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What’s so scary about Backrooms? A24’s horror hit has stunned Hollywood, amassing a bevy of superlatives in just one scant week in theaters. It is the largest opening for an A24 film and biggest debut for an original horror movie. With its shocking $81 million opening weekend, Backrooms director, the 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is now the youngest filmmaker to score a #1 box office hit, and can boast that he has the largest opening weekend for a debut filmmaker in history. Even for a film backed by known tastemaker A24, the seismic success of Backrooms — a film that outperformed a Star Wars movie – has turned the business upside-down.
This is fitting, as Backrooms is about discovering your world does not abide by the rules you thought it did. In the movie, struggling furniture store salesman Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a secret in his store’s basement: A wall that’s not really a wall, hiding a doorway to an endless series of corridors, each turn revealing a dingy space more illogical than the last. The movie unfolds like a fluorescent, overlit nightmare where Clark descends deeper into both the Backrooms and his insecurities, while his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), attempts to find him.
Much has been made of Parsons’ origins as a YouTuber in immediate discussions of Backrooms’ success. It’s a trait he shares with fellow surprise box office darling Curry Barker, whose horror phenomenon Obsession currently sits at #2 in with $161 million grossed a month after release at the time this was written. Together, these two YouTubers have pushed Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu to third place, effectively out of the conversation after just one measly weekend atop the charts. This is an astonishing reversal, in which the safest bet in Hollywood has been toppled in no time at all by two Gen Z upstarts.
Reverse-engineering success is tricky; first explanations are often incomplete. While the back-to-back success of Backrooms and Obsession has given YouTube directors a heat that will likely be felt in cinemas for years, declaring YouTubers as Hollywood’s heir apparent is a touch premature, and undersells what Backrooms is actually doing, and why Kane Parsons was the guy to pull off such a phenomenal success.
Backrooms began life as an internet meme, a photo taken of an empty furniture store mid-renovation that 4chan posters and other online denizens began riffing on. Parsons, who had been uploading amateur shorts under the name Kane Pixels, offered his own: “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, a short that follows an amateur filmmaker who, in the middle of filming a silly monster movie, glitches through the surface of the Earth to find himself lost in a labyrinth of endless corridors with a strange creature stalking him.
Parsons didn’t just make the one short. He made well over a dozen Backrooms videos, some straightforward horror shorts like the first, others little bits of strange ephemera: Autopsy reports, strange lab experiments, snippets of corporate intrigue, clues that led to even more mysterious unlisted videos. In the tradition of YouTube series like Marble Hornets, which similarly spun a horror meme about the Slender Man monster into a sensational webseries, Parsons turned The Backrooms into a whole paranoid universe, one he invited others to participate in actively, to speculate in forums and social media and yes, other YouTube videos.
Night Mind is one such YouTube channel. Devoted to exploring the creepier aspects of the internet, its host, the pseudonymous Nick Nocturne, surfaces videos like Parsons’ Backrooms series and encourages thrillseeking audiences to dive in, offering analysis and enthusiasm in equal measure. Nocturne speaks in a theatrical baritone that is both alarming and hypnotic, an unsettlingly perfect guide to the things you’re drawn to watching online when you should probably be sleeping instead.
According to Nocturne, The Backrooms videos are best understood as works of “unfiction,” understood to be any media found online that presents itself as real, even if it is clearly not. What makes unfiction different from, say, mockumentary, is that the online audience is expected to buy in just a little more than a casual viewer would, because they are at the center of the mystery, clicking links.
“We’re talking about immersive mystique, finding something online where even if there is an author label or channel name, you understand, you’re witnessing something that could have been a direct upload of a VHS tape,” Nocturne says. “Where you have no explanation for what you just saw, but you feel like you shouldn’t have seen that.”
When an unfiction creator is good at this, there’s nothing like it. You feel like you’re steps away from discerning the identity of the Zodiac Killer, or that The Mothman is actually real. The creators play on the fact that you are probably alone, up too late, on your computer for too long, your rational mind ceding control to the algorithm. In the bright light of day, you’ll feel a little silly afterwards — unless the mystery’s really got a hold of you. Then you’re more than just a fan. You’re a believer.
“You are craving more of the mystery, you’re craving to see more of what happened, to figure it out for yourself, to spot the creature in the background, whatever it might be,” Nocturne says. “So now you are having a shared experience that goes a little bit deeper than just sitting in the movie theater. That’s what’s so appealing about unfiction. It invites you: Wanna play?”
It is this indelible quality that made Parson’s Backrooms videos so enticing to his audience on a primal level. With its recurring motifs of liminal spaces and the thin membrane between reality and unreality, the endless corridors of the Backrooms parallel endless branches of the internet. Logging on leads us everywhere and nowhere, sublimating our identity to the screen yet, like the characters in the Hollywood version of Backrooms, unable to escape our own heads no matter how we may try.
For a younger audience that has replaced television with YouTube as primary entertainment, The Backrooms as Parsons explored them in his shorts was like a TV series that gave his fans a window into their collective subconscious for the last four years, a phenomenon as intense as older generation’s hyperfixation on Lost or Game of Thrones but more intimate and personal – and now on the big screen, where devotees can get lost with newcomers who’ve had no idea about this world between the walls.
A source close to the production of the film tells Playboy that this was part of the goal: To introduce the moviegoing world to a new kind of fear that has been lurking online and resonating with audiences there.
“When we first started this project, the idea was to be similar to when Steven Spielberg made water scary when Jaws came out. What is it about space? What is this liminal space specifically? What about it has launched all of these threads in a community online, and why is it so fundamentally scary? It really tapped into something that is super specific to a generation.”
Six days after Backrooms’ debut, it’s breaking more records, with $100 million grossed domestically, a first for A24. According to survey data provided by the studio, half of the movie’s audience showed up because they were fans of “the Backrooms IP.” They had presumably already gotten lost with Kane Parsons when he was just Kane Pixels, a precocious kid who saw a meme that made him think about falling through a glitch in the world, from a world that made sense to one that did not. They saw something that they felt that they shouldn’t have seen, and now they can’t get enough.