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Creepypasta comes to life then infects its characters in Backrooms

A well-designed but stretched-thin adaptation feels uncannily authentic, for what it's worth.

By Jacob Oller | May 27, 2026 | 6:00am

Photo: A24

Film Reviews Backrooms

Creepypasta comes to life then infects its characters in Backrooms

If nothing else, Kane Parsons’ feature-length Backrooms faithfully recreates the sensation of stumbling across its creepypasta origins. Like Slender Man, the viral phenomenon preyed on a fear derived not from imagining that we are physically in these unreal spaces, chased by unknowable beings, but one stemming from our psyches being submerged in endless disorienting videos of places detached from reality. Here, these surreal spaces evoke the labyrinthine corridors of dead-end retail and soul-sucking office work. It’s suburban strip mall horror, which Parsons demystifies over the course of his overwrought directorial debut.

The film was probably doomed from the start to feel this way, considering that the 20-year-old Parsons is adapting his own YouTube series of shorts, which began with a nine-minute video of sickly yellow walls constructing impossible floorplans, fluorescent lights and their oppressive hum, and the jumbling sonic debris of someone fumbling with a mic. These pinpointed sensory details evoked the uncanny edge that made the original, unsettling photo of an under-construction Wisconsin furniture store so potent.

The webseries starts as a killer special effects reel, which gets less interesting the more that Parsons returns to the idea of the Backrooms in following videos, parceling out backstory little by little like the video games that helped inspire his approach. (Control, with its Escher-like building, bureaucratic organization, and undermined normalcy, is a direct touchstone, just as Parsons’ Backrooms videos went on to influence things like Severance.) As much as those ambitions remain, TV writer Will Soodik’s expansion of the webseries into a 110-minute script overburdens the concept with clunky explanations, flashbacks, and environmental storytelling. Though oddity abounds in the film, it’s still linked to convention. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor)—disgruntled, divorced, and drunken owner of a pirate-themed furniture store—accidentally finds the Backrooms in a gap between his basement’s walls when investigating the source of his flickering lights and inordinately high energy bill. He’s followed down the rabbit hole by his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who supplies the film’s semi-heady voiceover and, in her early session with Clark, the opportunity for exposition around the kind of person who’s susceptible to clipping out of reality.

But despite the attempt to link this place to a larger, more realistic world, the most effective segments simply devote themselves to replicating the look and feel of the initial online videos, including a found-footage cold open and a camcorder-filmed sequence where Clark wrangles his assistant manager (Lukita Maxwell) and a commercial cameraman (Finn Bennett) into the liminal space alongside him. The textures are more detailed and the layouts of the rooms themselves are more complex—this was an oddball dream job for a production design team, with abstract drop ceilings and furniture piled with the chaotic grace of a Nancy Rubins installation—but the rhythm remains the same. The explorers rubberneck around endless hallways, lost and alone, with a breathy Blair Witch narration to accompany their handheld terror, building up to the inevitable moment when they’re no longer by themselves.

The primal effectiveness remains intact, aided by Ejiofor’s bought-in intensity, supplementing the familiar horror beats with an aesthetic that blends the hypnotic images of structural filmmaking like Serene Velocity and the audience conditioning of atmospheric experiments like Skinamarink. Much of Backrooms, though, is shot from a third-person perspective, watching Clark (and, eventually, Mary as she comes to search for her missing patient) slowly traverse this absurd terrain. It’s not scary, exactly, watching them walk—this shift in perspective saps the power of the original videos, just like the half-assed (even silly) third act where mental illness and monster-movie collide robs the environment of its inexplicable mystery.

The lack of setup, the fringe details that only ever hint at what’s going on, is jettisoned in favor of something blunter and more explicit. That could manifest as the presence of a chatty Async employee (Mark Duplass), walking the audience through the history of the Backrooms from the vantage point of the professionals observing it, or as the clumsy thematic throughline linking the past pains and present ennui of Clark and Mary to their time in the neverending halls.

But it’s not like Backrooms was hurting for potential meaning that audiences could ascribe to it. The beauty of creepypasta is often in its shifting malleability—a brief description in the film of the Backrooms as a place that’s misremembering itself sharply ties its inhuman hallucination to AI. It’s in trying to nail things down too tightly, in the urge to overexplain and clearly define, that weakens ideas like this. Nightmares where you run through a maze of rooms in search of an exit are scary because of the doorknob slipping ever further from your grasp, not because of what you eventually find when you open the door.

Director: Kane Parsons
Writer: Will Soodik
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Release Date: May 29, 2026

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