Backrooms

Backrooms is an announced feature film based on the online horror project created by Kane Parsons. In February 2023, trade reporting said A24 had won a competitive bidding process for the adaptation. Parsons, who created the original material under the name Kane Pixels, was attached to direct. Roberto Patino was named as screenwriter, while James Wan and Michael Clear were identified as producers through Atomic Monster. Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine were also reported as producers through 21 Laps. The announcement did not provide a release date, cast, or finished story synopsis. Accordingly, claims about a completed release would go beyond the public information available at that time. The source material began with Parsons’s YouTube short “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” uploaded in January 2022. That short presents a person apparently falling into a stark, maze-like interior of yellowed rooms and corridors. Its imagery uses the internet’s established “Backrooms” idea: a supposedly endless network of empty, liminal commercial-looking spaces. Parsons’s version, however, added a specific faux-documentary framework involving recorded footage, a lurking creature, and a fictional research organization called Async. The short became a viral hit and led Parsons to expand the concept in further YouTube installments. Parsons continued the series with additional short films released on the same channel. The film is therefore associated with a creator whose work had already established a recognizable visual language before the A24 deal: analog-video distortion, institutional training materials, unsettling empty architecture, and incomplete evidence about Async’s experiments. Parsons was still a teenager when the project was announced. Born in 2005, he had gained substantial attention for the 2022 short while posting effects-heavy videos online. Reporting on the deal characterized the planned feature as his directorial feature debut. That detail distinguishes Backrooms from a conventional adaptation commissioned after a long film career. The online Backrooms phenomenon itself predates Parsons’s film deal and does not belong exclusively to one author. It spread after a 2019 post on 4chan paired an image of fluorescent-lit carpeting and yellow walls with text about “noclipping” out of reality. Parsons drew on that shared premise but developed original characters and lore for his videos. The A24 project was announced as a feature adaptation of Parsons’s version, not as a documentary about the meme. Publicly reported credits at announcement place Patino on screenplay and Parsons in the director’s chair. Beyond that, officially confirmed details were limited; no verified plot.