What is the Backrooms movie about? Explaining the lore and history of the internet’s strangest horror ecosystem

Inside the internet’s strangest horror ecosystem

The somewhat familiar, seemingly infinite liminal expanse that is the Backrooms is, unto itself, a rather interesting story. Similar to the Slender Man before it, the Backrooms was born out of a single internet post that has slowly and effortlessly ballooned into a franchise all its own, to the point where the new Backrooms movie is now poised to give The Mandalorian and Grogu a run for its money.

But what even is — or are? — the Backrooms anyway, and what makes it such a fascinating exploration in horror storytelling? The Backrooms first began as a photo of an empty space in a HobbyTown under renovation, posted on 4chan’s paranormal board. The original poster’s thread asked for "disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” An anonymous 4chan user later replied to the image with an ominous description that would define the very concept:

“If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

Thus was born a horror phenomenon that would spark countless stories, video games, movies, and much more. The 2019 4Chan post became the defining metric of an endless maze of fluorescent-lit spaces that trapped souls would only find by way of "no-clipping” — a video game term describing how players or objects freely pass through walls, often leading outside the boundary of the game’s world.

The photo turned into a collaborative fiction project that dramatically expanded over time. Storytellers and creators added various elements to the lore, including numbered levels, entities, ecosystems, and rules. The core philosophy of this first budding community was: What if the Backrooms were an infinite alternate reality? It’s often compared with the SCP Foundation, which similarly uses collaborative fiction to build upon its lore and characters.

This ballooning fictional landscape is what eventually led to a major rift within the community. On one side, fans of the Backrooms wanted the story and lore to remain simple. They believed the original horror worked specifically because of how vague the world was. On the other side was the SCP-leaning fandom, who wanted to create even more within the Backrooms through survival logs, mythologies, and connected stories. The primary catalyst was the introduction of levels; some wanted the Backrooms to remain in the yellow-hued hallways of its origin, while others wanted to craft even more complex liminal spaces, like poolrooms, malls, offices, and electrical stations.

The two varied ideals of what the Backrooms truly is clash quite a lot on the internet, but it doesn’t really matter so long as it’s enjoyed by those experiencing it. There’s even a third, much more niche section of the fandom that predominantly explores the “liminality” of the Backrooms (liminal spaces, nostalgic horror photography, and weirdcore). These fans care less about any of the complex lore and hone in entirely on the emotional resonance of the spaces themselves.

In 2022, a 16-year-old Kane Parsons opened the 3D creative program Blender and began experimenting with the software to learn better ways of using it. He eventually uploaded his video doodles to his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, titling them simply “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” Little did he know his videos would launch the horror meme into the mainstream — leading to the release of his first feature film four years later. His interpretation of the Backrooms galvanized that first core community: those who wanted the Backrooms to remain simple.

Instead of following the sprawling Backrooms Wiki mythology, Kane Parsons decided to go the analog horror route, opting for a more pseudo-scientific conspiracy thriller told through a found footage lens. His narrative loosely links several similar concepts, like dimensional instability (wanderers simply dropping into the Backrooms at random, everyday places), Async Research Institute (a mysterious organization studying the Backrooms phenomenon), corporate experimentation (human interference in creating non-Euclidean spaces leading to its manifestation), and threshold portals (doorways opening and closing at will). Through Parsons’ body of work, the Backrooms became less of an infinite, community-made nightmare dimension and more a secret failed experiment that opens into an impossible space.

Parsons used cinematic narrative structure through VHS footage to create this eerie world that still feels just out of reach. That ambiguous nature of the setting coupled with the complete isolation, silence, and scale made it totally unforgettable. His YouTube videos still had slight elements plucked from the Wiki, like some entities, but for the most part the space itself is the monster. As Parsons himself aptly put it during a recent interview with James Wan and A24, this iteration of the Backrooms "is a purgatory that we built. It's not like a purgatory beyond humanity, it's like one that we're clearly pushing ourselves towards... we're building prisons for ourselves."

The Backrooms will undoubtedly go down as a legendary concept, one that will remain timeless. It’s a creepy, brilliant blend of many internet-adjacent ideas — video game terminology, creepypasta storytelling, liminal space photography, analog horror, and internet nostalgia. What started as a single unnerving image on a message board has transformed into a generational horror landmark. Now, that deeply unsettling purgatory is finally making the leap to the big screen, and you can experience the madness of its mono-yellow embrace for yourself starting today. Just make sure to remember the exit.

The Backrooms is in theaters now.