A YouTube nightmare at 16, A24’s record-breaker at 20: BACKROOMS arrives on HBO Max

In 2022, a sixteen-year-old in Petaluma, California uploaded a short video to YouTube in which a man stumbles through an endless maze of yellow-carpeted, fluorescent-lit rooms — the geometry wrong in small, unsettling ways, as if a level designer had left the collision data running with nothing attached. It had no budget, no actors, and no narrative resolution. It accumulated 197 million views and changed what horror could look like. Three years later, that same teenager — Kane Parsons — stood at the top of the domestic box office with BACKROOMS, A24’s highest-grossing film in the studio’s history.

What Parsons built in both the YouTube series and the feature operates on a logic borrowed from gaming: the procedurally generated environment, the sense that there is a world-state the audience can never fully map, the particular dread of empty space that functions but shouldn’t. In the film, that premise takes shape through Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture showroom owner who discovers a hidden doorway in his basement leading to a network of interconnected rooms where time distorts and something unseen waits. When Clark goes missing, his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) enters the Backrooms to find him — and the film shifts, cleanly and deliberately, into something closer to a search for the rules of an impossible place.

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Written by Will Soodik and produced by an ensemble of genre architects — James Wan, Shawn Levy, Osgood Perkins, and Peter Chernin among them — the film rests on a cast that takes its procedural nightmare seriously. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark enters the Backrooms as a man who simply opened the wrong door; Renate Reinsve’s Dr. Kline follows him into a place that has no exit she can map. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell complete the ensemble, each navigating the same governing logic: that in this world, getting lost is not a metaphor but a mechanism.

The result — $396.5 million worldwide, A24’s highest domestic and global take in the studio’s history — points to something the film understood about its audience before anyone else did. The Backrooms mythology is native to the generation that grew up inside games, inside YouTube, inside the taxonomies of internet horror. Parsons did not translate that mythology for a theatrical audience. He built the film so that the mythology was the film. Kane Parsons is twenty years old.

BACKROOMS begins streaming in the United States exclusively on HBO Max on September 25. The film makes its HBO linear debut the following day, September 26, at 8:00 p.m. ET.

Tags: hbo max, Baker Mayfield, a24, James Wan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, horror films, Kane Parsons, Renate Reinsve, Backrooms

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