Some people waited years for a “Backrooms” movie. Others thought it was just another original horror movie produced by A24.
If you’re part of the latter camp, you probably don’t know how deep the lore runs. It’s lore that “Backrooms” director Kane Parsons is intimately familiar with — he created much of it himself.
Before Parsons would direct the high-grossing “Backrooms” feature, written by Will Soodik and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, he made a series of YouTube videos set in the same universe, deeply exploring the titular liminal spaces and the world around them. Parons released his first video in 2022 at the young age of 16 using the online pseudonym Kane Pixels. He went on to make a full series of found footage short films using the 3D software Blender.
In the “Backrooms” feature, Parsons and Soodik give unfamiliar audiences enough knowledge to understand the broad strokes of the world while still leaving doors open for questions. If you want some of those questions answered, read on — obviously, spoiler alert.
How did Backrooms start?
I would imagine “Backrooms” is the first movie to gross more than $200 million that’s based on a 4chan post.
It started in 2019 when an anonymous 4chan user invited people to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” They started the chain with a picture (now known to be an old furniture store, alluded to in the film) of empty rooms, yellow fluorescents and pale wallpaper — what would become the defining look for the whole backrooms genre.
Another anonymous user replied to the chain with words that proved just as foundational.
“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,” they said. “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
And thus, the Backrooms were born — a series of similar internet posts in the creepypasta sphere adding lore to the hellish liminal space dimension that takes center stage in Parsons’ feature film.
Parsons got involved in the trend himself in 2022 by posting the short film “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” on YouTube under the name Kane Pixels. This short (which you can watch below) shows a man “noclipping” through the ground while filming a video with friends, landing him in the Backrooms. The videographer wanders around the Backrooms, stumbling upon large and intricate environments as he is stalked by a monster.
The video ends with the monster grabbing the videographer as he drops his camera, which noclips back into the real world high in the sky (thus allowing the footage to be “found”). Parsons went on to make 23 more shorts in the “Backrooms” world from ages 16 to 19, ceasing in 2025 before his A24 feature released in 2026.
What is the monster in “Backrooms”?
Let’s talk about Still Lifes.
Just as the Backrooms inaccurately recreate rooms from “memory” (more on that later), they sometimes recreate the humans that occupy those spaces. These are called Still Lifes.
Early on in the “Backrooms” movie, it becomes clear that some monstrous entity is down in the Backrooms with Clark (Ejiofor), the furniture salesman/wannabe architect who spends more and more time in the rooms as his life in the real world crumbles. After this unseen creature kills Bobby (Finn Bennett), whom Clark hires to video the “Backrooms” (in one of the film’s found footage segments evoking the YouTube shorts), Clarks stumbles upon a series of Still Lifes in a dark room lit by a Christmas tree. It’s the first full glimpse of these creatures in the film, and it is terrifying.
Later in the movie, Clark abducts his therapist, Mary (Reinsve), who goes into the Backrooms looking for him. Clark now lives in the Backrooms, surrounded by (and eating) a trio of Still Lifes, including one that is implied to be a replica of the wife from whom he’s separated in the real world. Clark and Mary’s conversation is soon interrupted by the monster that killed Bobby: Captain Clark.
Captain Clark is a large Still Life that resembles Clark in a pirate-themed commercial he filmed for his furniture store. In replicating Clark at that moment, the Still Life has a right arm that juts out at an angle, mimicking the crutch held under Clark’s arm in the commercial. It also has a peg leg where Clark wore one for his pirate costume.
Why this Still Life is bigger and more aggressive than the others is up to interpretation. Captain Clark seems to have adopted the narcissism and aggression displayed by Clark throughout the film, reflecting his worst tendencies into a monstrous creature. This leads to Clark’s own death, as Captain Clark violently bites and kills him.
When Is 'Backrooms' Streaming?
How does “Backrooms” end?
At the end of “Backrooms,” Mary is rescued from Captain Clark by Async scientists, who study (and are responsible for) the liminal spaces she finds herself in. She then meets with one scientist, Phil (Mark Duplass), who asks her to share everything she knows about the Backrooms while cryptically revealing that they might not let her go.
As Mary remains in the hands of the Async scientists, who are similarly in the dark about the particulars of the liminal space phenomenon, the audience is then shown a Still Life of Mary, deformed and sitting silently in a copied room somewhere in the Backrooms.
This Still Life too nods at the replication of memory and trauma that permeates the Backrooms. Throughout the film, flashbacks reveal that Mary had a traumatic childhood involving an agoraphobic mother who warned her to never go outside. Mary repeatedly grapples with this trauma throughout the film (literally carrying it with her in the form of concrete handprints she made as a child).
It’s no accident that the film ends with Mary, traumatized yet again, locked in another room, still and silent.
Where do the Backrooms come from?
Parsons and Soodik restrain themselves from explaining too much of “Backrooms” in the feature. Clark gives a few good explanations for what the rooms are like (“The more it remembers something, the less it does” is a particularly good example), but these are just guesses from a mentally unstable character who’s spent a lot of time in the space.
The extended lore created by Parsons in his YouTube videos offers up some additional information — notably, how the Backrooms came about. Parsons used the real-life Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 as part of his canon, with the quake, in his universe, causing a malfunction during a test of Async’s Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System. This malfunction seemingly caused the creation of the Backrooms and the tears in reality that allow things to noclip in.
But one of the interesting things about Backrooms as a concept is the fact that no one individual has true ownership over it. Parsons is inarguably the defining voice in the space, but Backrooms started as a communal internet concept that people built upon with their own lore, adding various levels and monsters into the liminal space for travelers to experience. It has just as much in common with that Martin Scorsese “Goncharov” meme as it does with the MCU — continuity made by masses.
So if you want to know more Backrooms lore, from Parsons and beyond, then buckle up — there’s a lot left to learn.
