Horror Watch: Backrooms (2026)

Watched:  10/04/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Kane Parsons

During lockdown, I went down a lot of YouTube holes.  One of the ways I wasted my hours was watching "urban exploration" - videos of people going into facilities and structures which have been abandoned.  

These videos cover everything from empty hospitals with equipment collecting dust to prisons with rotting bars to defunct mega-construction projects in China.  Some folks hit old forts and underground military bunkers left over from the Cold War.  And houses - often mansions, that have simply been left to rot.

The videos are always marginally disturbing.  Buildings are *designed*.  They have purpose where form meets function.   You can see the massive expense for these places, from the labor needed to build them to the equipment and furnishings.  And then... something happened.

The buildings, tunnels, etc.. are left to decay.  America's former malls are a wild thing to behold.  Nature reclaims what it can, rain comes through ceilings, vines and mold grow in odd places.  a layer of dust a half inch thick may have formed in the older examples.

What's haunting is that people occupied those spaces, worked, lived, fought, loved and did everything else a body can do in those spaces until that *something* happened, and all the life in that building was told to cease. 

And so I didn't understand what I was looking at the first time I saw a Backrooms video.  It was just the next item up proposed by the algorithm.  It looked like just another one of these videos, until it obviously was not.

And if you don't know what you're watching at 2:00 AM while a backrooms video unspools, it is a wild ride.  This is the first one I watched.  Watching the original Backrooms videos the first time was as close to the experience of that opening weekend of Blair Witch Project as anything I've experienced since the late 90's.  Until, of course, you realize "oh, okay.  How clever."

The videos were created by a 16-year-old wunderkind named Kane Parsons - now 21.  I will get out in front and say - this movie is a shockingly strong debut from a guy with what seems minimal formal training, who did not come up through the ranks - he just had a vision and proved out his concept online.  He will go on to do mind-blowing things.

Anyway, someone decided to give the kid a Hollywood budget and let him go nuts.  Which, in today's actuary-driven Hollywood, is nothing less than a miracle.

That said, the power of the original videos was that they seemed like genuine found footage, and they had a certain verisimilitude tucked in among the guys jumping fences and dodging security to walk around the aforementioned locations.  

But knowing it's all a movie?  Where do you even go with that?

The videos don't really have characters or arcs.  It's just uncanny footage that *feels* spooky because it doesn't make much sense.  It's the Lovecraftian chill of seeing things beyond your understanding, and experiencing dream-like environs in real time.  And I don't know about you, but my dreams regularly are about opening a door and finding out "oh, there's a whole extra floor in my house I never noticed before.  I should show Jamie."

So, does it work as a movie?  

Yes and no.  

If you're looking for an *experience*, I think Backrooms (2026) fits that bill.   Much as I enjoyed Gravity in 3D but don't ponder the story it told and have had no desire to rewatch it on my television, what will stay with me about Backrooms will be the imagery. A combination of what seems to be abandoned retail space (ooooooOOOooo!  eerie!) and then oddball shapes and organization to the space with inexplicable placement of furniture and retail fixtures and furniture of decades past gives it a definite dream-like quality.  See: The Black Lodge.

A strong element of Parsons' YouTube videos was the notion of endless liminal space (something generations younger than Gen-X seem freaked out by), especially empty showrooms in need of a cosmetic overhaul.  There's a sort of dingy early-90's-ness to Parson's view, which in turn is the remnants of the 70's and 80's that are ready for the scrapyard.

Expect beige walls, drop ceilings with buzzing overhead fluorescents, and carpet in need of a clean.  And then...  Escher-esque reshapings of those spaces, littered with cast-aside relics of the past, and then that same furniture to just incomprehensibly from the walls themselves.  

The movie makes the point you can't describe something no one has seen, so I'll stop here.

The story sets up characters in crisis, a therapist (Renata Reinsve) and her patient, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  Clark is going through a divorce and living in a furniture store he manages.   His life is coming apart.  It's said he drinks too much though we never see it.  He has not been able to pursue his dream of being an architect, something he got the degree for, because his wife was likely suffering from depression and unable to finish the law degree she sought and he couldn't stop his job to go take his own risks.

I won't get into "oh, an architect!  How symbolic!" because it's really solid thinking for a first-timer.   

His therapist recalls a past that involved some sort of abusive parenting that led to our therapist having her own spell with a complete mental collapse in her youth.  

I don't know that anything about the characters works very well, although they're well-played by the actors.  It's the type of movie where no one thinks not to do the very inadvisable thing.  No one bothers to get witnesses or back-up or call the police.  And, okay.  That's the kind of movie it is to keep the ball rolling.  But it just makes me think the script needed a few more passes and some guidance from someone more seasoned.

I am okay with a movie this odd that doesn't explain anything.  I've seen Possession.  I get that's part of what makes Phantasm work.  To draw a different comparison, I've seen Stalker a few times.  But this movie decides to explain itself, and with all things uncanny - see all of Stranger Things - it just makes it seem small and kind of ridiculous.

Forcing a story on The Backrooms was always going to be hard.  And this feels very of-today.  It's basically the same maze we got in The Void in Thunderbolts*.  Therapy.  Unmanaged trauma.  You get the picture.

I can see why The Kids(tm) like it.  

What I've not seen discussed, and eventually struck me as funny, is that what seems to creep out the filmmaker is the notion that not everything is new.  The aesthetic of this movie is that the past is an undiscovered country and walking among the ruins of that past conjures feelings.  

I get the liminal space thing to a degree,* but it also feels like a product of finding spaces that are without immediate sensory input that triggers an explanation of itself is what the viewer is to find unsettling.  We do not trust a room with the furniture cleared.

But the movie also feels like an unconscious product of what I think is not something I dwell upon, which is whether a space has been *updated*.  

I've seen in other YouTube videos younger people who range from tut-tut'ing to outright pearl clutching in their travel videos that a hotel, etc.., in modern America, has not spent the money to stay trendy and changed to what is the latest in design.  And we've been watching with quiet wonder as Millennials bought their homes and decided what they needed to do was make them monotone, painting brick and wood black and gray, color a thing of some other past (I hear the pendulum is swinging) and not approved of by influencers.

Anyway, as the economy tanks, get ready for a whole less refurnishing to keep up with trends.

And maybe because my generation grew up in the wake of the 20th Century where we knew we were in the bones of the past, as we were constantly reminded how great the prior decades had been, and our childhoods were spent in the 70's and 80's financial crashes (we had them, too, youths!), it just never seemed *that* weird to walk into a space with stained drop ceilings, thirty-year-old carpets and bad lighting.  Showing me showrooms of 1983 is just that, at some point.

Even outside of his creepy space, Parsons would have us creeped out by a furniture store that looks like it should have shuttered five years ago.  Or someone sleeping in a bedroom set that was on-trend when Miami Vice was a hit.  The real terror here is a lack of foot traffic in retail space when you can just buy a couch on Wayfair.com.

Like in his original series, he adds an uncanny horror-monster, but this one is so on-the-nose, you're reminded that the author of the text was an 18 or 19-year-old.  One is just starting to be haunted by their past, perhaps, at this age.  (Hold on, kids, because it just keeps piling up over the years!)

Anyway - the movie is... fine.  It's an amazing achievement for someone so young and untrained.  Parsons could go very, very far, but I'd recommend he pair with an older writing team for any extension of this project.  I expect a lot of what feels derivative in the movie is more along the lines of convergent evolution (and that whole dining table scene surely felt like a mix of three or four things I've seen before).

What I don't see is what people were saying about this movie being about AI.  That feels like overlaying the current social issues onto something that it was not intended to support.  

I will admit, at some point I kind of lost focus.  It's the problem of showing me the same thing over and over in a two hour movie and having characters with no real arc.

The ending was relatively satisfying in a way, but also just made me think "oh, they're going to do like 10 of these things".  So, get ready for something to have "lore" that would be much better off without it.

*In real-life, the closest I've ever come to this was working at the library, and my pal Shay, the security guard, mentioned "well, you know, the building has tunnels".  Which I did not know and had worked there for years.  So he took me into a meeting room we used all the time that had two locked doors at the back.  He opened those, and there was another set of doors, which opened into a massive, multi-story space.  Essentially it was a machine room the size of an auditorium, designed for HVAC management, but also had space enough for a shop if you needed one, and had access to the legendary tunnels beneath the university campus.  What graffiti that was there was written in pencil and was from the 1980's as fresh as had it been written the day before.  Stark white and oddly *clean* for a space I expect people entered maybe 10 or so times a year.