A24's Backrooms Opens May 29 --the Kid Who Made It Is Only 20 Years Old

If you've been online at any point in the last four years, you know the Backrooms. Yellow wallpaper. Fluorescent hum. Moist carpet. The feeling that reality has quietly glitched out from under you and you are now very, very alone in a place that has no exits. It started as a single image posted to 4chan in 2019 and became one of the most widespread pieces of internet horror mythology ever created.

Then a teenager named Kane Parsons started making YouTube videos about it, and the internet lost its collective mind.

Parsons has racked up more than 190 million views on his YouTube horror series. He will be A24's youngest feature director at just 20 years old when Backrooms hits theaters on May 29. Let that number marinate. 190 million views. Built from a bedroom. Now he has Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in his cast, and A24, James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins all backing the thing.

The film follows furniture store owner Clark, played by Ejiofor, who discovers a seemingly endless liminal dimension in the basement of his shop and begins exploring it, which prompts his therapist, played by Reinsve, to go in after him. To create the physical world of the film, over 30,000 square feet of actual Backrooms were built on set, and people reportedly got genuinely lost in them during production. Cast and crew were getting actually disoriented in a space designed to feel like infinite nothing. Method filmmaking achieved purely through architecture.

Parsons was deliberate about staying true to what made the original videos so unsettling. He stayed away from the idea that the Backrooms is some dreamy headspace where rooms constantly shift and change. The whole point is that it preys on the human brain's ability to map spaces and understand them, and then denies that ability completely. You go back the way you came and it just keeps going and going and going forever.

The industry is different now. The gatekeepers have left the building, or maybe they just got lost in it.

Backrooms opens May 29. Don't noclip into anything on the way to the theater.