The Backrooms: A Mysterious Internet Phenomenon
Welcome to Explain the Internet, where we break down the noise on the World Wide Web with the help of experts. One image has managed to capture the imagination of internet users for years — a boxy picture of an empty, sickly yellow room. This image has become the center of a phenomenon known as the Backrooms, inspiring a vast amount of user-generated content that includes video games, television episodes, and written fiction.
The Backrooms have become a cultural touchstone, with their unique blend of fear and curiosity. Now, this mysterious world is set to make its way to the big screen with A24’s Backrooms, a film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons.
Parsons describes the images as feeling like they are taken from one’s subconscious or dreams. He notes that there is a sense of one’s inner life being reprocessed and shown in an unsettling way.
What Are the Backrooms?
The original Backrooms image first appeared on 4chan in 2019, within a paranormal thread. It was posted by an anonymous user who described the Backrooms as a place filled with the stink of old, moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and endless background noise of fluorescent lights. The term “noclip,” a video game cheat that allows players to fall through walls, implies that the Backrooms are always accessible.
Stories about the Backrooms began to spread across online forums, particularly r/creepypasta, where characters like Slender Man have flourished. Days later, r/backrooms popped up to collate the massive amount of content. The subreddit currently has more than 100,000 weekly visitors. Each version of the Backrooms had aspects unique to its author — from monsters, to protagonists, to different map layouts.
Dr Adam Daniel, filmmaker and lecturer at Western Sydney University, says it’s the community push that gives the Backrooms staying power over other urban legends. He explains that the Backrooms function almost like a creative prompt that different people can interpret and expand in genuinely divergent directions.
The Influence of the Backrooms
The Backrooms didn’t stop at the written word. Video games started popping up, American Horror Stories did a whole anthology episode on the concept, and Severance creator Dan Erickson has cited the Backrooms as one of the inspirations for Lumon’s snaking hallways.
The Backrooms also saw liminal-space horror — a genre which leans into our fear of the weird, and the power of the unseen — soar in popularity on platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Daniel notes that found-footage horror is an immense influence, particularly the analogue aesthetic of 90s projects like The Blair Witch Project. But what really distinguishes liminal-space horror is its emphasis on the uncanny and the eerie over more explicit scares.
Who Is Kane Parsons?
Among the thousands of creators lending their voices to the lore, then-16-year-old Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels) catapulted through the community with his 2022 YouTube short film, The Backrooms (Found Footage).
Parsons was drawn in by the blank canvas the Backrooms presented. He released 24 more videos in The Backrooms series, expanding on his original lore by folding in the Async Research Institute, a fictional, shadowy organisation that discovers the Backrooms.
As of 2026, Parsons’s Backrooms series has clocked up more than 220 million views on YouTube alone.
What Is the Movie Backrooms About?
In 2023, before Parsons had even finished his YouTube series, Oscar-winning indie production house A24 entered a deal with the then-17-year-old to turn his vision into a full-length feature film.
The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a down-and-out business owner sleeping in his dusty store after splitting with his wife. Clark stumbles into the Backrooms in the shop’s basement, beguiled by its random piles of furniture and never-ending halls.
Soon, Clark and his two employees go missing, prompting Clark’s therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), to venture into the Backrooms on a rescue mission.
Parsons’s movie scares with the threat of the unknowable rather than with a physical monster that can be defeated. He notes that it’s the restraint that makes liminal space horror even more impactful.
The Origins of the Backrooms
As the popularity of the Backrooms fiction grew, so did internet sleuths’ desire to uncover the origins of that first image. A 2019 tweet identified the original file for the image, but the link was broken and largely overlooked until 2024, when a Backrooms Discord community traced it back to an archived webpage from 2003. The webpage details the renovations of a Wisconsin furniture store undergoing renovations to become a hobby shop.
Every other image on the archived webpage is missing, except for the Backrooms image and another photo of the same room from a different angle. While some in the community saw the discovery as the end of the Backrooms, Parsons isn’t so convinced.
Backrooms is in cinemas now.
