Backrooms (2026) Review - Kane Parsons Just Changed Horror Forever
Those familiar with the concept of the Backrooms will recall a vast, mostly empty series of rooms. Musty carpeting. Rectangular fluorescent light panels dotting the ceiling. Walls of faded, urine yellow. Every room connected to another room, and another, and another, extending in all directions without apparent limit. Some contain stacked furniture. Some are partitioned, with square holes that look like passageways. And the place just keeps going.
Kane Parsons, twenty years old and making his theatrical debut, has been here before. He built this place. He has spent four years and 25 episodes learning its specific grammar of dread. And what Backrooms the film demonstrates is that he has emerged from that apprenticeship as something genuinely rare: a filmmaker with a visual language entirely his own.
The history that leads to this moment is worth briefly recounting. When Sony Pictures released Slender Man in 2018 – a studio attempt to translate an internet creepypasta mythology into conventional theatrical horror – the result was a cautionary tale about what happens when corporate machinery attempts to metabolize internet mythology without understanding what made it disturbing in the first place. The Slender Man had thrived in the margins of culture, in the found footage aesthetic of Marble Hornets and the collaborative world-building of a community that had made its own folklore. Given a budget and the machinery of studio filmmaking, it lost the quality that had made it matter. It became just another horror film, and not a particularly good one.
Backrooms does not make that mistake, and instead succeeds in ways that the Slender Man adaptation never came close to. The story grounds the Backrooms mythology in a deceptively simple psychological framework. Clark is a man whose life has collapsed around him – failed architect, failed marriage, reduced to operating a discount furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, where he performs television advertisements in a pirate costume with the dead eyes of someone who has stopped being embarrassed by his own degradation. He sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve with a tensile, watchful anxiety. She coaches him to recognize the repeating patterns that have kept him trapped – the loops of behavior and thought that constitute their own kind of infinite room, connected to another room, and another, with no apparent exit.
The parallel is not subtle. The NeverEnding Story plays on a television set in the background of one scene. The screenplay announces its metaphors plainly and early. But the lack of subtlety suits the film’s larger project, because Parsons is not really interested in concealment. He is interested in immersion. The thematic architecture exists to support the experiential one – to give emotional weight to what would otherwise be purely atmospheric filmmaking. And as atmospheric filmmaking, Backrooms is extraordinary.
Utilizing the technology of its 1990 setting, the film opens with a found footage cold open – a brief, destabilizing glimpse of the Backrooms’ particular dread in its most elemental form, before the film proper introduces us to Clark and his ordinary misery. The choice to use found footage selectively rather than as the film’s primary visual language is one of the production’s most significant departures from the webseries, and it is the right call. The YouTube episodes derived their power from the implications of the format – someone filmed this, someone survived long enough to upload it. The feature film, working at a different scale and with different resources, needs to do something more. It needs to let us inside the space in a way that the distancing effect of found footage would prevent.
Parsons proves to be a wizard of mood who works in the tradition of early David Lynch – sharing Lynch’s love of industrial cosmic sound design, his fixation on the mysteries of electricity, his willingness to let atmosphere do the work that plot might otherwise be expected to perform. The production design is as incredible as it is disturbing. As Clark penetrates deeper into the Backrooms and reality becomes increasingly unstable, the rooms distort and mutate in ways that draw on the uncanny valley not as a technical limitation but as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Breathtaking transitions and camera work disorient without losing the viewer. The minimalist electronic score, which Parsons developed across the webseries and has now brought to theatrical scale, reaches its fullest expression here – not scoring the action so much as constituting the environment, the sonic equivalent of that fluorescent hum made physical.
Reinsve and Ejiofor, both such great actors, are the perfect presences at the center of all this. Ejiofor’s Clark communicates the feeling of a man searching for catharsis – for some meaning that would make his accumulated failures cohere into something other than pure waste – even as he senses that the catharsis the Backrooms offers might be a nightmare. He is a person whose interior landscape has exteriorized itself around him, and the horror of the film is inseparable from the horror of being him.
Backrooms is, at its best, the rare horror film that understands the relationship between external dread and internal state – that the spaces we fear tell us something about the spaces we carry within ourselves. The infinite yellow rooms are not simply a nightmare. They are a diagram of a particular kind of modern suffering: the isolation, the repetition, the sense of being trapped in patterns that predate conscious choice and resist conscious intervention.
What remains to be seen is how this universe expands from here. The webseries built 25 episodes of mythology. The film advances it meaningfully while suggesting that the full scope of what Parsons is building remains, tantalizingly, just out of reach. Beyond the next wall. Down the next corridor. In the room connected to this one, and the room connected to that, extending outward without limit.
Backrooms is in theaters now.