Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an unsettling series of rooms in a furniture storeA24
Backrooms
Kane Parsons, in cinemas now
There is something uniquely disturbing about a room that seems to have no reason to exist. A corridor without destination. A chair half planted into the floor. A couch positioned just wrongly enough to become a threat. In Backrooms, the feature debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, ordinary objects are stripped of their everyday usefulness and made alien. A shadow, a carpeted hallway, a buzzing fluorescent light: all become evidence that reality has lost its bearings.
Parsons, better known online as Kane Pixels, first developed Backrooms as a YouTube phenomenon inspired by a photo of a yellow-wallpapered, fluorescently lit room posted online by an anonymous 4chan user in 2019. The poster asked for other “disquieting images that just feel ‘off'”; another user responded with the concept of “the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow… and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in”. An internet horror phenomenon was born.
