peaks, 1990-2017; Severance, 2022-25) and games (Exit 8, 2023, recently the source of a feature film spin-off ). Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels) created a series of Backrooms shorts posted on YouTube from 2022, inspiring others to add to this shared universe with many more clips. 

In this feature, Parsons recreates the original image, acknowledging its origin by making these backrooms accessible via a struggling furniture showroom. The thorny challenge is to carry over the sense of unease generated by the entire Backrooms phenomenon into something like a narrative feature with character arcs, a storyline and a self-consistent mythology. Some recent films – notably Skinamarink, The Outwaters and Enys Men (all 2022) – have dispensed with conventional narrative and simply essayed ambient horror, generating unease through images, impressions, sound design, textures and free-floating fear. This is the terrain of the Backrooms shorts, which explore an oppressive, minatory environment but don’t often tell stories. 

For his debut, Parsons wraps quite a tight plot around two explorers of the Backrooms – angry, resentful, overbearing Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whose more dangerous doppelgänger is a gangling pirate persona created in TV adverts for his furniture store, The Ottoman Empire; and psychiatrist/self-help guru Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), survivor of a childhood dominated by an agoraphobic mother who made a prison of their home. Both the leads have reasons to be attracted to and terrified by the Backrooms. Clark initially explores this new realm with some glee and excitement, even when the space claims his dragooned assistants as victims. 

When Mary follows her missing patient, she is troubled by memories of her recently demolished childhood home even as endless partitions, walls, stairs, doors and ceilings blur the distinction between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Ejiofor and Reinsve create complicated characters from tics and reactions, flashes of memory and unspoken thoughts. Therapy sessions fill in blanks, with a well-delivered tell-it-like-it-is speech by Mary, who literally has to be tied to a chair to be honest with her patient, pointing out that Clark’s worst trait is whining. 

Kawamura Genki’s Exit 8 (2025) is set in a not dissimilar labyrinth but relies on the structure of its source game and a conventional redemptive character arc. It may be a more satisfying film than this deliberately open-ended mystery, but the point of a creepypasta is that it’s unsatisfying – unfinished and potentially infinite. What works best in Backrooms is an elaboration on the random, somehow unsettling image of an unpeopled space that started the phenomenon. Whereas the YouTube shorts were made with CGI, the film has the budgetary resources to build a large, deceptive, practical set littered with dead tech (floppy discs, cassette tapes). It’s a wasteland of cheap furniture, some melding with the floor or walls, some piled up like obstacle courses or a bonfire-in-waiting. Others intrude – including significant cameos for indie genre icons Mark Duplass (Creep, 2014) and Katharine Isabelle (American Mary, 2012) – and among the overseers of the project are key creatives in contemporary horror, including James Wan and Osgood Perkins. 

But much of Backrooms is first-person camera, found footage-style, which means the third significant explorer of this closed universe is the viewer. While Clark and Mary are on their own journeys, haunted by their distorted mirror selves, it’s down to us to spot details in the corners of frames or catch notes in the babel of a soundscape that resonate with our own histories and imaginings.

► Backrooms is in UK cinemas now.