Backrooms is one of the most extraordinary things you’ll watch this year

Director Kane Parsons was just 16 when he posted The Backrooms on YouTube. 

A nine-minute found-footage horror of a man being chased through a seemingly infinite maze of empty yellow rooms, it instantly went viral as the scariest thing on the internet, racking up 78 million views, a YouTube series and a deal with hipster film studio A24 for a feature spin-off.

Given that he made the original on his laptop, this was a serious upgrade. Parsons (born the same year as YouTube) apparently didn’t set out to make a major feature at all. But he’s got one, with two Oscar-nominated heavyweights: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve heading the cast.

So, what sucked them in? Presumably the same thing that sucked in 78 million viewers: the freakily distinctive, head-messing vibe.

Ejiofor is Clark, a failed architect who manages a discount furniture warehouse somewhere in the USA. He’s also sleeping there, following a failed marriage. One night he investigates a glowing light in the basement and finds he can pass through a wall into a never-ending warren of brightly lit yellow rooms.

Clark becomes obsessed with exploring and mapping this eerie subterranean realm. His therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Reinsve), assumes he’s delusional until Clark fails to show for his appointment and she goes to investigate.

There’s not much plot, which may frustrate some. But the plot’s not the thing. There’s a unique quality to Backrooms. Parsons has always conscientiously noted that the concept isn’t originally his; it began as a 2019 photo on 4Chan that inspired a creepypasta thread (that’s internet-generated horror content, not a spooky bowl of spaghetti).

Parsons picked it up and ran with it. There’s a brilliant, unsettling use of sound, particularly the hum of fluorescent strip lights, that feels very David Lynch, even though Parsons says he’s never watched Lynch.

There are echoes, too, of Charlie Kaufman, Chekhov and less surprisingly, Stranger Things’ Upside Down and recent videogame horror Exit 8. Yet despite being mentored by James Wan and Osgood Perkins, Parsons has a precocious technically assured talent that’s entirely his own.

The atmosphere is extraordinary. Over 30,000 square feet of Backrooms were built for the shoot, reportedly leading to people getting lost on set. Moving through them, the characters encounter half-sunken office furniture, heaps of old clothes, a dead seagull and Alice in Wonderland-tiny doorways, as real terror closes in.

So, what are these rooms? What do they represent? Parsons didn’t write the script, but his therapist mother would surely approve of it. ‘We all have our loops, our habits, that keep us stuck,’ Dr Mary tells her clients. Her aim: to free them from the traumas of the past so they are no longer destined to repeat it. Are the Backrooms neural pathways? Trapped trauma? The fact that nothing is spelt out is precisely what makes Backrooms so intriguing and transfixing.

There are solid jump scares early on, replicating the found-footage style of the YouTube original, plus several moments of agonising be-quiet-or-the-thing-will-get-you tension. But this isn’t traditional horror. It feels like something new.

As the credits rolled, the influencer-packed preview audience I watched it with were left more bemused than whooping. It was as if we’d all experienced something strange and inexplicable. 

Part of us is still wandering the Backrooms. 

Backrooms is out in UK cinemas from May 29.

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