It is official: Backrooms, in just one weekend at the box office, has earned 8 times its cost, achieved the biggest success in A24’s history, and changed everything for its director, Kane Parsons, who at just 20 years old has secured a spectacular future. However, it was a foreseen success: after all, he has been adding lore on his YouTube channel since January 7, 2022 and terrifying the audience with his version of the backrooms. But… what are they, how did they become a term known worldwide, and why have they dominated the box office? We’ll tell you.
Do not enter through the main door
Year 2019. Someone uploads to 4Chan, the famous anonymous Internet forum where some of the greatest atrocities in history have occurred, movies have been spoiled, and governments have been decided, the image of an interior place, carpeted, with several interconnected rooms illuminated only by artificial light. The text accompanying the image is “Post unsettling images that feel strange”. Another user, shortly after, named the phenomenon: “If you’re not careful and you step out of reality in the wrong places, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where there is nothing but the smell of old damp carpet, the madness of the yellow color, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum, and approximately six hundred million square kilometers of randomly arranged empty rooms to trap you”.
Immediately, 4Chan users adopted the term “Backrooms” and began posting both real images and digitally created ones, as well as creating stories about people who have fallen into these places. But of course, there was no real timeline or canonical story, so everyone followed the lore they wanted to follow. Little by little, they started uploading more and more videos, creepypastas, and images in a collaborative effort that we can hardly see anymore on the current Internet. And in this maelstrom, Kane Parsons appeared.
In the end, the Backrooms were evolutions of things we had already seen in horror, liminal places between reality and fiction, which we recognize and do not at the same time. Particularly, that first image that started it all was of a furniture store being renovated in Wisconsin back in 2002. A perfect moment for Parsons, at just 16 years old, to upload a video created with After Effects and Blender to YouTube titled The Backrooms (Found Footage), about a man being chased by a monster in this place, filmed with a VHS camera in the 90s. It was a success with tens of millions of views and excellent reviews, indicating that it was better than what Hollywood was doing at that time. Life was never the same for the teenager.
24 short films later, where the story expanded and grew to unforeseen limits even with breaks in between (for example, between 2023 and 2025 he could only make four shorts), A24 saw the potential and decided to finance a low-budget film directed, of course, by the young man, to ensure that he respects the lore, his ideas, and his own tone. The result has been global applause and the discovery of the “backrooms” for an audience unfamiliar with the Internet… in addition to the birth of a new franchise. The meme has officially died on the Internet, but it has found a new place to sneak in, because in this world we live in, nothing lives and nothing dies: it simply learns to transform.