After an insidiously vague marketing campaign whose hero shot featured the acid-yellow wallpaper in a mysterious office complex, “Backrooms” finally got its first full official look on Tuesday.
A24 has released the trailer for YouTube-creator-turned-first-time-feature-director Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms,” which stars Oscar nominees Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The movie arrives on the heels of Reinsve’s Best Actress Oscar nomination for “Sentimental Value”; it’s also her second pairing with A24 after starring in 2024’s “A Different Man.”
Based on the creepy trailer below, Ejiofor’s character comes upon a strange doorway in the basement of a furniture showroom — leading into an endless carpeted warren of seemingly expanding rooms and spaces that will eventually engulf him.
The concept for the film began as a 4chan creepypasta called “The Backrooms” back in the late 2010s, basically an ever-expansive fictional horror universe that fans could contribute to and that borrowed video game vernacular such as the concept of “noclipping” — like a video game cheat code used to pass quickly through walls and other solid objects. Parsons then started releasing “found footage,” realistic-looking short YouTube films set in the so-called Backrooms; these inspired several PC games that expanded on the lore of the online series.
Reinsve co-stars as Ejiofor’s therapist, who, it looks like, must go into the Backrooms herself, where she’s likely to encounter endless hallways and possibly nefarious entities. This first footage from “Backrooms” certainly brings to mind Mark Z. Danielewski’s unfilmable experimental novel “House of Leaves,” itself a novel about a fictional found footage movie about a house filled with endless and multiplying passages that a group of people set upon exploring. Published in 2000, “House of Leaves” is basically the original liminal horror story — about the transitional, isolated spaces adjacent to our own — even if Danielewski has said he will never allow his book to be adapted.
Anyway, back to “Backrooms”: The cast here also includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. Will Soodik, a writer on “Westworld,” was brought in to pen the script based on Parsons’ ideas. (The filmmaker is only 20 years old. And what have you been doing with your life?)
“Backrooms” is the latest in the YouTube-to-the-big-screen pipeline; online creator Markiplier saw sizable success earlier this year with the self-release of “Iron Lung.”
The impressive lineup of producers on “Backrooms” includes James Wan, Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Osgood Perkins, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, and Kori Adelson.
“Backrooms” opens in theaters on Friday, May 29. Watch the trailer below.