Backrooms

Released May 29, 2026, Backrooms is one of the most genuinely remarkable origin stories in recent cinema history. Kane Parsons was twenty years old when his Backrooms theatrical feature debuted at #1 at the US box office, making him the youngest filmmaker in history to achieve that distinction. He had built his audience not through film school or industry connections but through a series of viral YouTube short films adapting the Backrooms — the internet-born "liminal space" creepypasta that imagines an endless, fluorescent-lit, carpet-covered void behind the walls of reality — into the visual language of found footage and indie horror. A24 recognized something in those shorts and gave Parsons the resources and creative freedom to expand the Backrooms world into a full theatrical feature with a proper cast. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass anchor the film's human drama, bringing professional credibility and emotional grounding to a concept that in lesser hands could have remained a gimmick. The film's horror is predominantly atmospheric — built from dread, disorientation, and the deeply unsettling geometry of spaces that look almost right but aren't — rather than jump scares. Backrooms earned 88% from Rotten Tomatoes critics and a 74% audience score, with the audience gap relative to critics reflecting a faction who found its deliberate pacing slow rather than tense. Its Metacritic score of 76 reflects strong critical respect for what Parsons pulled off. The commercial achievement is historic: roughly $310 million worldwide as of late June 2026 makes Backrooms A24's highest-grossing film ever — a milestone that says as much about how far A24 has grown as it does about the film itself. Backrooms is proof that the pipeline from internet creator to theatrical filmmaker is now fully open, and that what comes through it can be genuinely good.