Backrooms (2026) Review: The Internet’s Nightmare Just Became A24’s Biggest Hit Ever

You know that feeling when you stay late at the office and the building goes quiet? The fluorescent lights start humming a little too loud. You take a wrong turn down a hallway you’ve walked a hundred times — except this time it doesn’t look right. The carpet’s the wrong color. The walls curve where they shouldn’t. And when you turn around to go back the way you came… the hallway just keeps going.

That’s not a nightmare. That’s Tuesday in the Backrooms. And Kane Parsons just turned it into the biggest horror movie of the year.

The Review

Here’s the thing nobody saw coming: a 20-year-old kid who taught himself Blender in his bedroom just directed A24’s highest-grossing movie of all time. Let that sink in while I pour us both something strong.

Backrooms takes the creepypasta that haunted the internet since 2019 — endless yellow rooms, buzzing fluorescents, the feeling that reality glitched — and gives it a beating human heart. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a divorced, struggling furniture store owner who discovers a portal in his basement leading into an infinite labyrinth of liminal space. His therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) goes in after him. What she finds in there… well, let’s just say therapy gets complicated when your patient has made himself at home in an endless nightmare dimension.

The genius of this movie is restraint. Parsons understands something most horror directors never learn: the scariest thing isn’t the monster. It’s the room. It’s the wallpaper that’s almost — almost — normal. It’s the hum of a light that’s been on since before you were born and will be on long after you’re gone. The film’s horror is architectural. It gets under your skin the way a song stuck in your head does — quietly, then all at once.

Ejiofor is phenomenal, by the way. He plays Clark not as a hero but as a man who’s slowly, believably coming apart — a guy who’d rather live in an endless yellow hellscape than face his actual life. That’s the real horror here, and the movie knows it. The Backrooms aren’t just a place. They’re what it looks like when a human mind gives up on finding the exit.

Is it perfect? The back half leans harder into plot than the atmosphere-horror of the first hour, and purists of the original YouTube series might miss the pure found-footage dread. But when your worst criticism is “I wanted MORE of the scary empty rooms,” you’re doing something right.

Harper’s verdict: A landmark. The rare internet-to-Hollywood adaptation that doesn’t sand off everything that made the original special. See it big, see it loud, and maybe don’t stay late at the office for a while.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Backrooms (2026) scary?

Terrifying in the best way — it weaponizes liminal-space dread and buzzing fluorescent unease rather than cheap jump scares. If empty office buildings at night unsettle you, this one will live in your head rent-free.

Who directed Backrooms (2026)?

Kane Parsons — the same kid who created the viral Backrooms YouTube series at 16, teaching himself Blender. A24 handed him the keys to the biggest version of his nightmare.

Is Backrooms (2026) based on the creepypasta?

Yes — it’s adapted from the 2019 Backrooms creepypasta and Parsons’ own YouTube series, expanding the endless yellow rooms into a full feature without sanding off what made it scary.

Where can I watch Backrooms (2026)?

It’s an A24 theatrical release — catch it in cinemas first, then expect it on digital rental and streaming platforms after its run. Check your region’s listings for what’s current.

Harper’s Extras

Holy crap, I didn’t know that:

• Kane Parsons started the Backrooms YouTube series at 16 years old, teaching himself Blender — free, open-source software — in his bedroom. He was posting videos to YouTube at age 9.
• For the movie, Parsons insisted on physical sets instead of CGI: over 30,000 square feet of actual Backrooms built across four sound stages, with 32,000+ square feet of wallpaper and 27,000+ square feet of carpet.
• The sets were so maze-like that crew members kept getting lost during filming, and production coordinators had to hand out maps. Life imitating art imitating a nightmare.
• Getting the wallpaper’s sickly yellow right took a month of development and 50 separate camera tests.
• Parsons sent his original Blender layout file to the production designer — and it crashed his computer.
• The film was shot in just six weeks in Vancouver under the working title Effigy, on a budget of under $10 million. It went on to gross $402.5 million worldwide, making Parsons the youngest filmmaker ever to hit #1 at the global box office.
• Mark Duplass (who stars in the film) publicly shut down rumors that Parsons was “ghost-directed,” saying the movie “very much belonged to Kane Parsons.”

The real story: The Backrooms creepypasta started in 2019 on 4chan, when someone posted a photo of a furniture store in Wisconsin undergoing renovation — empty, yellow, wrong. The internet did the rest.

Go deeper: Our wiki has pages on the films that paved the way for this kind of atmospheric dread — check out the entries in our Horror Movies index. And if liminal-space horror is your thing, the wiki hub is your new home.

Watch it with: If Backrooms leaves you hungry for more reality-bending horror, the Cube series scratches a similar “trapped in impossible architecture” itch — and it’s streaming in plenty of places. Worth the trip.