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The Backrooms is A24's 2026 horror film, directed by Kane Parsons (the YouTuber known as Kane Pixels), based not on a novel or a true story but on the internet's backrooms aesthetic: the yellow, empty, fluorescent-lit liminal space that began with one anonymous photo around 2019. Released in late May 2026, it opened to a reported $118 million worldwide (on an $81.5M U.S. debut), the biggest opening weekend in A24's history, and went on to become the studio's highest-grossing film. The short version of why it worked: the feeling it sells was already in millions of heads before there was ever a movie to put it on screen.
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The Backrooms is a found-footage horror film built around a simple, dread-soaked premise: a person slips out of normal reality and into an endless, empty interior that looks like the back half of an office building nobody has used in years. There are no real exits, the lights never turn off, and the wrongness is structural rather than monstrous. It is the cinematic expansion of a feeling that started as a single image and a two-line caption.
What makes its existence remarkable is its path to the screen. This was not a studio commissioning a horror property. It was the opposite: a piece of internet folk-culture, made and refined by thousands of anonymous people, that became powerful enough to pull a major release into being.
The aesthetic itself dates to 2019, when an anonymous photo of a yellow, carpeted, empty office space appeared on an image board alongside the idea of "noclipping" out of reality and ending up somewhere you were never meant to be. (We unpack that origin in detail in What are the backrooms?.)
In 2022, a teenager named Kane Parsons, posting as Kane Pixels, released a series of short found-footage videos that gave the aesthetic motion and sound: handheld camera, panic, that sickly fluorescent hum. They went enormously viral and effectively defined what the backrooms looked like as moving image rather than still photo. That body of work is what led, a few years later, to the A24 feature he directed before he was old enough to rent a car in some states.
So the lineage is unusually clean: an anonymous photo, then a community, then one young creator's viral interpretation, then a film. The movie is the top of a pyramid built almost entirely by the internet.
On paper, a found-footage horror film about empty hallways should not triple a studio's opening-weekend record. A few things explain why this one did.
First, the audience already existed and already cared. For years, the backrooms had been one of the most participated-in aesthetics online, with a built-in generation of people who felt ownership over it. A film wasn't introducing them to a concept; it was giving a shared, formless feeling a place to gather on a Friday night.
Second, the feeling travels. The dread of the backrooms is not culturally specific or reliant on a mythology you have to study. Almost everyone has stood in an empty version of a familiar place (a school after hours, a closed mall, an office at 3am) and felt the floor tilt slightly under them. The movie monetised a near-universal experience that had simply never had a marquee before.
Third, the story behind it was its own marketing. A self-taught creator going from anonymous uploads to the top of the box office is the kind of narrative that sells tickets to people who don't even like horror.
The best thing the movie understands is that the backrooms are not frightening because something is chasing you. They're frightening because the place itself is wrong in a way you can't quite articulate: the proportions are off, the light is too even, and the emptiness feels intentional, as if the space is waiting rather than abandoned.
That's a harder effect than a jump scare, and it's the same effect that makes liminal spaces feel nostalgic and uneasy at the same time. The film leans on recognisability over spectacle, which is exactly why it lingers after you leave.
Here's the one thing a film, by definition, cannot do: it can't make the haunted place yours. The backrooms on screen are someone else's hallway. They're brilliant, but they're generic by necessity, designed to feel like somewhere without being anywhere you personally lived.
The deepest version of this feeling isn't a set. It's the specific bedroom you grew up in, the specific corridor of your old school, the specific waiting room you sat in once and never thought about again until just now. That's the thing that actually drops the floor out from under you, because the memory is real even when the image is wrong.
That's what liminals.space exists to make. You give it photos of the real places you remember, and it rebuilds each one as its own backrooms version, empty and graded onto worn VHS tape, unmistakably the place you knew. Not a stock hallway. The one from your life.
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What are the backrooms? · Is the backrooms real? · Why liminal spaces feel nostalgic · What would my backrooms look like?