Backrooms: How 4chan “creepypasta” became Hollywood horror

There’s a back story to Backrooms. Since 2011, a creepy photo has circulated on message boards: a slanted entrance into a large empty room, all yellow, with grotty wallpaper, carpet and floating ceiling, lit by oblong fluorescent lights, obscurely seeming to give on to other such rooms. In May 2019, an anonymous user posted it on 4chan, asking others to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” as a contribution to “creepypasta”, a genre of frightening paranormal stories shared online. The next day, inspired by the glitchy moments in a video game when characters pass through a boundary, a fan suggestively named the phenomenon: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms…” A hyperactive online subculture soon developed around this idea.

It took five years to identify that the photo was taken in a disused furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In that time, it had become part of a potent mythology. In 2022, 16-year-old Kane Parsons, aka “Kane Pixels”, posted a nine-minute film on YouTube, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”. A disoriented cameraman wanders around these baffling rooms before being pursued by a mysterious “life form”. This spooky film, produced using open-source computer graphics, has now had more than 78 million views. Parsons followed it up with a series of other shorts, obliquely revealing a story about a scientific institute, Aysnc, attempting to investigate the anomalous, sinister world of the “complex”. There are now 24 such pieces by Parsons on YouTube, with 216 million views.

His take on the Backrooms myth was a fantastic invention. He sets the story around 1990 so that the found footage seems to be VHS quality, which works brilliantly; it’s hard to believe the images are computer generated. Parsons has a gift for turning the camera’s view – our view – into a genuine, fearful exploration, abetted by an alarming soundtrack. There may be monsters but he doesn’t stoop to jump cuts. He has an intuitive sense of how built environments that don’t make any sense to us can unnerve us without such tricks.

And so Hollywood, ever IP-famished, came calling. Fans were sceptical that this world, glimpsed through quasi-documentary fragments, could be converted into a satisfying conventional drama. But Parsons, now 20 and one of the youngest ever directors of a major feature, has shown us how. Made with real actors on real sets, Backrooms remains strikingly loyal to the world he invented digitally. The pre-credits sequence, in which an Async employee gets lost in the maze of rooms, is a direct replay from the shorts. Thereafter, the film – scripted by Will Soodik (Westworld) – develops into a full narrative, originating in character and psychology, able to sustain theatrical audiences.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect, reduced to running a grotesque, pirate-themed furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Chucked out by his wife, he sleeps in the desolate showrooms. He is seeing a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), the author of a self-help manual, “The Window Within”, who claims she can help him out of his loops to a new path. But Mary herself had a traumatising upbringing, imprisoned at home by her deranged mother, her memories recently triggered by seeing that house demolished.

One night, in the store’s basement, Clark glimpses a light behind a wall and discovers he can pass through into an apparently endless world of rooms and corridors, like abandoned offices, all oddly angled, strewn with random furniture and other defective items. Things move around. There are weird sounds. Excited and scared, Clark returns night after night, trying to map it out. When he tells Mary about it, showing her a hand-drawn plan, she’s unconvinced. After Clark disappears, she goes to look for him. 

Backrooms turns to body horror and throws in an extended chase sequence before a dodgy third act returns to the machinations of Async. But its unbearable rooms are unforgettably realised. Theorists like to call these nightmares “liminal spaces”, but maybe there’s a simpler explanation: “For me, Backrooms is the cumulative result of a societal exhaustion with this industrialised monoculture we’re slipping into,” says Parsons. We all experience buildings without humanity, anonymous, soulless offices, factories and showrooms, unintelligible multi-storey and underground car parks, entire cityscapes even, devoid of the values of home that Gaston Bachelard describes so beautifully in The Poetics of Space. Backrooms exposes the full horror of that.

Backrooms is in cinemas from 28 May

[Further reading: Paul Simon talks to God]