Backrooms

Backrooms is an announced feature film from A24, adapted from Kane Parsons’s online horror series The Backrooms. Parsons, credited online as Kane Pixels, is set to direct. The feature was reported in February 2023, after the filmmaker’s short-form project had attracted a large YouTube audience.

Parsons launched the series on January 7, 2022, with “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” In that video, a young cameraman falls through the floor and enters an apparently endless complex of yellow, fluorescently lit, office-like corridors. The short deliberately uses VHS-like image degradation, handheld movement, and sparse sound. Its setting draws on the “Backrooms” internet mythos, a collaborative creepypasta premise about accidentally “noclipping” out of ordinary reality into vacant maze-like spaces.

Rather than merely licensing the name, A24’s announced adaptation brings its original visual creator into the director’s chair. Roberto Patino was named as screenwriter in the initial trade reporting. Patino’s previous television writing credits include Westworld and Sons of Anarchy. The film was also announced with producers from Atomic Monster, 21 Laps Entertainment, and Chernin Entertainment.

In 2025, trade reports identified Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as members of the film’s cast. Ejiofor received an Academy Award nomination for 12 Years a Slave, while Reinsve won Cannes’s Best Actress prize for The Worst Person in the World. Those announcements did not publicly disclose their characters or a detailed feature-film storyline.

Consequently, any assertion that the movie follows a particular hero, contains a specified monster, or reproduces a particular YouTube episode would go beyond announced facts. The publicly described elements are the A24 adaptation, Parsons’s direction, and Patino’s screenplay. No detailed official synopsis was included in the original development announcement.

Parsons created the source episodes with Blender, a 3D computer-graphics program, and blended rendered architecture with found-footage framing. Later episodes introduce Async, a fictional research organization that investigates the Backrooms and tests an entry system called the Threshold.

Announced producing personnel included James Wan and Michael Clear for Atomic Monster; Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine for 21 Laps; and Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for Chernin Entertainment. At the time of those reports, no release date, rating, running time, or trailer had been announced. The project therefore remains identifiable by its named creative team and its documented connection to Parsons’s viral series, not by an officially revealed narrative. Its eventual film form has not yet been publicly detailed beyond those development and casting announcements in full.