What began as an anonymous 2019 4chan post featuring an eerie photo of an empty, yellow-carpeted room in a Wisconsin hobby shop soon grew into a vast urban legend. Three years later, then-16-year-old VFX artist Kane Parsons adapted it into The Backrooms (Found Footage), a horror short that amassed over 90 million YouTube views and caught the attention of Hollywood. A mere $10M later, the feature film adaptation Backrooms has become one of the biggest successes of the year and the highest-grossing film in studio A24’s history.
It’s 1990, and frustrated wannabe architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a struggling discount furniture store when a hidden portal opens in the basement, leading to a seemingly endless labyrinth of what appears to be mildly tacky office space. Clark explores and invites others to join him, but there’s more than an off-putting vibe lurking in these corridors, and the dangers soon become very real. It isn’t just creepy for creepy’s sake; the mystery is ultimately revealed (mostly), but Parsons & Co. do their best to make sure we’re pretty shaken up by the time the end credits roll.
Backrooms has an aesthetic like none I’ve seen in quite a while, with top-notch production design and visual effects that seamlessly extend the 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms built for the production. There are some long takes of low-res video, shot at full quality and artificially degraded to convincingly simulate the look of VHS, while the bulk of the movie was captured at 8K, presented here in a 4K master. They had the audacity to put a fine geometric pattern on the paper covering the walls, and it reproduces perfectly, while the big, wide shots are sharp and stable with lots of detail. The high dynamic range is tasked with conjuring the harsh look of fluorescent lighting, while the wide color gamut needs to visit at least fifty shades of yellow.
All of the environments are keenly rendered sonically, but it’s the furniture store and, of course, the strange rooms underneath that have the most distinctive character, largely defined by the buzzing of those aforementioned lights. The disc’s Atmos track is the way to go if your system supports it, transporting us to Clark’s bizarre universe. There are well-integrated offscreen cues, the classic voice-behind-the-camera for the POV shots, and Parsons worked with Edo Van Breemen to compose the music, often more like noises that exist to inspire tension (and I mean that in a very good way).
The audio commentary brings together Parsons—a talented young man with apparently lots to say—and Van Breemen with the VFX supervisor and sound designer. There’s also a quick look at the props in storage, a 16-minute overview of the visual effects, and then we can get an up-close look at how two key sequences were created. The 26-minute “making of” provides the deepest discussion, while the bonus footage is an extended “research” video by… no, that would be a spoiler. This is another slick digipack from A24, with half a dozen postcards tucked inside, styled to look like photos discovered in some poor soul’s found camera.
The creativity required to expand something so minimalistic into a fully realized motion picture must be saluted. Backrooms is a slow burn, to be sure, a masterclass in cinematic atmosphere that will surely be emulated. Experience it here first.
Backrooms – Movie Details
- FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray
- STUDIO: A24
- THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR: 2026
- ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1
- HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
- AUDIO FORMAT: Dolby Atmos with TrueHD 7.1 core
- LENGTH: 110 mins.
- MPAA RATING: R
- DIRECTOR: Kane Parsons
- STARRING: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia
Our Ratings
★★★★★★★★★★ Movie
★★★★★★★★★★ Picture
★★★★★★★★★★ Sound
★★★★★★★★★★ Extras
Where to buy:
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