What is Backrooms? A cheat sheet on the YouTube creepypasta turned A24 horror movie

Confused by the trailers? Me too. Here's what's up.

I’ve been a horror fan since I was way too young to have watched my first Elm Street movie, but one corner of the horror world I never really dabbled in was the “creepypasta” online horror space where fans and creators can come up with concepts and expand on lore and scary stories in a big, shared experience. It seems cool, but nothing I ever really followed that closely (though I did enjoy SYFY’s Channel Zero horror anthology that adapted creepypasta stories for TV).

Which is why I was largely confused when I saw the first trailer for Backrooms ahead of a movie on the big screen a couple of months ago. Sure, it looked creepy enough (and I’m always game for something scary from A24), but I quickly got the sense that I was missing a piece of the puzzle with this mysterious teaser.

Turns out, I was missing a whole lot.

So what the heck is Backrooms, and what do you need to know if you’re coming in largely blind (like myself) and just want to watch a cool horror movie? Here are the basics.

What is Backrooms?

It all started back in 2019 with an anonymous post on a message board, as part of a “creepypasta” thread on the 4chan platform. It’s basically the online equivalent of the urban legends the 1990s kids (myself included) grew up with — this is where the creepy stories and rumors are born now, and how they evolve.

The unsettling picture above was posted with this text: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

The “noclip” term is the keyword here, a term usually used in videogames for breaking the game and code in a way where you can fly or travel through walls across the video game map. When doing so, players can sometimes find abandoned and unfinished areas and rooms that aren’t designed to be accessible — often just unfinished, empty back rooms (you getting it now?) used for testing or staging by the developers.

The idea is basically what if those empty, unreachable “backrooms” existed in real life? And what if we could accidentally reach that plane of existence — and what if there were creepy, otherworldly things waiting for us there? … and what if we couldn’t get out?

It was a cool, creepy idea that lit a fire under horror fans, many of whom spent the past several years cooking up and building out a creepy mythology around this idea — and one of those horror fans was teenage YouTuber Kane Parsons.

How the Backrooms movie fits into this

Parsons, now 20, the young director at the helm of the big screen Backrooms movie, is a rock star in the “backrooms” online world, having created a series of wildly successful and super-creepy short films set around the concept (watch one of his most popular shorts from 2022 above).

It all taps into the concept of “liminal space,” something that plays into the otherworldly fear we can all feel when alone in a place that’s mundane but creepy (like an empty office building). The idea has become a whole segment of viral videos and social media, with urban explorers going into creepy, dimly lit and abandoned spaces and posting videos of their experiences.

Parsons’ videos proved to be bona fide YouTube hits with horror fans, and across almost two dozen videos he built out characters and plots of scary stories of folks lost in these real-life backrooms that led his shorts to serve almost as a roadmap and proof of concept for a big screen adaptation. He was still in high school fielding interest from major film studios, which led to the eventual A24 deal for the feature length film.

Though the aim is to create a scary movie where anyone can walk in and follow what’s going on, Parsons told Vanity Fair this all still fits neatly into the story he’s been telling in his YouTube shorts the past few years. It’s the same world, same canon and same story — just another chapter.

“The film is just an episode of the YouTube series. It is 100 percent congruent,” he explained. “I sort of have made a contract with the audience, and I like to do everything I possibly can to hold myself accountable to that…regardless if we’re medium-hopping.”

The film version kicks off with the seemingly simple, endlessly creepy synopsis: “A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”

It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the owner of the aforementioned furniture store, who becomes increasingly obsessed with this mysterious new dimension of the backrooms. When Clark disappears, his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) goes in to search for him.

For a horror fan, that’s an easy enough pitch to get behind (I know I plan to see it!). But knowing the wider background from the online posts and YouTube shorts could almost certainly provide for plenty of easter eggs and world-building you might miss otherwise.

But between Obsession and Backrooms? We’re really in the midst of a delightfully surprising indie horror summer.