What happens when a 20-year-old YouTuber who’s built a world around a creepypasta becomes the youngest director to debut with an A24 film? You receive the live action rendition of one of the internet’s most well-known urban legends: the Backrooms. In an exclusive interview with actor Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Clark in the film, we decode the Backrooms lore, how it steps away from traditional horror and Kane Parsons’ creative genius ahead of the film’s release.
“For audiences who are familiar with THE BACKROOMS, it’s exciting to see this expanded rendition of it, how it utilizes and builds upon all the things people have loved about it over the years,” says Ejiofor. “People who are new to it will be equally fascinated by this world, and Kane’s unique vision, created out of a singular imaginative leap.”
In the day since the film released domestically, A24’s Backrooms has made back its budget and more: guaranteed to be A24’s highest-grossing opening weekend ever as one of the top 5 highest grossing openings for a horror movie ever. The critics are dropping rave reviews, and the theatres are packed for the coming days. The effect the film is having across the internet currently speaks not just of its brilliance but of the massive fanbase that the Backrooms already seems to have. In some parts from the gaming community and mostly from the long-time viewers of the original Backrooms YouTube series created by Kane Parsons. What is it exactly about this internet urban legend and Parsons’ concept of ‘liminal horror’ that makes Backrooms one of 2026’s best horror films so far?
What are the Backrooms and what makes them so creepy?
Essentially, the Backrooms started with the image of what looked to be an ordinary looking furniture store with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lights posted on to 4chan’s paranormal board in 2019. The creepypasta text described the ‘liminal space’ as a place you could “no-clip” or phase into, existing in a different reality and going on endlessly like a yellow maze. The text also described a presence, an ‘entity’ that is aware of you in that massive never-ending expanse. The lore expanded as the community weighed in on this mysterious space, ultimately giving rise to Kane Parsons or Kane Pixel’s YouTube series of the same name which finally gave it an accurate and tangible plot. It started out simple, and yet there’s a certain eeriness you can’t seem to explain about what the Backrooms have become.
“The Backrooms feel ordinary, but by the very nature of their extreme ordinariness, it becomes quite disturbing,” says Ejiofor. “You feel like you should be reasonably safe because you’re in an empty office space but because something isn’t quite right within its confines you feel even more vulnerable. That feeling is the starting point for why the Backrooms is so horrifying,” he explains.
That oppressive mundaneness of the ‘liminal space’ is exactly what Kane taps into with Backrooms, giving ‘liminal horror’ a new identity. “Everyone has theories on what it all means,” Ejiofor says of the space’s nature and design. A liminal space is the ‘in-between’ or a transitional space, somewhere where you’re not quite there or here. Eerie, disorienting and surreal, a liminal space can also be described as a space that was meant to be bustling but is uncannily empty. Airports, train stations, malls or even classrooms at night. It seems like there is no meaning or goal, just an unsettling feeling in the pit of your stomach and confronting the psychology of being truly alone head on. With the film, Backrooms brings that idea of horror to life in the real world – yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights, empty hallways and all.
How filmmaker Kane Parsons created an alternate reality with Backrooms
The intended impact delivered by the eerie film has much to do with 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ worldbuilding. At just 16, armed with the free CGI software Blender and an obsession for filmmaking, Parsons created the found footage series of The Backrooms on YouTube, inspired by the creepypasta. The Backrooms expanded with Kane Pixel’s vision, adding new floors, new entities and a storyline built around a scientific exploration of the space. While there is chatter around his debut and questions of credibility being asked on the internet, what’s apparent is that no one else has as much authority over the Backrooms than Kane does. “There is no question that he can’t answer,” Ejiofor says about the young youtuber turned filmmaker. “There is no aspect of it that he hasn’t considered. It has obviously been at the forefront of his whole creative process for several years and he has spent endless hours working on it, understanding it.”
Backrooms is doing horror very differently than we know it, not run by jump scares or an out there haunting, and yet it delivers what critics describe as a ‘suffocating’ fear. “Of course, it’s scary and there’s horror, and it’s terrifying at times, but it also has these great characters and it’s speaking to a lot of different fascinating things,” says Ejiofor. The horror in Backrooms is psychological and nuanced. “There’s also a very grounded, philosophical and psychological truthfulness to what’s happening to Mary and Clark. The uniqueness of this storytelling is what I hope audiences will engage with, because it is unlike anything else,” the actor explains. Stepping away from traditional horror films, Indie Hollywood is placing its bet on the experimental horror archetype with the release of A24’s Backrooms.
Backrooms is now showing in theatres in Malaysia, including GSC and TGV Cinemas.
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
