Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” Reaches Theaters After Escaping the Internet

This week turned “Backrooms” into a theatrical reality. Decider reported that A24’s film, directed by Kane Parsons, opens in U.S. theaters on May 29, 2026. The coverage also notes that Parsons is 20 years old and that the movie grows out of his viral online horror work around the Backrooms mythos.

People and Vanity Fair both spent part of the week digging into Parsons’ rise and the questions surrounding such a young filmmaker handling a studio-backed feature.

That alone makes the release stand out. Internet horror has made plenty of noise over the years, but crossing into a major theatrical rollout is a different animal. Parsons did not just make a short that popped off online. He built a visual language people associated with this strange liminal-space nightmare, and now that language has been expanded into a feature with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass in the cast.

The side drama around authorship also became part of the story this week. People reported that Mark Duplass publicly defended Parsons against online claims suggesting he had not truly directed the film himself. Whether fans buy into the finished movie or not, that detail says a lot about how unusual this release is. A young creator moves from YouTube horror to A24 distribution and immediately gets treated like an industry anomaly people need explained to them.

Now the movie gets judged in the only way that matters. Not as creepypasta. Not as a viral artifact. As a feature that has to hold a theater. That is a very different test, and this week is when “Backrooms” officially walks into it.