Name: Backrooms
Director: Kane Parsons
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction
Released: 2026-05-29
Duration: 110 min
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell

The Backrooms began as an image, not a story. One photograph of an empty office floor, fluorescent tubes buzzing over damp yellow carpet, rooms running past the edge of the frame and apparently never stopping. No people. No door marked exit. The internet looked at that picture and decided it was a place you could fall into, somewhere just behind the walls of ordinary life. Kane Parsons builds his first feature on the idea that the place was always real, and that the way in has been sitting in the basement of a furniture showroom the entire time.

The setup is almost mundane, which is the point. Clark, a furniture salesman whose store is dying, finds a doorway that should not exist and steps through it. He does not come back. Mary, the therapist who had been treating him, refuses to accept that a person can simply be subtracted from the world, and follows him in. What waits for her is the Backrooms exactly as the internet pictured it: a maze of identical corridors, an architecture with no function and no end, and the slow certainty that something inside has already heard her coming.

Casting is where the film states its intentions. Renate Reinsve, who made ordinary indecision unforgettable in The Worst Person in the World, plays Mary as a professional trying to apply clinical calm to a situation with no precedent in any textbook. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives Clark the tired dignity of a man whose real crisis began long before the supernatural one. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell occupy the rooms around them. None of these are horror-franchise hires. They are drama actors, and bringing them in signals that the film wants to be believed before it tries to frighten anyone.

That ambition is remarkable given where Parsons started. He built the Backrooms as a found-footage series on YouTube while he was still a teenager, posting as Kane Pixels, and watched it gather tens of millions of views and an entire ecosystem of imitators. This is his feature debut, made with A24, and it sits in a category that barely existed before now: the creator adapting his own viral myth into a studio film while the platform that launched him still streams the originals for free. Hollywood has spent years strip-mining internet horror for intellectual property. It has rarely handed the budget back to the person who invented the thing.

The stakes run in both directions. For A24, the film is a test of whether the studio’s prestige-horror instincts translate to a property whose entire fan base already knows it at no charge, and whether that built-in audience will show up to a theater for something they have always watched alone on a phone. For internet-native storytelling, it is a referendum on whether a form built on anonymity, brevity and dread can scale to feature length without shedding the texture that made it spread. A hit reframes the creepypasta as legitimate source material. A miss confirms the suspicion that some of these myths only work at the length of a clip.

The danger is written into the source. The Backrooms worked precisely because it explained nothing. Its horror was duration and absence: empty footage, dead air, the suggestion that the most frightening thing about an infinite space is that nothing ever arrives in it. A feature cannot hold that line for its full running time. It needs a protagonist with an objective, a threat with some kind of logic, a rescue with stakes attached, and every one of those additions is a quiet admission that emptiness alone could not carry a movie. Whether Parsons keeps the dread once he begins answering questions is the one thing neither the trailer nor the premise can promise.

The real test is whether emptiness survives a plot

Everything that makes the Backrooms legible as a film works against what made it terrifying as a feed. The online version had no protagonist because it wanted you to feel that no one was coming for you. The movie gives you Reinsve to follow, which is both a mercy and a compromise. The corridors, at least, look correct. The trailer confirms the sickly yellow, the carpet, the lights that hum and never quite cut out. The open question is whether Parsons trusts an audience to sit inside that space the way his subscribers once did, or whether a studio feature obliges him to keep the story moving briskly through rooms that were designed to make people stop.

A small internet legend with a serious cast

The credited principals are Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, with Parsons directing from his own story. On paper it is a contained horror-mystery with a science-fiction frame, the kind of disciplined genre picture A24 has built its name on. What makes it worth attention is not the size of the budget but the nature of the experiment: a piece of pure internet folklore, handed back to the person who created it, and asked to behave like a feature film.

Backrooms runs 110 minutes and opens in United States theaters on 29 May 2026, with international dates following through the early summer. Parsons has already proved he can make millions of people stare into an empty room and feel watched. The feature poses the harder question and answers it in public: whether they will keep staring once the room finally has somewhere it needs to take them.