Backrooms: What is the Backrooms? A 4chan creepypasta is the backstory of the movie.
How does a teenager become the director of one of the year’s most anticipated auteur horror films? The answer, of course, is the internet. The digital expanse is our foremost bridge closing the gap between opportunity and accessibility for young creatives; it’s also a virtual space that elides both the liminal and the concrete, that allows us to analyze the in-between spaces in life, which, ironically, then helps us define them. So, when an aspiring young director named Kane Parsons was tapped to helm an A24 feature film about the internet phenomenon known as “the Backrooms” (with the movie titled, unambiguously, Backrooms), it simply made sense.
But what are the Backrooms? In 2019, a post to the infamous anonymous imageboard 4chan sparked what would become a genre in horror storytelling. The post sported an eerie picture of a series of connected corridors with yellowed carpet and wallpaper, accompanied by 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
The initial message carried one of the truest markers of an impending internet phenomenon: It put words and images to something no one has ever been able to state, but everyone has felt, giving a name to one of life’s mysteries that you might think of as singular experience, until a chatboard makes you aware that it’s a much more universal feeling. The Backrooms evoke a feeling of drifting into an undetermined limbo—further exemplified by the subreddit r/LiminalSpace, which is dedicated to settings in this metaphysical uncanny valley—one that is unnavigable and inhospitable. Perhaps it’s an answer to the question: When you zone out, where do you go? But it’s something many of us have felt, even if we didn’t know it before the internet gave it voice. This is also what drew a teenage Parsons, who is now 20 years old, to the iconography. “I found it very compelling that so many people felt so strongly that there was this thing that they could not quite articulate, and so that meant that there was a string to pull on,” Parsons told USA Today.
The Backrooms as an iconography is proof of concept of all that the digital space can do. Its origins echo that of Slender Man, a fictional horror character that was also derived from a chatboard. Much like the online musings that created Slender Man, the Backrooms 4chan message became a popular copypasta—a block of text that is copied and pasted across various internet chat spaces, like forums or social media; also dubbed a creepypasta when related to the horror genre—relying on gaming language to help elicit the emotion. The operative word in the descriptor is “noclip,” a video game term for when collision detection is disabled, allowing a player to move through solid objects like walls and floors. In this disquieting context, it has also come to mean falling out of step with reality, or rather, falling into a boundaryless land that is neither here nor there. The viral copypasta incited the emergence of a new genre of horror creation, usually in the form of other stories and short-form video. One of those creators was Parsons, who, in 2022, at 16 years old, made a nine-minute short film titled The Backrooms (Found Footage), which he uploaded to YouTube under the moniker Kane Pixels. The video, a truly terrifying re-creation of some first-person VHS footage depicting a man trapped in the unending domain of labyrinthine corridors, has since amassed almost 80 million views.
Slender Man, as an internet-born horror phenomenon, wrought nothing good. It inspired a legitimate, and fatal, moral panic, as well as a 2018 feature film adaptation that flopped and was panned by critics. And yet, the Backrooms have been ushered into cinematic reality by A24, a generally respected and popular film and TV company. Parson, who had been making shorts long before he began exploring the theoretical flaxen maze, was inspired by the popularity of that nine-minute YouTube video. He then made a handful more, each touting millions of views. The success of his mini franchise, all built from a prompt of less than 100 words, caught the eyes of A24, who, shortly after Parsons turned 17, signed the young filmmaker on to make a feature-length film. Now, Backrooms, which stars Oscar-nominated actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve and began development when Parsons was only 19, is out for all to see. It extrapolates a story from the Backrooms, one that takes place in the 1990s, wherein Ejiofor plays Clark, an alcoholic furniture store owner who is struggling with his recent separation. Reinsve plays his somewhat mysterious therapist, Dr. Mary Kline. When Clark discovers a crack in the universal fabric—literally, here, a seam in the furniture store’s basement wall—he realizes that he can slip through the wall to an unending realm. Clark, who is clearly searching for something of meaning in his life of discontentment, treats the discovered backrooms as if figuring it out, solving it, is his new purpose. But all of us who have read the original text know better.
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Judging from Backrooms, Parsons may have an uninspiredly conventional view of marital woes—a part of the adaptation that feels somewhat pat—but he definitely understands the machinations of anxiety, and of the thing about the Backrooms that gets your hair to stand on end. The key lies in combining two layers of feeling lost. It’s not about simply being metaphysically adrift; it’s also about the mazeophobia of being trapped in a place that’s unnavigable to both you and anyone you’d hope might find you. (To achieve this effect physically, Parsons reportedly oversaw sets that totaled around 30,000 square feet, so large that people actually got lost in them during filming.) Imagine encountering something that exists beyond your understanding, and then getting trapped in that unknowable expanse full of many corners for things that go bump in the night to wait behind. The internet surely can; to some, the web itself might even be one of those spaces. And now, with Backrooms, that world is brought closer to us than it was before, waiting for us to slip into it. God save us.
