Haunted houses are out. Liminal spaces are in.
That's the case in A24's upcoming horror movie Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons. Backrooms adapts Parsons' viral 2022 YouTube short films of the same name, which were in turn inspired by the internet urban legend of the Backrooms.
The term "the Backrooms" originated in 2019, when an anonymous 4chan user used it to describe an eerie photo of an empty HobbyTown. They said that if you leave, or "noclip" out of, reality, you'll arrive in the Backrooms, a nightmare of moist carpet smell and buzzing fluorescent lighting.
That description has since become a copypasta, and it's inspired the internet to create more Backrooms lore. Now, there are levels to the Backrooms, as well as strange entities that inhabit them.
Parsons' original short film brings this lore to life through harrowing found footage of endless hallways and rooms. Based on the feature-length Backrooms' teaser, it looks like the original film will continue to do just that.
The teaser descends through a variety of iterations of the same, unremarkable room. Each time it goes down a level, though, something feels off. A couch melts into the floor. Windows open onto wall. The door vanishes, then takes a weird shape. All the while, a voiceover reveals that this space "remembers" these rooms as it builds them.
"And the more it remembers something, the less it does," the teaser reveals. Consider us spooked.
Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell.
Backrooms hits theaters May 29.
