There was a time in Hollywood, before CGI, when studios built huge sets for movies. These days, however, you very rarely hear of studios actually committing to building the worlds in which films are set. Thankfully, A24 agreed to give 20-year-old Kane Parsons the budget to architect thirty thousand square feet of backrooms. That’s a lot of yellow, nightmarish office space.
See, A24’s upcoming Backrooms movie won’t be relying on green screen trickery for the creepy backgrounds. All the empty spaces were physical and walkable. The yellow walls and buzzing fluorescent hum are all real. In fact, the set was so big that some of the cast and crew actually got lost in it.
“The set was huge. We built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms that we could walk around in. Actually, some people were getting lost. It felt like being there, which was really weird,” Parsons said at CCXP Mexico.
The upcoming A24 movie is based on one of the internet’s creepiest and most popular horror concepts: backrooms (basically an endless, maze-like dimension of empty wallpapered rooms that stretch on forever). Parsons, who started uploading videos to YouTube in 2022 as a teen and gained millions of views and a cult following, has now adapted his creepy video idea into a full feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
And, thankfully, everyone involved was smart enough not to fake the backgrounds (which are key to the film’s story, of course), but to actually build every large maze/office space we see in the movie.
See, The Backrooms, which traces all the way back to a 2019 4chan post, actually works because your brain tries to map them out. Parsons knows exactly why his videos were hits. “If you go back the way you came, you will go back the way you came, but it just keeps going and going and going,” he explained in an interview describing the concept.
It’s a clever move, really, especially when you remember how many of these creepypasta movie adaptations usually fall apart once they become Hollywood films. So, thankfully, the studio isn’t taking any shortcuts with Backrooms. The film should instead just feel like an expansion of his ideas from the YouTube videos with a larger budget.
The story will follow Clark, a furniture store owner who discovers something very wrong in his basement. One moment he is lying on a showroom bed watching TV and the next, he “noclips” out of reality into a place that doesn’t end.
Backrooms hits cinemas on May 29, 2026.
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