In the basement of the aging, dingy furniture store that Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs, there is a barely visible crack in the wallpaper. A narrow strip of light shines through in the semi-darkness – from a room behind the wall that the building shouldn’t actually have at this point. When Clark steps into this unfamiliar room for the first time at the beginning of Kane Parsons’ masterful directorial debut “Backrooms”, anyone who has ever played an old first-person shooter game will remember a common cheat code: a complicated key combination could usually activate the so-called “noclipping”, with which you could walk through walls as if they were just a surmountable glitch. The unreal feeling that I felt while playing, when you could suddenly walk from room to room without any obstacles, now immediately comes back when someone enters the backrooms of the title.
Behind this portal, Clark suddenly finds himself in an old office room: the wallpaper looks faded and, like the worn carpet, is bathed in an ugly piss-yellow color. The room is illuminated by numerous flickering fluorescent lamps embedded in the ceiling, which produce a whirring, static noise. The nine-minute-long YouTube video has collected an incredible 78 million views to date, in which Kane Parsons created such a nightmarish backroom with modest means for the first time in 2022. The A24 directing hope was just 16 years old at the time, a high school student who brought a room to life with the free 3D software Blender and started a huge hype at the end of the 2010s with a simple photo on the 4chan imageboard.
The furniture store operator Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the first to get lost in the yellowish backrooms.
A rapidly growing, huge online fan community arose around this image of a yellowish, empty room, which developed so-called creepypastas in endlessly branching Reddit threads: a modern, heavily internet-based form of urban horror stories that eventually became a popular mainstream phenomenon through Parsons’ 22-part web series “The Backrooms” over the course of the early 2020s. There must have been a lot of pressure on the young director to develop a large-format cinema material from this complex online cosmos. In fact, with the film version of “Backrooms”, Kane Parsons has now achieved a masterpiece that is the best possible version of himself: a film that, on the one hand, remains very true to the Creepypasta origins and will therefore delight even those fans who have followed the detailed Backrooms lore since its earliest beginnings. On the other hand, it also works perfectly as an intense, immersive horror experience for those who are still completely uninitiated!
A huge film set was designed for this purpose on almost 30,000 square meters, the likes of which have not been seen in a horror film since the hotel labyrinth in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”: The deeply unsettling thing that comes from the endlessly extending office spaces in “Backrooms” is that they actually resemble normal rooms, but countless details are irritating and seemingly shifted without any logic of their own. It’s an effect like describing a dog to someone who has never seen one so that they can then draw a picture of it – with this comparison, Clark at least tries to explain this oppressive feeling to his psychotherapist Mary (Renate Reinsve). In one room, old furniture is pushed together and almost overgrown, in another, shoes stick out of the middle of the floor, or banners with mirrored characters hang directly from the ceiling without a holder.
The psychotherapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) is drawn into the mysterious Backrooms phenomenon.
Unlike his web series, whose individual episodes functioned more like loosely connected puzzle pieces that could be recombined over and over again, Kane Parsons tells a self-contained and stand-alone story that is emphatically psychologically based. So you should spoil as little as possible in advance, even if the actual horror in the film lies in being able to explore deserted rooms in long shots that seem ordinary at first glance, but become increasingly threatening the longer you stay in them and notice irritating inconsistencies. The unique horror that “Backrooms” unfolds is less reminiscent of other representatives of the genre and more reminiscent of those nights in which you spent hours googling online into rabbit holes that became more disturbing the deeper and more endlessly they went down.
Conclusion: With “Backrooms”, Kane Parsons, who is just 20 years old, succeeds in translating what is actually a deeply internet-based urban horror myth into big cinema without losing its actual appeal. Parsons makes exactly that diffuse feeling tangible that made his web series seem so unique: the disturbing suspicion of having landed in a reality that is almost completely similar to our own – and that is precisely why it seems wrong. The result is one of the most intense and unique horror films of recent years.