So…What Exactly Are the Backrooms?: An Explainer

This week, A24 released the first official teaser for Backrooms, the highly anticipated debut feature from Kane Parsons. Based on Parsons’ eerie viral found-footage YouTube series “The Backrooms” and written by Will Soodik (Ash vs Evil Dead, Westworld), the film has been steadily building hype across paranormal forums, the film community, and social media over the past few years. And if the trailer is an indication of what’s to come, it seems like the wait will be worth it. 

But for those of you who have a healthy relationship with the internet, you probably watched the trailer and thought, “Cool. So what exactly are the Backrooms?” Allow me to provide a brief explainer.

On May 12, 2019, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread on one of the site’s paranormal-themed forums, asking users to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’.” One of the replies was a photo taken on an accidental Dutch angle of what looked like a sickly green-yellow office space, the walls covered in a mid-century chevron wallpaper. The following day, another anonymous user replied to the post, officially giving it the name, the Backrooms: 

“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