Kane Parsons was 16 when he uploaded a nine-minute found-footage clip of a man falling through a floor into an endless yellow office. Four years later that clip has become an A24 feature starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass. Here is what we know about the Backrooms movie, where it came from, and where you can watch it.
Key Takeaways
- The Backrooms movie is directed by Kane Parsons, the YouTuber known as Kane Pixels, and released by A24 in 2026.
- Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass headline the cast.
- James Wan’s Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps and Chernin Entertainment produced it.
- The source material is a 2019 4chan post and a 2022 YouTube series, not a book or game.
- Critical reaction has been split, with several reviews praising the atmosphere and faulting the story.
- It played theaters first, then moved to digital, Blu-ray and streaming.
How a Cursed Image Became a Movie
The whole thing traces back to a single photo. In May 2019 someone posted a picture of a mustard-yellow room with damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights to a “cursed images” thread on 4chan’s paranormal board. A reply added the lore: if you “noclip” out of reality in the wrong spot, you end up here, in roughly 600 million square miles of empty rooms.
The image sat unexplained for five years. In 2024 internet sleuths finally traced it to a HobbyTown USA store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, photographed mid-renovation in 2003. Knowing it was a hobby shop with the shelving and furniture pulled out does nothing to make it less unsettling.
Parsons took that idea and gave it a plot. His first video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” went up on January 7, 2022. It framed the space as something discovered in the 1990s by a fictional company called the Async Research Institute. The clip has racked up tens of millions of views, and the series that followed built out a cold-war-style corporate conspiracy around the yellow halls.
Who Made the Backrooms Movie
A24 announced the project in February 2023, when Parsons was still a teenager, and the headline most outlets ran with was his age. We think the producing lineup matters just as much. It pairs the studio behind Hereditary and Talk to Me with the people behind The Conjuring and Stranger Things.
| Role | Name | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Director | Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels) | The Backrooms YouTube series |
| Screenwriter | Roberto Patino | Westworld, DMZ |
| Producers | Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, David Ready | Chernin Entertainment |
| Producers | James Wan, Michael Clear | Atomic Monster, The Conjuring |
| Producers | Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen | 21 Laps, Stranger Things |
| Studio | A24 | Hereditary, Talk to Me |
A24 has done this before. Talk to Me came from Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twin brothers behind the RackaRacka YouTube channel, and it became the studio’s biggest horror hit at the time of its 2023 release. Lights Out, from Warner Bros. in 2016, grew out of David F. Sandberg’s viral short. Backrooms follows the same pipeline, just with a younger filmmaker and a stranger source.
Cast and Characters
Casting news landed in February 2026, after filming had already wrapped in Vancouver, and it signaled a tonal choice. None of these three are scream-queen types.
Chiwetel Ejiofor brings the gravity of 12 Years a Slave and Doctor Strange. Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian star of The Worst Person in the World and A Different Man, is a current A24 favorite. Mark Duplass, co-creator of the Creep films, knows low-budget dread better than almost anyone working.
That trio tells us Parsons and Patino wanted actors who could carry long, quiet stretches with nobody else on screen. The YouTube series had almost no dialogue. A feature needs faces we care about getting lost.
What the Movie Is About
The film keeps the bones of the Kane Pixels mythology. There is a research outfit that found a way into the Backrooms, people who went in, and people trying to get them back. The time period and the exact relationship between the three leads were kept under wraps through production, and A24’s marketing leaned on the empty rooms rather than plot.
Expect the same visual grammar fans know: handheld camcorder footage, grainy 1990s tape artifacts, sudden drops through floors, and a creature that appears in a single frame before it is gone. What the feature adds is scale. The series was built in Blender by one person. The movie had practical sets, a real crew and a budget that let the halls go on forever in a way a laptop render never quite could.
Backrooms Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2003 | The original photo is taken inside a HobbyTown store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin |
| 2019 | The image and the “noclip” lore appear on 4chan in May |
| 2022 | Kane Pixels uploads “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” on January 7 |
| 2022 | Indie games Escape the Backrooms and Inside the Backrooms launch on Steam |
| 2023 | A24 announces a feature film with Parsons directing in February |
| 2024 | Internet users identify the 2003 origin photo |
| 2025 | Filming takes place in Vancouver in July and August |
| 2026 | Ejiofor, Reinsve and Duplass are revealed as the cast in February; the Backrooms movie opens in theaters |
How Critics and Audiences Reacted
Reviews have not been uniform. The most-quoted knock, from one widely shared review, was that A24’s Backrooms “gets lost in its own maze,” a line that captures a common complaint: the first hour is genuinely frightening, and the back half struggles to explain itself.
We would frame the split this way. Critics who came in cold tended to admire the craft and question whether there was enough story to justify a feature. Fans of the series, by contrast, cared mostly about whether Parsons kept the texture of the videos, and most of them felt he did. The “wait, is that it?” ending reaction shows up in a lot of audience comments, which is exactly the reaction the original 2019 post was designed to produce.
For context, this is a familiar pattern for internet-born horror. Talk to Me earned near-universal praise, but Lights Out and Slender Man both drew mixed notices while still finding an audience. Backrooms sits closer to the first camp on craft and the second on narrative.
Where to Watch the Backrooms Movie
A24 followed its usual release path here, so the options look like this.
| Format | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Theaters | A24 theatrical release | Opened in 2026; some IMAX and premium large-format engagements |
| Digital purchase or rental | Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home | Typically arrives a few weeks after theaters |
| Blu-ray and 4K | Standard HD Blu-ray Disc, 4K UHD | Dolby Atmos audio on A24’s recent discs, with English and Spanish subtitle options |
| Streaming | HBO Max | A24’s recent features have landed here after the digital window |
Two notes from us. First, if you have a choice, see this one with the best sound you can find. Parsons built the series around low hums, fluorescent buzz and sudden silence, and the Atmos mix on disc does a lot of the scaring. Second, availability shifts by region. The United States and Canada, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Africa, Middle East and India territories often get different streaming homes for A24 titles, so check your local listings before assuming it is on the same platform as a friend abroad.
Why It Matters Beyond the Scares
Parsons is the youngest director A24 has ever handed a feature to. That alone made the film a test case, and the industry was watching to see whether a creator with a Blender rig and a YouTube audience could run a professional set.
The answer, by most accounts, is yes. Whatever you think of the script, the film looks and sounds like the series, which is the thing fans were most afraid would be lost in the translation. Hollywood has been chasing internet IP for a decade, usually by buying a name and handing it to a different filmmaker. This time the studio kept the person who made the thing. That is the real headline, and it is the reason the next YouTuber with 100 million views on a horror short is going to get a meeting.
FAQ
Is the Backrooms movie based on the Kane Pixels videos?
Yes. Kane Parsons, who made the YouTube series as Kane Pixels, directed the film, and it uses his Async Research Institute mythology rather than the original 4chan lore alone.
Who stars in the Backrooms movie?
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass lead the cast.
Is it found footage like the YouTube series?
Largely, yes. The film keeps the camcorder look and 1990s tape texture that defined the series, though it is not restricted to a single camera the way the shorts were.
Where can we stream the Backrooms movie?
A24’s recent releases have gone to HBO Max in the United States after their digital window. It is also available to buy or rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, and on Blu-ray and 4K disc.
Is the Backrooms movie scary?
The first act is widely described as one of the more unsettling stretches of recent studio horror. The scares come from space, sound and silence rather than gore.
Will there be a sequel?
A24 has not announced one. The series mythology leaves plenty of room, and the producers have talked about the Backrooms as a world rather than a single story, so we would not rule it out.
