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Director Kane Parsons turns internet horror phenomenon into striking debut
FOR what began as one of the internet’s simplest modern horror ideas, the Backrooms asks: What if you slipped out of reality and landed in an endless maze of yellow walls, stained carpets, buzzing lights and liminal rooms that looked almost familiar but wrong in ways you could not fully explain?
With Backrooms, 21-year-old Kane Parsons turns that viral fear into one of the most impressive horror debuts in recent memory.
Parsons, who built his reputation through his Backrooms web series on YouTube, makes his feature debut with remarkable control. The film is atmospheric, visually unsettling and far more mature than many studio horror releases built from internet material. It understands that the real fear of the Backrooms was never just a creature peeking around a corner. The horror comes from the space itself.
A world badly copied
The Backrooms in this film are gorgeously horrible. Every frame is carefully built, from the lighting to the furniture placement to the dead corporate texture of the rooms. The set design is eerie because everything feels familiar at first glance, then increasingly wrong the longer the film lets you look.
The lighting is especially effective. It is not inviting or cinematic in the usual sense. It feels cold and stale, like a rundown office left to rot under fluorescent bulbs. The furniture is arranged with the logic of a broken memory. Chairs, tables and walls appear in places where they should not be, sometimes intersecting in ways that resemble video game clipping, where physical objects pass through each other by mistake.
That detail gives the Backrooms a feverish aura. It feels as if reality has been scanned, reconstructed and returned with missing information.
That connects neatly to Async, the corporation responsible for accidentally creating the Backrooms. Async manufactures MRI machines, which scan the brain and produce images of what lies beneath the surface. The Backrooms seem to do something similar to people and places. They absorb environments, memories and trauma, then produce copies that are twisted, incomplete or emotionally corrupted.
Clark becomes his own punishment
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is one of the film’s strongest pieces of character work. He is a failed architect and struggling furniture store owner whose life is already collapsing before he enters the Backrooms. His alcoholism, self-pity and broken marriage are not caused by the maze. The maze exposes what was already there.
Clark spends only weeks inside the Backrooms but quickly claims to understand it. That arrogance says everything about him. Async scientists have studied the place for years and still barely understand its nature, yet Clark convinces himself he has mastered it. His ego becomes physical through Cap’n Clark, the monstrous pirate version of his furniture store mascot. The creature’s size and grotesque form feel like Clark’s self-image made flesh.
His line “They don’t feel pain. You can eat them” is one of the film’s most revealing moments. It shows how far Clark has gone in erasing the harm he has caused. He cannot recognise pain unless it belongs to him. The Still Life version of his wife immediately trying to flee from Cap’n Clark says more than a long explanation could.
The Still Lifes are among the film’s most disturbing creations. They are not traditional movie monsters. They are human facsimiles, as if the Backrooms is trying to recreate people but only understands the surface. Their blankness is unsettling because they resemble life without fully possessing it.
Clark being consumed by Cap’n Clark (Robert Bobroczkyi) is also one of the film’s sharpest images. It recalls Saturn Devouring His Son, the famous painting by Goya, but the horror here turns inward. Clark is eaten by the version of himself he refused to confront.
Mary finds a way forward
Renate Reinsve’s Mary gives Backrooms its emotional centre. As Clark’s therapist, she spends her life giving guidance to others while carrying unresolved trauma of her own. Her childhood home, her mother and the demolition of that past give the film a personal wound for the Backrooms to feed on.
Mary’s arc is compelling because the film does not reduce her trauma to a simple weakness. In the final stretch, she uses the last tangible piece of her childhood to save herself from Cap’n Clark. That moment shows growth rather than easy healing. Her past remains part of her, but it no longer controls her actions.
The contrast with Clark is clear without being forced. Clark sinks into blame, denial and self-mythology. Mary faces the thing that shaped her and uses it to survive.
No grand explanation
The ending is one of the best choices in the film. Viewers might expect a major explanation from the Async scientist, some clear answer about what the Backrooms are and why they exist. The film refuses that. The scientists do not understand the maze much better than the people who stumble into it.
That lack of certainty is the point. The Backrooms would lose power if every question had an answer. The unknown is part of what makes the place frightening. It is endless, unstable and bigger than human explanation.
There is also a mythic reading to the film. The Backrooms resemble a modern Greek Labyrinth, with Cap’n Clark as a warped Minotaur figure. The film never needs to underline the connection. The structure is already there – a maze, a monster, trapped people and a place that feels older than anyone studying it.
Internet horror grows up
Backrooms arrives during a strong period for YouTube-born filmmakers. Alongside Curry Barker’s Obsession, it shows how online creators are moving into feature filmmaking with real impact. It follows a path also seen with Markiplier’s Iron Lung, RackaRacka’s Talk to Me (2022) and Bring Her Back (2025), and Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks (2025).
It also continues the long movement of internet creepypastas becoming films, after Five Nights at Freddy’s and Slender Man. Creepypastas are essentially internet campfire stories, passed around through forums, videos and online communities until they take on a life of their own.
The difference is Backrooms is leagues beyond those examples. Parsons does not treat the source material as cheap online lore to be stretched into jump scares. He treats it as a serious cinematic space with visual rules, emotional weight and psychological meaning.
That seriousness is welcome because Backrooms has often been weakened by its own online audience. Children on the internet have turned much of modern horror into jokes, memes and reaction clips. Many latch onto monsters and chase scenes while missing the deeper fear of liminal space: The endlessness, the bad copies, the misremembered rooms and the madness of being trapped in a place that should not exist.
Parsons understands the concept better than that. He gives it scale, silence and dread.
As a debut, Backrooms is an incredible achievement. It is beautiful, unsettling and confident enough to leave its mysteries intact. The film proves what can happen when young filmmakers are trusted with strange ideas and allowed to follow them seriously.
For a movie about an endless maze, Backrooms has a clear sense of direction.
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