There has been so much chatter surrounding Backrooms and its 20-year old
director Kane Parsons that, honestly, I almost walked into the theater
slightly exhausted before the movie even began. Internet discourse has a
strange way of building impossible expectations around horror films
now. Every new release is either “the future of the genre” or “overrated
garbage” before most people have even watched a frame of it.
Thankfully, Parsons seems completely uninterested in that noise. What
matters is the film itself. And sitting there in a dimly lit theater,
surrounded by fluorescent yellow hallways that seemed to stretch into
infinity, feeling this strange combination of visual claustrophobia,
dread, confusion, and anxiety slowly crawl under my skin, I realized
something very quickly. Kane Parsons absolutely understands the feeling
he wants to create. And more importantly, he knows how to sustain it.
That alone is impressive.
Because Backrooms is not horror built around conventional scares. This is not a film chasing loud sound cues, grotesque faces lunging at the camera, or carnival ride jump scares every seven minutes. Parsons and Will Soodik (Writer) instead builds horror through space itself. Through silence. Through repetition. Through environments that feel wrong in ways your brain cannot quite articulate. The endless rooms. The stale lighting. The camcorder footage. The carpets. The corners. The strange geometry of spaces that resemble somewhere familiar while simultaneously feeling completely alien. Calling it claustrophobic almost feels inaccurate. Suffocating is probably the better word.
What makes Backrooms
fascinating is how deeply it understands modern internet horror culture
without feeling trapped by it. Older horror films often say, “Here is
the monster.” Internet horror says, “Here are clues. Build the monster
yourself.” Parsons fully understands that distinction. The terror here
largely comes from implication, interpretation, and uncertainty. The
imagination does most of the heavy lifting, which often makes the
experience far more unbearable than anything explicitly shown onscreen.
And honestly, that patience pays off beautifully during the film’s strongest stretches.
There
are at least two or three sequences here that genuinely feel like some
of the most striking horror scenes of the decade so far. One particular
sequence involving found footage style camerawork had my entire body
reacting physically. I sat upright in my seat without even realizing it.
Heart racing. Eyes scanning every inch of the frame. Parsons
understands how to weaponize empty space better than filmmakers twice
his age. The film slowly hypnotizes you into searching the corners of
every frame for danger, until eventually the absence of danger itself
becomes terrifying.
That confidence is what shocked me most throughout the film.
This
is not a cautious debut. Parsons swings big stylistically. Sometimes
messy, yes, but undeniably ambitious. The film mixes found footage
aesthetics with more traditional steady cam cinematography, all
unfolding across a gigantic 30,000 square foot practical set that
genuinely feels endless. The production design deserves enormous praise
because the environments themselves become the film’s primary
antagonist. Spaces designed for comfort become hostile. Familiarity
mutates into something uncanny. Parsons creates what honestly feels like
a new subgenre altogether. Fluorescent light horror.
The sound
design deserves equal praise. Horror films live or die through sound,
and Backrooms understands this completely. Every buzzing light fixture,
distant scrape, hollow echo, and subtle ambient hum slowly chips away at
your nerves. There are moments where the soundscape alone creates more
anxiety than most horror films manage with elaborate visual effects.
Parsons also co composed the score himself alongside Edo Van Breemen,
and it works almost like a guide rope pulling viewers deeper into the
maze. Hypnotic. Drifting. Uneasy.
It also helps enormously that the
film is anchored by two terrific performances from Chiwetel Ejiofor and
Renate Reinsve. Ejiofor brings a grounded emotional weight to material
that could have easily floated too far into abstraction, while Reinsve
once again proves she can communicate existential dread with just a
glance. Their performances give the audience something human to hold
onto while the world around them grows increasingly incomprehensible.
I
especially appreciated the decision to focus more heavily on
psychological deterioration rather than turning the movie into “person
with flashlight runs from creature” for two hours. That would have been
the obvious route. Instead, Parsons leans into trauma, memory,
isolation, and identity. The Backrooms themselves begin to feel less
like physical locations and more like manifestations of emotional loops.
Places where people become trapped inside their own minds. The film
repeatedly explores how environments can reshape memory and how trauma
distorts our understanding of reality itself.
There is something strangely timely about all of this too.
The
original Backrooms concept emerged from internet culture, but Parsons
transforms it into something larger. The film almost feels like a
metaphor for modern online existence itself. Endless digital corridors
filled with fragments of humanity. Spaces that feel populated despite
being empty. Places where people lose themselves searching for meaning
while algorithms quietly rearrange the walls around them. Once you fall
inside, escaping becomes increasingly difficult.
That thematic undercurrent gives the film a lingering power beyond simple horror mechanics.
Now,
to be fair, Backrooms is not flawless. The third act does lose some of
the ambiguity that made the earlier portions so unsettling. Certain
thematic ideas become slightly over explained, and I do think the film
probably could have trimmed fifteen minutes without sacrificing any of
its atmosphere. There are moments where the pacing slows just enough for
the hypnosis to briefly wobble. The characters themselves occasionally
feel more like emotional vessels than fully realized human beings, even
though the actors elevate the material considerably.
But honestly, those flaws almost feel inevitable in a project this ambitious.
What
impressed me most is that Parsons is willing to risk alienating
audiences in pursuit of atmosphere. Modern horror rarely allows itself
to be this patient anymore. Most films are terrified of boredom. Parsons
instead leans directly into stillness, repetition, and discomfort. Some
viewers will absolutely hate that approach. Others are going to leave
the theater genuinely haunted by it.
Personally, I found myself unable to stop thinking about it afterward.
And
maybe that is the biggest compliment I can give Backrooms. It feels
like one of the first major examples of internet mythology fully
evolving into cinema rather than simply borrowing from it. Kane Parsons
did not just adapt a creepypasta. He translated a very specific kind of
online dread into cinematic language.
Whether audiences embrace it,
reject it, or spend years arguing about it online, Parsons already
accomplished something remarkable here. He took old forum images,
collective digital anxiety, and liminal space nightmares and turned them
into a theatrical horror experience that genuinely feels unique.
And honestly? That alone is exciting as hell for the future of horror filmmaking.
Comments