How A24’s ‘Backrooms’ recreates the internet’s creepiest liminal space

FastCompany: There’s a place that you’ve never actually set foot in, but your subconscious recognizes it. It’s a maze of hallways full of yellowed wallpaper, dingy cream carpet, and fluorescent lights—an amalgamation of all the in-between, liminal spaces that you’ve ever briefly occupied. Just looking at an image of it triggers a sense of déjà vu for some forgotten childhood doctor’s office, playdate, or store. This is the Backrooms, and it’s the playground where A 2 4 ’s new surreal horror film takes place. The Backrooms , which debuts on May 29, was directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons , A24’s youngest-ever director.

Parsons discovered the concept of the Backrooms as a middle schooler by trawling through sub-Reddits, fan forums, and wiki posts. Since then , he’s essentially created a Backrooms canon through a series of videos on his YouTube channel, building his own rich Backrooms lore that’s amassed such a fervent fan base that it’s getting its own mainstream movie spinoff. The adaptation fleshes out a small narrative snippet from the overarching Backrooms story that Parsons has already crafted on YouTube.

It takes place in 1993, following a furniture store owner (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers a portal to the Backrooms in his warehouse’s basement and is ultimately followed into the unknowable space by his psychiatrist (played by Renate Reinsve). In order to transport viewers into this world alongside its characters, Parsons gave his production design team a daunting imperative: turn the internet’s most iconic liminal space into a physical film set. [Photo: Asterios Moutsokapas] A beginners guide to the Backrooms The first known reference to the Backrooms traces back to a 2010s post on 4chan .

It shows a series of empty rooms filled with yellow wallpaper, close ceilings, and fluorescent office lights. One comment on the post, which has come to define the essence of the Backrooms, reads, “If you’re not careful and you no-clip out of reality in the wrong places” (video game slang for glitching from one place to another) “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 miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.” This post took on a life of its own

, spawning user-written stories , its own wiki , graphics , and countless theories . But the concept truly solidified when Parsons, then 16, published his first YouTube video about the the Backrooms in 2022. The video, titled “ The Backrooms (Found Footage) ” has more than 78 million views and is the first in a 16-part series. Over time, the videos reveal that a mysterious corporation called the Async Research Institute is responsible for spawning the Backrooms in an apparent effort to deal with overpopulation and create an infinite storage space, though its exact motivations and operations remain shrouded in mystery.

Each new installment, which Parsons scripts, sound engineers, and designs himself on the visual effects (VFX) platform Blender , has millions of views and a legion of fans ready to dissect every frame (see the multiple hours-long videos on the topic) for information about how the Backrooms came to be. Parsons’s new A24 movie will be one of the biggest new installments of lore yet. It will also be the first time that the Backrooms have been constructed in real life. To capture the space’s unsettling ambience, the production designer Danny Vermette built a giant physical set for the actors to interact with.

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