Some horror films arrive with decades of mythology behind them. Backrooms arrives with something more modern and arguably more potent: an internet legend, a teenager with a camera, and 190 million YouTube views.
Directed by Kane Parsons — known online as Kane Pixels, who was just 16 when he began uploading his Backrooms found footage series in January 2022 — and produced by A24 alongside James Wan and Shawn Levy, Backrooms is one of the most anticipated horror films of 2026. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, runs 110 minutes, and opened to $81.5 million on its debut weekend. For a film made for under $10 million, that is a remarkable number. For a film directed by a 20-year-old making his feature debut, it is almost unbelievable.
I find that origin story as fascinating as the film itself. And it matters — because understanding where Backrooms came from is the only way to fully appreciate what Kane Parsons was trying to do with it.
Backrooms (2026)
The Story: A struggling furniture store owner discovers a portal in his basement leading to an endless labyrinth of fluorescent-lit corridors. He keeps going back. His therapist goes in after him.
💀 Our Verdict: A24’s most unsettling horror film of 2026 — and a startlingly assured feature debut from a 20-year-old director. The Backrooms sequences are among the most suffocating horror cinema of the decade. Not perfect, but impossible to forget.
Director: Kane Parsons · Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
🎥 Watch it
Powered by JustWatchThe Backrooms Phenomenon — Where It All Started
Before there was a film, there was a creepypasta.
In May 2019, an anonymous user posted a single image on 4chan — a photograph of a yellowed, fluorescent-lit corridor that felt simultaneously familiar and deeply wrong. The kind of space you might find behind a shopping mall or inside an office building that has been empty for too long. The caption described it as an image of the Backrooms: a place you could accidentally “noclip” out of reality into, leaving you stranded in an endless maze of identical rooms with humming fluorescent lights, damp yellow wallpaper, and the faint smell of carpet. No exits. No explanation. No other people.
The image spread. The legend grew. The internet, as it tends to do with liminal spaces and unexplained dread, became obsessed.
Then, in January 2022, a teenager from California named Kane Parsons uploaded a short found footage video to YouTube. It showed a person stumbling into the Backrooms through a construction site, shot with the grainy, disorienting aesthetic of old camcorder footage. The video went viral almost immediately — and kept going. By the time Parsons graduated high school, his Backrooms series had accumulated over 190 million views and attracted the attention of multiple major studios.
A24, 21 Laps Entertainment, and Atomic Monster announced a full-length feature adaptation in February 2023, with Parsons attached to direct. He was 17 years old. The film that resulted — shot on a $10 million budget in Vancouver with a cast including an Academy Award nominee — is in direct continuity with his YouTube series. Not a reboot. Not a reimagining. The same world, expanded to feature length, by the person who built it.
What Backrooms Is About
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect turned struggling furniture store owner — recently separated from his wife, quietly unravelling, spending his nights sleeping in the back of his own shop. When electrical disturbances lead him to a crack in the basement wall, he phases through it and finds himself somewhere that shouldn’t exist: an endless, fluorescent-lit labyrinth of yellow corridors and malformed rooms with no apparent exits and no logical architecture.
He keeps going back.
His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), watches her patient disappear deeper into an obsession she can’t explain — until she has no choice but to follow him in herself.
What lies inside the Backrooms — what it is, what lives there, and what it wants — is the film’s central mystery. One that Backrooms unravels with considerable patience and, if the critics are to be believed, considerable nerve.
The Backrooms Trailer
Review: Backrooms (Spoiler-Free)
There is a scene in Backrooms — somewhere in the first hour — where Clark moves through a corridor that looks exactly like every other corridor, and the camera holds on him just long enough for you to feel what he feels: the particular dread of a space that has no memory of you having passed through it. No landmarks. No logic. Just yellow wallpaper and fluorescent hum, stretching in every direction, forever.
That scene alone is worth the price of admission.
Kane Parsons understands something that most horror directors take years to learn — that atmosphere is not decoration, it is architecture. The Backrooms in this film are not a backdrop. They are the film’s central character, and Parsons treats them with the same obsessive care he brought to his YouTube shorts. The decision to build thirty thousand square feet of practical sets rather than rely on CGI pays off in every frame. You can feel the wrongness of the space in a way that no green screen could replicate. The floors slope slightly. The doorways are set at the wrong height. The furniture appears to be sinking. Nothing is quite right, and nothing lets you look away.
Chiwetel Ejiofor carries the film’s first half with a performance of quiet, accumulating desperation. Clark is not a likeable protagonist in any conventional sense — he is a man in the process of losing everything, making increasingly bad decisions, and finding in the Backrooms something that his real life has stopped offering him. I find that psychological dimension the film’s most interesting choice. This is not a film about a man trying to escape a nightmare. It is, at least partly, a film about a man who prefers the nightmare to what’s waiting for him outside.
Did you know?
The original Backrooms creepypasta was posted anonymously on 4chan in May 2019 — a single photograph of a yellowed corridor with the caption describing it as a place you could accidentally “noclip” out of reality into. The image’s origin has never been definitively identified. It remains one of the most effective pieces of internet horror folklore ever created.
And Kane Parsons was 16 years old when he uploaded his first Backrooms YouTube video in January 2022 — teaching himself Blender to create the VFX shots from his bedroom in California. By the time he graduated high school, his series had accumulated over 190 million views and he had an A24 deal on the table. He directed Backrooms at 20.
Renate Reinsve is extraordinary in the second half. Where Ejiofor disappears into the obsession, Reinsve brings the film back to something human — a woman trying to make sense of a patient who has stopped making sense, and then finding herself in a place that makes sense of nothing. Her scenes in the Backrooms are the film’s most purely frightening.
The found footage elements are used sparingly and precisely — the opening tape of Naren Warne, the camera feeds Clark sets up as he maps the space — and they hit harder for being rationed. The hybrid format will frustrate purists, but I think it’s the right call. Full found footage for 110 minutes would have been exhausting. The conventional cinematography gives the audience air to breathe between the suffocating sequences that made Kane Pixels famous.
Where Backrooms stumbles slightly is in its third act. The film introduces narrative threads — the Async organisation, the mythology of the Backrooms, what the creatures actually are — that it doesn’t entirely resolve with the confidence of what came before. The first hour is essentially flawless. The final thirty minutes asks more questions than it answers, and not always in a way that feels deliberate rather than unfinished.
That is a real complaint. It is also a minor one relative to everything the film gets right.
I find Backrooms one of the most genuinely unsettling cinema experiences of recent years — not because of what it shows, but because of what it makes you feel. The wrongness of those spaces lodges somewhere in the back of the brain and stays there. Two days after watching it, I noticed the fluorescent lights in a supermarket and felt briefly, inexplicably uneasy.
That is the mark of a horror film that has done its job.
Closing Shot
Kane Parsons made his first YouTube video at 16. He made his first feature film at 20, for A24, with a cast that includes an Academy Award nominee, and a budget he spent building one of the most convincing alternate dimensions in recent horror cinema.
The third act leaves questions unanswered. The atmosphere leaves marks.
If you only see one horror film this year, make it Backrooms — and see it in the dark, with the sound up, and nothing else demanding your attention.
Where to Watch Backrooms
Powered by JustWatchIs Backrooms (2026) Found Footage?
Partly — and deliberately so.
Backrooms opens with pure found footage: a recovered VHS tape shot by an Async scientist named Naren Warne, documenting his final moments lost inside the Backrooms in 1990. It’s grainy, disorienting, and immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with Kane Parsons’ YouTube series. That tape is found footage in the strictest sense — recovered evidence of something that went wrong.
From there, the film shifts into conventional cinematography for the main narrative. Clark’s story is not shot handheld. There is no character holding a camera and justifying its presence. Parsons uses a traditional cinematic language — composed shots, controlled lighting, a score — to tell the furniture store half of the story.
The found footage elements return inside the Backrooms itself. Clark sets up cameras to document his explorations and map the space. The footage from those cameras — surveillance feeds, handheld recordings — is woven into the film at key moments, creating a hybrid format that moves between the two modes depending on where the story needs to go.
I find this the right creative decision. A full 110-minute found footage film set in the Backrooms would have been exhausting — and the contrast between the conventional world outside and the recorded, documented world inside actually reinforces the film’s central idea: that the Backrooms exist in a different relationship to reality, one where the camera is the only tool that makes sense of the space.
So — found footage? Yes, in part. Hybrid? Absolutely. And in the same tradition as Late Night with the Devil and Trollhunter — films that use the format selectively and are stronger for it.
If you came to Backrooms purely for found footage, you’ll find it. Just not all the way through. And what you find in between is worth the detour.
Similar Films to Backrooms
Backrooms is a rare thing — a horror film with no obvious direct predecessor. Instead, it sits at a very specific intersection of found footage horror, liminal space dread, and corporate conspiracy — and its closest relatives come from several different directions.
We’ve put together a full guide to the 11 best films that share its particular brand of dread — split by type of wrongness, with a comparison table and a “which one to watch first” guide.
→ Movies Like Backrooms (2026): 11 Films That Share Its Liminal Dread
In the meantime, if you want a quick starting point:
- Corporate horror → The Borderlands (2013). The most underrated film in this space.
- Found footage → Kane Pixels’ original YouTube series. Free, essential, more unsettling than the film in some ways.
- Liminal atmosphere → Annihilation (2018) or Skinamarink (2022) depending on your tolerance for demanding cinema.
