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backrooms & ai
No on both counts. The 2026 Backrooms movie was not made with generative AI — it was built with conventional CGI in Blender, the free 3D software director Kane Parsons taught himself as a kid — and it is not a film about artificial intelligence. It's about liminal dread: an ordinary, empty space that feels wrong. The reason people search "is the Backrooms AI" at all is a tangle of two separate things: the word generated that follows the aesthetic around online, and a real, current controversy about AI in Hollywood — one that involves the studio, A24, far more than the film. Parsons himself is openly anti-AI. Below is the full picture, told honestly by a site that does use AI, and is not going to pretend that's not worth talking about.
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The most common version of the question is whether the film's eerie, impossible spaces were generated by AI. They weren't. The Backrooms was built with hand-made CGI in Blender, the same free tool Parsons started learning in middle school and used for the viral found-footage shorts that led to the feature. When rumours circulated online questioning how much of the film was really his, co-star Mark Duplass pushed back publicly, saying Parsons was completely in control of it. The "wrongness" of those hallways is the product of deliberate craft — modelling, lighting, lens choices — not a prompt.
Thematically, the film has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It's the cinematic version of a feeling that predates the current AI moment entirely: the unease of standing in an empty version of a familiar place. If you want the deeper account of where that feeling comes from, see what the backrooms are and why liminal spaces feel nostalgic. The AI question gets attached to it mostly by association — "AI-generated backrooms" is a popular image-generator prompt, so the two ideas sit next to each other in people's minds even though the movie isn't part of that.
This is the part most people miss: the director is one of the more outspoken critics of generative AI of his generation. In 2026 interviews he described its consequences as "genuinely harmful" and told Variety that generative tools defeat the purpose of filmmaking for him — that he gets no creative enjoyment from them. So the person most associated with the backrooms on screen is, if anything, on the skeptical side of the AI debate. Worth knowing before assuming the film is an AI showcase.
Where AI genuinely enters the Backrooms story is at the studio level. In June 2026, A24 reportedly took a $75 million investment from Google to develop AI filmmaking and storyboarding tools with DeepMind — and a chunk of A24's audience reacted badly, especially after the studio had earlier been criticised for using AI-generated promotional art. That's a real debate worth having. But it's about a studio's business strategy, not about how this particular film was made or what it's about.
Here's the honest part. liminals.space uses AI. We're not going to hide that behind softer language, and we think Parsons is broadly right about the thing he's criticising: AI used to replace human artists, to scrape and launder other people's work, or to flood the internet with disposable slop is a real harm.
What we built is a narrower, more personal thing, and the distinction matters to us:
You can disagree with that line, and plenty of people will. We'd rather make the argument in the open than pretend the tool isn't what it is. If the idea of a private, made-only-from-your-own-memory version of the backrooms appeals to you, that's exactly what this is for.
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The Backrooms movie, explained · Is the backrooms real? · What are the backrooms? · Backrooms vs liminal space vs dreamcore