Parsons takes the raw material of online creepypasta and builds something rarer than scares alone, a film where every yellowed wall and fluorescent hum feels like a mirror held up to a mind that cannot find its own exit.
Backrooms Review: Kane Parsons Turns Internet Nightmare Fuel Into Genuine Cinema
In 2019, an anonymous 4chan user posted an image of a yellow-walled, fluorescent-lit space with damp carpet and a caption warning about “noclipping out of reality” into the Backrooms. That single JPEG became one of the defining creepypasta myths of the decade, spawning forums, wikis, video games, and a sprawling collaborative fiction that imagined an infinite labyrinth of moist, buzzing nothingness stretching just behind the world we know.
Kane Parsons was fourteen when that image appeared. By sixteen, he was making short horror films set in its universe, uploading them to YouTube where they accumulated over one hundred million views. His found-footage approach to the Backrooms mythos struck a nerve, blending the uncanny stillness of liminal space photography with a slow-burn narrative tension that felt patient beyond his years.
Now, at nineteen, Parsons has transformed those shorts into a feature film, and this Backrooms film review examines what happens when internet-born nightmare fuel gets a theatrical budget, a pair of formidable leads, and a director young enough to have grown up inside the very dread he is now shaping.
The shorts drew heavily on analog horror’s visual grammar: VHS degradation, glitch, the queasy sense that the footage had been recovered from some forgotten hard drive. Translating that lo-fi menace into a feature without losing its handmade grip is the test every internet-born project faces. Early responses from the festival circuit, where the film has been generating word-of-mouth since its debut, suggest Parsons has managed something audiences were not necessarily expecting.
The casting alone signals ambition. Chiwetel Ejiofor, an actor capable of carrying everything from Dirty Pretty Things to 12 Years a Slave, plays Clark, a furniture store manager in 1990 who wanted to be an architect and instead finds himself walking the same mistakes in endless repetition. He sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Krane, played by Renate Reinsve, whose breakout in The Worst Person in the World demonstrated a gift for making interior collapse feel luminous.
Two performers defined by understatement and emotional transparency, dropped into a film where nothing behaves as it should. It is a decision that suggests Parsons understands something crucial about liminal space horror: the uncanny only lands if the human ground beneath it feels unshakably real.
The film arrives at a moment when liminal space horror is having a quiet but insistent cultural surge. Skinamarink’s polarising theatrical run in 2022 proved that a micro-budget experiment shot in a childhood home could divide audiences as fiercely as any blockbuster, while Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 demonstrated that the same architectural unease could translate into interactive walking-simulator dread. Analog horror channels on YouTube continue to accumulate millions of subscribers, and the creepypasta-to-screen pipeline is evolving from curiosity into a legitimate talent incubator.
Parsons’ Backrooms enters this landscape not just as an adaptation but as a film that uses the infinite yellow rooms to explore psychological loops, the failure of therapy, and the circuits we trace without ever reaching an exit.
Hope Madden’s review picks up here, stepping into the yellow light to assess whether the film earns its psychological weight, how Ejiofor and Reinsve hold the centre when reality keeps sliding, and why a nineteen-year-old filmmaker’s debut might just shift the conversation around creepypasta adaptations. She brings an unflinching eye to the film and is not about to start handing out easy verdicts. She will not tell you what to think. What she offers instead is a clear-eyed, room-by-room account of what she found.
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
There is reason to compare Backrooms, feature debut from 19-year-old co-writer/director Kane Parsons, to Skinamarink, the 2022 feature debut from writer/director Kyle Edward Ball. If you are one of the many who found Ball’s nightmare an effective, even terrifying head trip, Backrooms might be for you.
If you didn’t, that’s OK too. Backrooms shares the true experiential nature—you may feel as though the director has somehow filmed your actual nightmares. But a lot more happens in this one.
Backrooms is liminal space horror, not entirely unlike Genki Kawamura’s effective video game adaptation, Exit 8. But for all these comparisons, Parsons crafts an unnervingly unique excursion into the uncanny.
Captain of that voyage is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He manages a furniture store where he dresses like a pirate for low-fi ads. It’s 1990. Clark wanted to be an architect. He just keeps making the same mistakes, like a circuit he follows forever expecting a different destination. That’s why he sees Dr. Mary Krane (Renate Reinsve).
Let’s pause, because that’s reason enough to see the movie. Here are two actors who’ve built careers on understated, natural performances that ground every moment onscreen in something honest. Which makes them a magnificent choice for a film where nothing makes sense, and that’s the whole point.
Kane adapts a series of shorts that made him a YouTube force, all of it based on online Twenty-teens creepypasta dread of being trapped eternally in an endless, yellow, moistly carpeted maze of empty rooms with no hope of escape.
The fact that Clark turned this concept into a compelling feature essentially about our own labyrinthine minds and psychiatry’s impotence is pretty impressive for a fucking teenager!
Both leads give the film earnest vulnerability and obvious intelligence, which sells the madness. Their few scenes together are wonderful, but that’s not simply because of their talent. The script is engrossing, forever mirroring what’s been seen and said in a way that could feel heavy handed were it not for Kane’s sure direction.
It’s easy to make a trippy movie that doesn’t make sense because you don’t really have to make sense. A lot of bad horror leaves you guessing because of sloppy scripting. Backrooms never feels sloppy. Every tee shirt, piece of furniture, neighborhood street feels intentional, tells its own story. Everything loops, remembers but doesn’t, until you can’t shake the dread that nothing is right.
Backrooms, because it’s so singular in its vision, won’t sit with everyone. But for those of us who have nightmares of being trapped in room after windowless room of fluorescent buzz and mildew smell, this is our Skinamarink. I mean that in the best way possible.
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