Born from an image posted on the internet in 2019, “backrooms” have become one of the most fascinating myths of web culture. Their adaptation to the cinema by Kane Parsons transforms this digital labyrinth into a horrifying and psychoanalytic experience.
From an image posted on the 4chan forum in 2019 to a horror film enjoying a spectacular first weekend (more than $100 million collected worldwide): the itinerary of backrooms and one of the most fascinating web phenomena of recent years, and the confluence point of an entire genealogy (and lexicology) of horror made on the internet, mixing concepts like liminal spaces, creepy pastas, analog horror or cursed images.
As a reminder, the backrowho are this otherworld, materialized by a maze of offices with yellowed carpets and incoherent architecture, in which one can “glitcher” by accident and find oneself trapped, threatened by the strange entities that exist there lurking. Part of a post on a forum (their seminal image accompanied by a small text), they will quickly become an extremely dense mythology, augmented by the additions of Internet users creating, consciously or not, the first fully participatory work of horror. In 2022, Kane Parsons – aka Kane Pixels – young 3D animation prodigy, gave backrooms their terminal incarnation through a captivating web series, mainly composed of found footagewhich will confirm the extent of the phenomenon.
A hallucinatory psychoanalytic experience
It is the same Kane Parsons, 20 years old, who approached A24 to transmute this abundant mythology (but deemed unadaptable) into a calibrated horror film, without betraying its original concept.
We follow Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a forty-something with a dissolute life, freshly left by his wife, who discovers in the back room of the furniture store close to bankruptcy that he runs, an entrance to the backrooms. In other words, a passage towards a parallel reality represented in a labyrinth of corridors and rooms devoid of meaning and defying reason. His unhealthy obsession with the place will push his therapist (the always magnetic Renate Reinsve) to go looking for him once he disappears, and to in turn experience the danger of backrooms.
The first discovery, and the main addition of the film, consists of transforming the backrooms into a hallucinatory psychoanalytic experience. Brilliantly rendered visually, they become a sort of conceptual antechamber, reshaping the reality and the unconscious of those who pass through them, with all that this implies of imperfect reconstructions and bugs. Like an artificial intelligence that would be asked to recreate reality, but whose small imperfections and inconsistencies would sow fear.
A collective unconscious that came to life on the web
This psychoanalytic dimension (the backrooms like a deranged double of the unconscious of the person who passes through them), absent from the original idea, allows the film and its characters to come to life, and manages, with an economy of dialogue and large, impressive explanations, to digest in its own way a concept as elusive and hybrid as that of backrooms. But this despite, it must be admitted, a certain emotional deficit regarding the journey of its two main characters.
But the great feat of the film lies in its ability to encapsulate in 1 hour 50 minutes the composite aesthetic, resulting from multiple references – and more or less abstruse for anyone not in the habit of getting lost in the underbelly of the Internet – having presided over the construction of backrooms. Like the final expression of a collective unconscious having come to life on the web, and whose exposure to the general public takes place in the cinema.
In this sense, Backrooms is without a doubt the first major film to come from web culture, and will certainly carry, like the concept it adapts before it, its share of more or less relevant or eccentric theories and exegeses. This is the very nature of backrooms. We will see, why not, an allegory of a contemporary world and a reality swallowed, digested and reshaped by artificial intelligence and algorithms. Or perhaps the song of the sign of degenerate capitalism, with these successions of utilitarian pieces which, emptied of their usefulness, become an aberrant and infinite office cemetery. Or the expression, as said above, of a collective unconscious which would have aggregated and distorted the unconscious of all its unexpected visitors? To your theories.
Backrooms by Kane Parsons, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass… In theaters June 17, 2026.
