Kane Pixels’ Backrooms (2022-2025) Review - The YouTube Masterpiece You Need to See Before the Movie
The idea behind the Backrooms began, as so many genuinely strange things do, on the internet.
In May 2019, an anonymous user posted a single image to the paranormal section of 4chan. The image showed a vast, empty room – or rather, a suggestion of rooms, extending in all directions without apparent limit. Yellow walls. Fluorescent lighting. Damp, patterned carpet. The particular quality of institutional space that exists just outside the edge of memory – the kind of place you feel you have been before without being able to say when or why. Another user responded with a caption that has since become one of the more remarkable pieces of internet mythology of the past decade:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
What makes this piece of anonymous writing so effective is its specificity. The horror it invokes is not the horror of the extraordinary – of monsters or demons or supernatural forces beyond comprehension. It is the horror of the mundane made infinite. The office. The waiting room. The corridor that goes on slightly longer than it should. The particular dread of institutional space encountered at the wrong hour, in the wrong state of mind, with no one else around.
This image and its caption spawned an entire creative ecosystem – fan art, collaborative world-building, dozens of imitative videos of varying quality that flooded YouTube in the years that followed.
The Backrooms concept was not the first piece of internet mythology to generate this kind of creative explosion. A decade earlier, the Slender Man – an impossibly tall, featureless figure in a suit, created in a Something Awful forum thread in 2009 – had demonstrated that the internet was capable of producing genuinely resonant modern folklore from almost nothing. The Slender Man Mythos found its most sophisticated artistic expression in Marble Hornets, a YouTube webseries by independent filmmakers Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage that originally ran from 2009 to 2014 and used the found footage format to construct a genuinely unsettling narrative around a film student’s investigation of his missing friend. Marble Hornets understood that the found footage format was not merely a stylistic choice but a philosophical one – that horror filmed as though it were documentation of real events occupies a fundamentally different psychological register than horror presented as entertainment. It implied that someone had survived long enough to upload the footage. It made the audience complicit in the act of watching.
What the Backrooms concept needed to become a truly great work of horror fiction was a single sustained artistic vision capable of doing for its particular mythology what Marble Hornets had done for the Slender Man. A filmmaker who understood that the format was not the point – that the format was the vessel, and that what mattered was what you put inside it.
Then, in January 2022, a then-teenaged filmmaker named Kane Parsons – under the YouTube handle Kane Pixels – uploaded a nine-minute video that changed the conversation.
Backrooms – the webseries that Parsons would continue developing over the following three years, eventually accumulating 25 entries – is one of the most remarkable works of independent horror filmmaking produced in the internet era. That it was created primarily by a single young person working with only basic filmmaking resources, 3D animation software, and a minimalist electronic score makes it not less impressive but more so. Parsons understood that the most effective use of the Backrooms concept was something that most of its imitators missed entirely: that the horror was never in the monsters. It was in the space itself.
The series follows the activities of a fictional organization called the Async Research Institute, which has developed technology capable of creating a doorway into the liminal space of the Backrooms and has been systematically exploring and documenting what they find within… even when that doorway threatens to create more rifts drawing the occasional unsuspecting victim into the Backrooms as well. The corporate framing is deliberate and brilliant. By filtering the Backrooms through the aesthetic vocabulary of institutional documentation – grainy security footage, clinical research videos, bureaucratic procedures applied to phenomena that resist all bureaucratic containment – Parsons gives this impossible space a texture of reality that more straightforwardly fantastical approaches could not achieve. The found footage format, which lesser filmmakers have reduced to a delivery mechanism for jump scares, becomes in Parsons’ hands a genuine storytelling tool. The camera does not simply show us the Backrooms. It implies that someone thought to bring a camera, which implies that someone thought they were going somewhere they would want to document, which implies a whole world of institutional decision-making and human ambition that the images themselves never fully explain.
The series plays with length and format in ways that consistently subvert expectation. Episodes range from thirty seconds to forty-five minutes. Some are dense with narrative information. Others are almost purely atmospheric – extended passages of empty corridors and ambient sound that function less as traditional storytelling and more as immersive experience, inviting the audience to sit with discomfort rather than resolving it. This refusal to provide the satisfactions of conventional horror plotting is either the series’ most frustrating quality or its most interesting one, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.
The series builds to its most fully realized entry in “Found Footage #3”, the 23rd episode, which runs 45 unrelenting minutes and follows a young man named Ravi who discovers that the Backrooms has somehow expanded into his own basement. The escalation from domestic normality to complete existential horror is handled with a patience and precision that many professional horror filmmakers do not command. Parsons allows the impossible to intrude incrementally – a door that should not exist, a space that extends beyond the physical dimensions of the building containing it, the first distant sound of something moving in the dark – before committing to a pursuit sequence of sustained, claustrophobic dread. Comparisons to author Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves are impossible to ignore in this entry, and the trailers for the feature film continuation only amplify those parallels. The minimalist electronic score, which throughout the series has functioned as the sonic equivalent of the fluorescent hum described in that original 4chan caption, reaches its fullest expression here. The sound design is not there to frighten you. It is there to make you feel, on a physical level, the specific quality of wrongness that the Backrooms represent.
The debate within the analog horror community about whether Parsons’ work constitutes analog horror proper or is better understood as found footage with an analog aesthetic is, ultimately, a taxonomic question that the work itself renders somewhat irrelevant. What matters is that Parsons has created something with genuine artistic coherence – a consistent visual language, a developing mythology, and a tonal commitment to a very specific kind of dread – that stands apart from the vast majority of internet horror content by virtue of being, simply, better. The cinematography, the 3D animation, the lore that accumulates across 25 entries into something that rewards sustained attention: these are not the achievements of amateur content creation. They are the achievements of a filmmaker.
That filmmaker is now making his theatrical debut with a feature continuation produced by A24, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in the lead roles. The resources available to him are of a fundamentally different order than those he has worked with across three years of YouTube uploads. What remains to be seen is whether the Backrooms concept – which derives so much of its power from its lo-fi texture, institutional griminess, and footage of a quality that looks like it was not meant to be seen – can survive the transition to theatrical exhibition without losing the specific quality that makes it disturbing.
These 25 episodes suggest that Kane Parsons understands his material well enough to navigate that transition successfully.
The original 25-episode Backrooms webseries is available now on YouTube.
The feature film continuation debuts on May 29 exclusively in theaters.