On May 29, Backrooms released to theaters in the United States. Produced by film company A24 and directed by 20-year-old filmmaker and YouTuber Kane Parsons, it is a revival of a legendary creepypasta that has inspired a generation of horror seekers and video game designers.
The concept of backrooms originated in 2019 when an anonymous user posted an eerie image on 4chan, an imageboard website. Another user replied to the image, imagining an endless maze of yellow carpet, tinted wallpaper, and flickering ceiling lights, only accessible by “noclipping” — a term taken from video games where players walk or fall through walls or the floor, typically as a result of a glitch.
Since then, hundreds of game designers have taken inspiration from this thread. One of the most popular co-op games derived from it, “Escape the Backrooms”, features dozens of different monsters and over 30 liminal space levels, such as the infamous pool rooms.
When Backrooms was released to theaters, It grossed an estimated $118 million globally in the first week of shows, earning an 88% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and 7.1 of 10 on IMDb.
Students around Camas High School (CHS) have been flocking to see it. Many students were previously familiar with the concept of the backrooms before the movie and were driven to see it purely because of the nostalgia from seeing a childhood creepypasta brought to the big screens.
Junior Lily Kim is one of those students.
“I think just seeing it on TikTok or on social media definitely influenced that I wanted to watch it,” Kim said. “I think it was really targeted towards a younger audience. They knew what people would want from a horror movie to make it enjoyable.”
Before the creation of the movie, Parsons was a primary driver behind the growth in popularity of the backrooms, creating a 24-episode YouTube series based on found footage and analog horror that would later become the foundation of Backrooms.
While the plot of the movie did not follow the blueprint of what many fans had anticipated for the classic liminal horror, it opens up a new can of worms in the world of the backrooms, allowing for further imaginative additions from the community.
Sophomore Jessie Cox gave their opinion.
“I think a lot of people who go to see it already knew what it was and grew up on the backrooms stuff,” Cox said. “I thought it was really good, a lot of people didn’t like it but I thought it was really good.”
Sophomore NJ Zieman went further into what was so appealing about the movie.
“I really loved the camera work. Every single scene in Backrooms had the creepiest angles that just made you terrified when [the characters] were walking through a hallway with yellow walls and nothing was happening,” Zieman said. “I thought it was a fun horror movie that did, in fact, scare me, which some horror movies don’t do. So it was scary in a good way.”
Fans are excited to see something that, for many, is a childhood source of nostalgia. Produced with a budget of $10 million, the movie has now grossed over $300 million since its release, making it A24’s biggest release yet.
