There’s no doubt that, as of late, the YouTube/content creator space has had an insane impact on how many view the success of films in the industry, especially within the horror genre. Iron Lung (2026), Shelby Oaks (2024), and Obsession (2025) are all films by directors from various backgrounds in the YouTube or sketch-comedy world, bringing their varied experiences to a new plane of creativity. This arguably makes Kane Parsons’ Backrooms the most fascinating case study of this new wave of creators yet.
The film is based on the web series Parsons created of the same name, meant to evoke a feeling of being in a place that’s both familiar and alien to you, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, from the backrooms’ original “creepypasta” origins. Parsons nails this eerie nature through backrooms, crafting a uniquely uncanny atmosphere of endless miscellaneous rooms, furniture, and space, fully revealing the uncertainty of its lingering dread. The film, unfortunately, isn’t always able to keep a tight grip on its terror as it loses itself in both its thinly drawn narrative and effective ambiguity by the time it reaches its final third. However, Backrooms is still an impressive debut for Parsons, effectively capturing the dread of the liminal space in ways we have never seen in a cinematic landscape.
After opening with a full-pov camcorder sequence in the backrooms that’s extremely similar in vibe to Parsons’ first-ever Backrooms YouTube short, the film takes place in the 90s, following Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect living and operating in his rundown furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. From the get-go, we see that Clark is extremely troubled mentally following a recent divorce that he constantly has to face the ramifications of with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), as the film unpacks the toxic layers that surround him as a character.
Everything in Clark’s life turns upside down, however, when he discovers a mysterious portal to another realm within the basement of his store, and what he thinks is just a further extension of his store is something else entirely: a reality of endless yellow walls of subliminal office space and furniture scattered around with limitless possibilities between what lies in each room Clark walks within. Clark spouts out his findings to Mary, determined to solve the mystery of what lies behind this new realm of reality. Still, after Mary doesn’t believe his stories, Clark sets off with his employees Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) to discover the true terrors that lie within the titular backrooms.
In the film, when Clark talks to Mary after his first venture into the backrooms and describes the experience as trying to draw a dog, having never seen one, with your only basis being how someone describes it to you. Parsons is well aware that this same lingering difficulty in description is reflected in the specific sensation of walking through a place like the backrooms.
The abstract nature of Backrooms’ horror isn’t just effective because of its ambiguity in both story and character, but also because Parsons heightens a one-of-a-kind lonely dread, matched by the quiet, cold atmosphere of the rooms and the strikingly haunting production design by Danny Vermette. There always ends up a new expansive crevice to the other worldly nature of each room that remains utterly transfixing, ranging from empty neighborhoods to abandoned pools presented like detached memories from all walks of life. Even when the film loses its grip a bit on the quieter tension, it’s more effective within its first half and shows more of its hand. The horror is not engaging to follow, as a distinctive uneasiness, you will feel yourself submerged in its slow burn right until the final shot.
Parsons’ YouTube series mainly utilized the creative confines of camera footage to further craft the sensibilities that would become synonymous with liminal spaces, and Parsons directs both POV footage and more traditional setpieces with such miraculous confidence. Similar to undertone earlier this year, Backrooms implements a similar creative use of empty space within its frame in both regular and found footage sequences, keeping the causes for sudden sounds and the appearances of lurking creatures a mystery before building up to a solid payoff at the film’s climax.
If there are any areas where Backrooms is a bit more shaky, Will Soodik’s screenplay renders itself a bit too thinly drawn at crucial points. Parsons and Soodik rightfully leave many questions about the backrooms up to individual interpretation, further adding to the effectiveness of the film’s slowly creeping tension within its striking images, but there’s something more to Mary and Clark’s connection to the backrooms that the film only half explores.
Both Reinsve and Ejiofor give great performances that make much of the movie’s abstract theatrics tangible to those not looped into the backrooms’ lore, but the film goes the route of connecting its themes of trauma to the ambiguous mystery of what exactly the backrooms are, which is never fully formed. It’s almost like there’s a clash between keeping the simplicity of what makes the backrooms so eerie intact, vs showing a more obvious reality of what the mystery really means in the final third. The film’s more clunky connections towards its end, however, prove not to be a deal breaker as the atmosphere still more than captures its desired effect.
It is easy to make general assumptions about a debut from such a young filmmaker, but Kane Parsons more than proves himself to be a new name to watch within the genre landscape. Backrooms might be testing to those who are less forgiving of its slower builds of atmosphere or clunky screenplay issues, but Parsons crafts a completely new type of psychological horror pushing the boundaries of what we know as abstract in chilling ways; combining elements of horror we’re familiar with, like riveting found footage and palm-sweating chase sequences, and mind-bending surrealism to create a uniquely chilling genre experiment.
Review Courtesy of Joshua Mbonu
Feature Image Credit to A24