The Backrooms, Explained

This week, A24 released the first official teaser for Backrooms, the highly anticipated debut feature from Kane Parsons. Based on Parsons’ eerie viral found-footage YouTube series “The Backrooms” and written by Will Soodik (Ash vs Evil Dead, Westworld), the film has been steadily building hype across paranormal forums, the film community, and social media over the past few years. And if the trailer is an indication of what’s to come, it seems like the wait will be worth it. 

But for those of you who have a healthy relationship with the internet, you probably watched the trailer and thought, “Cool. So what exactly are the Backrooms?” Allow me to provide a brief explainer.

On May 12, 2019, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread on one of the site’s paranormal-themed forums, asking users to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’.” One of the replies was a photo taken on an accidental Dutch angle of what looked like a sickly green-yellow office space, the walls covered in a mid-century chevron wallpaper. The following day, another anonymous user replied to the post, officially giving it the name, the Backrooms: 

“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.” 

Like Slenderman in 2009, internet users began to expand on the original post on other platforms, most notably Reddit, giving the Backrooms creatures and additional “levels” (floors). In a since-deleted post in a thread on r/backrooms from 2019, one user explained that there are: 

“6 million square miles of hallways on level one, filled with creatures (more the farther you go out). Stay too long, and you will make your way to the higher levels. You can always find the hub to go back to level 1 or 2. No need for food or water, but you can find almond water to help with sanity. Fake windows to drag you into insanity if you get too close, and stairs down going to the negative levels. Highest level is 6 I think (or it’s 8).” 

Three years later, a then-16-year-old Parsons uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube. The video follows an amateur filmmaker being stalked by a strange creature as he wanders through a liminal “never-ending hell” of empty yellow hallways and dark corridors. In just 48 hours, the nine-minute short film went from one million to seven million views, offering fans and curious internet users a chance to actually feel what it’s like to be noclipped into this terrifying labyrinth. As of this year, the video has 71 million views and 2.1 million likes. 

You can watch the short below:

In 2023, A24 announced that they would be working with Parsons on a feature-length film version of “The Backrooms.” 

But wait a second–what was that image anyway? Was it something someone on 4chan created themselves? Was it found tucked in the back of an album donated to a local Goodwill?

In 2024, X (formerly Twitter) user @tjxz_z shared that their friend figured out the answer: the image was of a Wisconsin HobbyTown under renovation in 2002. It was uploaded to the company’s webpage the following year (if you want to experience the joy that was the old internet, you can find it archived here).