‘Backrooms’ Turns Internet Horror Into a Claustrophobic Nightmare

Directed by: Kane Parsons
Screenplay by: Will Soodik
Produced by: James Wan, Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Osgood Perkins, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson
Executive Producers: Kane Parsons, Chernin Entertainment, Atomic Monster, 21 Laps Entertainment
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia
Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes
Rating: R
Release Date: May 29, 2026

Fear Lives in the Unknown

What has always unsettled me most about haunted house stories is not necessarily the ghosts or monsters; it’s the fear of not knowing where you are, how to escape, or what might be waiting around the next corner. Backrooms understands that fear intimately.

Directed by Kane Parsons and based on his viral YouTube horror series, the film expands the internet creepypasta mythology into something surprisingly tense and emotionally disorienting. 

The concept itself is simple but deeply unnerving: endless hallways, strange rooms, and hidden doorways that seem to stretch infinitely in every direction. Some spaces appear abandoned, while others feel almost alive, as if reality itself has started malfunctioning.

A Man Already Falling Apart

The story follows Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a struggling furniture store owner whose financial and emotional stability is already beginning to crack under pressure. After discovering a mysterious hidden door, Clark finds himself entering a labyrinth of bizarre rooms filled with misplaced objects, warped architecture, and spaces that feel physically wrong. Chairs are fused into ceilings. Walls seem unfinished. Entire rooms feel suspended outside reality.

What makes the film effective is how long it keeps the audience questioning whether Clark is experiencing a psychological breakdown or encountering something genuinely supernatural. 

Clark’s sessions with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), add another layer of uncertainty to the story. The deeper Clark ventures into these spaces, the more unstable both his surroundings and mental state become.

Chiwetel Ejiofor carries much of the film’s dramatic pull, even when parts of the storyline feel a little uneven. His performance keeps the film’s increasingly surreal horror connected to something honest and recognizable. 

You can feel Clark’s exhaustion, depression, and desperation throughout the film, so when the supernatural elements finally emerge, they seem less terrifying than the life he’s already trapped in. That’s what makes his fixation on the rooms so believable — they don’t just represent discovery, but a way out from everything closing in on him. Still, if most people discovered a mysterious, endless hallway hidden behind a wall, they would probably call the leasing office and move immediately.

Kane Parsons Understands Perspective

Visually, Parsons brings the same experimental energy that made the original YouTube videos so effective. The film shifts between a cinéma vérité-inspired POV style and more traditional cinematic framing, creating a constant sense of instability. At times, the shaky handheld footage evokes films like The Blair Witch Project, while other sequences feel more polished and immersive in the style of a major studio horror film.

One of the smartest creative decisions is the film’s commitment to its 1990s setting. Through grainy commercials, VHS-quality recordings, and analog cameras, Backrooms creates a believable pre-smartphone world where characters cannot instantly document every strange occurrence online. That absence of technology makes the isolation feel even more suffocating. There is one sequence involving a handheld camera capturing characters trying to escape through the corridors that is genuinely terrifying.

The Sound and Set Design Create the Horror

The sound design and score do much of the heavy lifting as well. Horror often depends on anticipation, and Backrooms understands how silence, ambient noise, and sudden musical shifts can manipulate tension. Even before something appears on screen, the music prepares the audience for dread. The film constantly creates the feeling that something is moving just outside the frame.

The set design may be the film’s greatest accomplishment. Beyond the now-iconic yellow rooms featured in the trailers, every space feels deliberately designed to unsettle the audience. The environments resemble offices, storage units, or abandoned apartments just enough to feel recognizable, but they’re distorted in ways that make them feel deeply wrong. Parsons understands that the most unsettling places are often the ones that almost feel real.

Somehow, Backrooms Gets Creepier After It Ends

For horror fans, Backrooms delivers the jump scares and creeping tension expected in the genre, but it also succeeds thanks to its atmosphere and perspective. Fans of the original YouTube series, analog horror, and experimental cinematography will likely appreciate what Parsons is attempting here. Other viewers may occasionally feel as lost as the characters themselves, wandering through a story that prioritizes mood and psychological unease over straightforward explanations.

Still, there is something undeniably effective about a horror film that creeps into your mind afterward. Backrooms may leave some audiences disoriented, but that lingering discomfort is also what makes it memorable and terrifying. I walked away still thinking about those endless hallways, which is why the film lands at a 7.5/10 for me. When a horror movie follows you home and lingers in your mind afterward, it usually means it accomplished exactly what it set out to do.