‘Backrooms’ Doesn’t Quite Capture The Weirdness Of The Originals

I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms concept, born from a 4chan thread imagining an endless series of drab and empty yellow-tinted rooms that look like abandoned ’90s conference halls. Sometimes otherworldly beings dwell in these places, where furniture and walls meld together in awkward, nonsensical angles. Other times, you are simply trapped in an ever-expanding liminal space that has no end or exit. Parsons expanded on this idea by creating entirely computer-generated yet photoreal videos documenting the Backrooms. Soon his version, with an increasingly intricate and developing lore involving top secret government programs, took off on its own. With the release of his first feature film, Backrooms , produced by A24, I tried to remember why I was served Parsons' video at all. Creepypasta content was never my forte, though I did follow a few filmmakers committed to showcasing their work on YouTube, notably Adam Butcher, who made one of my favorite short horror films, Internet Story. Throw in a few longform YouTube essays I watched in high school about "unexplained events" and perhaps this is how I wound up following Parsons' over the years.

The reason this is of any interest now is because a small but growing cadre of Youtubers-turned-feature-horror-directors have drawn media and box office attention: Danny and Michael Philippou, who directed 2022's Talk To Me and 2025's Bring Her Back ; Chris Stuckmann with 2025's Shelby Oaks ; Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, with this year's Iron Lung ; Curry Barker's recent film Obsession ; and now Parsons with Backrooms. That this group of young men began their careers online has been the source of both suspicion and hyperbolic praise, signaling either admirable scrappiness and ingenuity or barrel-scraping trend-chasing on the parts of their producing partners. What is true for each of these directors is the fact that they had little to no familiarity with traditional filmmaking techniques or studio involvement. For those like Fischbach, whose long, frenetic tenure online has seen him work on a diverse (though not necessarily formally or narratively rigorous) range of projects, an outsider's ethos results in a compelling, authentically strange, and unique passion project.

For pretty much everyone else, one finds derivative filmmaking aping certain cinematic aesthetics—notably the locked-camera, low-lit, slow-zoom, jarring and shrill horror of Ari Aster—without any real understanding as to how or why these elements work. These films appear sleek and professional with sharp digital photography, symmetrical framing, and devoted performers. But there is no real grasp of cinematic language, no instinct or learned skill for blocking or staging, and no narrative sophistication, to say nothing of the dialogue, which tends toward the overly expository and literal. The horror is derived from sudden loud sounds, abrupt cuts to a shocking image, the juxtaposition of upbeat music and disturbing imagery, and, without fail, someone's head being smashed to a bloody pulp. This is a cinema of non sequiturs and vacuous, sometimes nonexistent, interiority. As critic Esther Rosenfield wrote in an essay about Iron Lung, “None of the skills required to make viral video content carry over to the art of filmmaking.”

Refreshingly, Parsons’ visual concerns in Backrooms are mostly about space and the perception of depth, and the patient discovery of how the two can combine to create discomfort. Instead of dark environments where the viewer has to squint to see what’s hiding in the corner, there are brightly lit, garish corridors that dwarf their inhabitants, spaces that cut into each other creating frames with frames. That said, Backrooms is odd for several reasons, not least of which is its clear struggle to turn a series of interconnected videos in which people are the least interesting aspect into something resembling a self-contained movie that places two characters at its narrative center. Set in the 1990s, Backrooms revolves around Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an emotionally volatile furniture store owner, whose therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), is unsure how best to help him through his feelings of resentment. In Clark, Ejiofor is given the chance to embody a broken, stubborn, and lonely man thwarted in his attempts at projecting authority and masculinity. Parsons demonstrates real confidence in the scenes between Clark and Mary, allowing both actors to enhance often stilted dialogue through expression and body language.