The Backrooms movie was only just released in theaters on May 29, but it has already earned over $100 million at the box office, making it A24’s biggest success yet. Even more impressively, it was directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who started his filmmaking career on YouTube in his teenage years. Backrooms is his first feature film, but he has been making short films about the Backrooms on YouTube for four years now. Although the movie was made recently, the idea of the “Backrooms”–an infinite and strange array of connecting rooms, often with yellow wallpaper and carpeting–has existed since 2019.
Where Did the Idea of the Backrooms Originate?
The idea of Backrooms originated from a picture posted on the “Paranormal” board of 4chan by an Anonymous user on May 12, 2019. The post, titled “unsettling pictures” with the caption “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’,” shows a series of interconnected rooms with pastel yellow wallpaper, grayish-yellow carpeting, and a row of square overhead lights.
Another Anonymous user replied to this post on the same day with the text:
“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.”
What Is the Backstory of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms YouTube Series?
Kane Parsons’s Backrooms series on Youtube (2022-2025) begins with a short film titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” where he noclips, or phases through the ground, into the Backrooms an infinite with a camera and explores it before getting attacked by the Lifeform and dropping his camera into a pit, which noclips back out of the backrooms and falls out of the sky towards a neighborhood.
Following videos reveal that a research institute called Async has been experimenting with their Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System to open a door into the Backrooms as a solution to the overpopulation and storage crises. When they finally succeed, it accidentally creates multiple “Null Zones” that momentarily connect the real world to the Backrooms, causing people, objects, or even entire neighborhoods in Null Zones to noclip at random into the Backrooms.
As Async employees and random people who accidentally noclip into the Backrooms explore the space with cameras, they discover that hostile monsters dubbed Lifeforms, which are spindly, shadowy creatures formed from bacteria, and Still Lifes, which are very similar to humans but deformed in unnatural ways, reside in them.
What Is the Premise of the Backrooms Movie?
In the Backrooms movie, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner of a furniture store called “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” in San Jose, California, that is struggling to stay in business. One night, he discovers an invisible door in the basement of his store that allows him to noclip into the Backrooms.
When he tells his therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) about his discovery, it’s clear that she does not believe him. To gather proof of the Backrooms’ existence, he asks his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to record their journey into the Backrooms. When things go awry and they all go missing, Mary steps into the Backrooms herself to look for Clark and discovers the wonders (and horrors) that lie within.
What Are the Differences Between the YouTube Series and the Movie?
The Backrooms movie has a new set of characters, and noclipping works slightly differently: randomly occurring “Null Zones” are permanent, not momentary doorways into the Backrooms. And spoilers ahead, but the movie puts a psychological twist on the YouTube series by implying that the Backrooms is at least partly an invention of the complexities and oddities of the human mind and imperfect memory, as opposed to an alternate realm. In addition, the monsters in the movie are all Still Lives (unnaturally deformed, human-like creatures that Clark hypothesizes are the Backrooms’ imperfect recreations of humans), and bacteria-based Lifeforms do not appear at all.
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