Inside the Backrooms Trailer: What A24 Gets Right About the Viral Horror

By Elliot Nash - News

Updated: 2 April, 2026

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Readtime: 4 min

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• A24’s Backrooms blends raw found footage with more traditional camera work
• The trailer leans on unease and repetition, not traditional jump scares
• Based on Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube series that built a cult following
• Pulls from creepypasta origins and the eerie logic of liminal spaces
• Subtle hints point to government access, experiments and controlled environments

You do not want to get lost in here. Empty rooms, low ceilings, a constant fluorescent hum that never quite switches off. Every hallway looks the same. Every turn feels like the wrong one. This is the Backrooms. A place that feels familiar at first, until you realise none of it leads anywhere.

And if you’re expecting A24 to help you understand what you’re looking at, think again. Much like everyone in the film, you’re just trying to work out what’s going on and how to get the hell out.

The trailer opens mid-movement, like you’ve already been here too long. The camera drifts through these spaces without direction, catching glimpses of rooms that feel identical, but not quite.

There’s no clear sense of where you are, or how big this place actually is. Just fragments. A doorway that leads into more of the same. A corridor that stretches a little too far. The kind of space that looks normal until you spend more than a few seconds in it.

And that’s where it starts to get under your skin. Nothing jumps out at you. Nothing announces itself. The tension comes from the absence of anything familiar to hold onto.

You’ve probably felt this before without knowing what to call it. An empty shopping centre just before closing. Office floors after hours. Hotel hallways where every door looks the same. Spaces built for movement, suddenly still.

It’s the same kind of unease Escher tapped into. Everything looks structurally sound, but the moment you try to follow it, something doesn’t line up. The Backrooms takes that feeling and stretches it out. No exits. No clear direction. Just space that keeps repeating until you completely lose track of where you’ve been and where you’re going.

The film is based on Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube series. He was still a teenager when he turned the Backrooms into one of the internet’s strangest horror ideas with nothing more than a camera and some rough CGI. It all started with a single image of a Midwest hobby store posted online before renovations. Yellow walls, stained carpet, harsh overhead lighting. Paired with a short caption about “noclipping” out of reality and ending up somewhere you shouldn’t be.

Now, at just 20, Parsons is turning into his feature film directorial debut.

The keen-eyed among you will no doubt spot that same backroom image from the original 4chan post at 1:45 in the trailer. From there, it spread to forums, Reddit threads and YouTube series. People began adding to it. New “levels”, new rules, and new things that might be lurking in the distance. No single version, just a shared idea that kept expanding.

And now it’s a movie produced by the undisputed kings of independent cinema, A24.

It sits in that same corner of the internet as creepypasta. Stories that feel unfinished on purpose. Just enough detail to pull you in, not enough to make you comfortable.

Instead of explaining the world, the trailer drops you into it and leaves you there. Which is exactly how most people came across the Backrooms anyway. You didn’t get a guide. You just found it.

There are hints that this goes further than just empty space. Small glimpses of equipment, controlled environments, and the suggestion that someone has figured out how to access it.

From what’s shown here, A24 is an extension of Parsons’ source material. The trailer holds things back. It gives you just enough to feel the space, but not enough to feel safe in it.

Because the Backrooms was never really about what’s in there. It’s about the feeling that you’re not meant to be there at all. And if the film can hold onto that, it might actually work.

Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons, with a cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell. It lands in theatres on 29 May.