As Burlington High School students prepare to move into a brand-new building, some may cast nostalgic eyes on the downtown former Macy’s that housed them for five years. Not only did that sterile, fluorescent-lit environment get the school featured in BuzzFeed, but it’s also eerily similar to the titular setting of last weekend’s box-office champion, Backrooms.
That’s right: The nation’s current No. 1 grossing film, beating the second week of a Star Wars movie, is a horror flick inspired by a crowdsourced creepypasta, directed by a 20-year-old (Kane Parsons, maker of a YouTube series based on the concept) and set in what looks like a dead mall, department store or conference center of 1980s vintage. If you’re like me, you may already know this non-place from your recurring nightmares.
The deal
In California’s South Bay, 1990, business owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) can’t get over the failure of his marriage. He camps out in his cavernous furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, watching old movies and mourning his dream of being an architect.
That’s how Clark notices periodic blackouts in the store, which lead him to a mysteriously malformed circuit board. In the basement, he follows a sliver of light through what appears to be a solid wall. Beyond is a windowless realm that seems to stretch out indefinitely: corridors, rooms, stairways, ramps, all papered and carpeted in the same sickly yellow. Some rooms hold heaps of furniture, or chairs and sofas half embedded in the floor, or inverted commercial signs. All appear to be deserted.
Enthralled by his discovery, Clark ropes his young employees (Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) into exploring. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), doesn’t understand his fixation — until she ventures into the Backrooms herself.
Will you like it?
If you’ve always found haunted houses more interesting than what haunts them, Backrooms is for you. Conversely, if you’re waiting for the appearance of something far more horrific than endless fluorescent ceiling panels, it may not be. This is place-based horror, where the décor is deranged and monsters dwell within.
That’s not to say nothing haunts the Backrooms. Ominous footsteps and shadows and a creepy, ambient score (by Parsons and Edo Van Breemen) make it clear things lurk there, and sometimes we encounter them. The film opens with a found-footage vignette of a hapless researcher that hits all the traditional scary beats. Ultimately, though, Backrooms isn’t about the primal terror of becoming prey — unless time itself can be considered a predator.
An early scene hints at precisely that. As a younger Mary (Ember Ambrose) presses her palm into wet cement beside her childhood home, the camera pans up to reveal an excavator looming in the sky, presaging its destruction. The surreal time jump suggests the juxtapositions of memory. And memory is central to Mary’s adult career, in which she hawks a book about the dangers of getting caught in outdated patterns, or “neural loops,” formed in childhood.
A shard of cement bearing the childhood handprint sits on Mary’s desk, telling us she isn’t so different from her patient, who’s all too eager to disappear into the “backrooms” of mindless repetition. Both she and Clark find it tough to break free from remembered trauma and “open a window” (Mary’s inspirational motto) into the future.
Parsons uses his setting in an intuitive way to give physical reality to these ideas. The Backrooms’ outdated institutional vibe evokes both nostalgia and nausea. Furniture protrudes from the carpeting like ruins from desert sands — or memories from the morass of time. The vast halls appear made for convivial gatherings, yet everyone’s gone, leaving the characters — and us — with the uncanny sense that we’re the ghosts, trapped in patterns we can’t escape.
If this metaphor works on the visual level, it sometimes feels heavy-handed on the story level, largely because Will Soodik’s script doesn’t give the two main characters much individuality beyond grief and rage. It’s tough to root for Clark and Mary to escape the Backrooms when neither has the sort of scrappy energy that might make their plight tragic.
But that’s all right, because we lack the will to escape, too, mesmerized by all the ways the Backrooms feel weirdly relevant now. They’re the dead malls haunting our postindustrial landscapes and the ghastly facsimiles of humanity haunting our social media. (The film’s inverted signs, in particular, recall the nonsensical text in the backgrounds of early AI images.)
It’s no surprise that a society obsessed with disruption, automation and progress is also obsessed with obsolescence and being forgotten, or that young people find those themes especially hard to shake. Sure, liminal spaces have been a horror trope forever — Backrooms has one obvious precursor in Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult novel House of Leaves. But the movie may be particularly disturbing because we’re all starting to feel a little liminal these days.
If you like this, try…
The Backrooms (22 videos, 2022-25; YouTube): Parsons’ animated shorts offer background on the origin of the Backrooms and the role of Async Research Institute, as well as well-crafted found-footage scares.
“Severance” (two seasons, 2022-25; Apple TV): Dan Erickson, creator of this sci-fi series about the ultimate form of workplace dissociation, has cited the Backrooms creepypasta as an inspiration for his Lumon Industries.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): While its aesthetic diverges from Backrooms’, Mary Bronstein’s borderline-surreal drama about a woman (Rose Byrne) caring for her sick child underlines how trauma and isolation can make us feel as if we’re disappearing.
This article appears in Animal Issue • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
