Remember, as a kid, going to a friend’s basement and being surprised by how many rooms were down there—and how oddly they were configured? If you ever had that sort of experience, you know what it’s like to watch Backrooms, the feature debut from director Kane Parsons, based on a series of shorts that he distributed on YouTube (themselves extensions of a longstanding Internet trend involving images and videos of eerie, mostly empty spaces).
Backrooms, which Parsons wrote with Homeland and Westworld screenwriting vet Will Soodik, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a struggling discount furniture store owner who is processing his professional and personal distress with a therapist, played by Renata Reinsve (Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World). When Clark discovers a portal in the basement of the store that leads to an endless and increasingly odd series of rooms—all mostly empty, save for strangely discarded furniture—the tension escalates for the characters and the audience.
Backrooms has been linked with the likes of Exit 8, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as examples of Internet-inspired, liminal-space horror, where the environment itself is the main threat. (Perhaps The Shining is ground zero for this subgenre?) Indeed, Parsons proves to be an expert manipulator of space with the camera. We enter the store’s sickly yellow, low-ceilinged “backrooms” four times in the movie, and he employs a variety of techniques—first-person POV, found footage, handheld camerawork, forced perspective—to destabilize us in different ways, making us feel deeply uneasy in this fractured, yet familiar, setting. There’s no need, really, to amp up the horror elements as the movie unfortunately does during its final third. The “explanation” for the backrooms is inspired, but the execution of it—particularly in a haphazardly gruesome dinner scene—reeks of desperation and a desire to give the movie hard horror cred.
Liminal horror proves to be disturbing enough on its own, particularly, it seems, for younger audiences. What might explain this generational pull? Perhaps it’s because audiences now in their twenties grew up watching public spaces like shopping malls slowly depopulate, due to online shopping and the recession of the late 2000s. This phenomenon was slowly exacerbated by social life in general moving online (keeping more people indoors), all of which was dramatically escalated by the 2020 pandemic. In essence, the world has uncannily emptied during the youth audience’s formative years; movies like Backrooms cleverly bottle up the peculiar anxiety of that experience.
(6/8/2026)
