When this Empire writer was 20 years old, he was a second year university student reading r/Backrooms posts about eerie liminal spaces while snaffling Pot Noodles and pulling last-minute essay writing all-nighters. When Kane Parsons — better known to most as YouTube filmmaker and VFX artist Kane Pixels — was 20 years old, in the summer of 2025, he was directing Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in A24 eerie liminal space horror Backrooms, based on his own, same-named viral horror series. So, sort of similar, right? Anyway, today the first teaser trailer for that lugubriously lit, seriously starry feature directorial debut has just been released. Check it out below;
“I found something,” Ejiofor tells Reinsve in this creepy minute-long teaser for Backrooms as Parsons’ camera descends through a series of dankly lit, off-kilter empty rooms. “I found a place,” he continues, “it’s massive in there. It just goes on and on and on and on. All these rooms. It builds them.” It’s a strange introduction to a cinematic take on a strange corner of internet culture, but in its odd narration and hybrid Blender/live-action presentation of, well, backrooms, it certainly does the trick. And while plot specifics are being kept under wraps for now, we do know that the movie, penned by Westworld, Homeland, and Ash Vs The Evil Dead writing alum Will Soodik, follows two people (that’d be Ejiofor and Reinsve) who find a mysterious door in a furniture showroom’s basement — which is very much in keeping with the ‘backrooms’ vibe.
For those who may not be clued up on the backrooms phenomenon, it all stems back to an anonymously posted 2019 4chan Creepypasta (that’s the catchall term for internet-spawned horror legends, FYI) that paired a picture of a then-under-renovation HobbyTown with the description: “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. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” This led to whole communities spawning that shared their own ‘backrooms’ experiences, developed their own divergent (oftentimes warring) lores for the Creepypasta, and — in the notable case of Kane Parsons — created full-on horror shorts viewed by literally hundreds of millions… which is what has gotten us to A24’s Backrooms.
The A24 movie — which elsewhere co-stars Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell — joins upcoming Neon J-Horror Exit 8 in the ranks of incoming liminal space horrors to look forward to/dread, while Parsons’ jump to feature filmmaking sees him become the latest product of the YouTuber-to-horror-movie-filmmaker pipeline (see also: Markiplier’s Iron Lung, Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, and the Philippou brothers’ Talk To Me and Bring Her Back.) American horror lovers can look forward to getting lost in Backrooms when the movie hits US cinemas on 29 May, while we’re sitting tight here in the UK as we wait to find out when it’s our turn to descend into hum-buzzing madness. Yippee!
