A24’s smash hit horror movie Backrooms was born from director Kane Parsons’ ultra-popular viral YouTube series, but it leaves out a ton of the lore that helped The Backrooms establish itself as the most thoroughly-explored iteration of the original creepypasta. As a teenager and over the course of a couple of years, Parsons developed a 24-episode web series consisting mostly of found footage that depicted the experiences of unfortunate individuals who found themselves in an infinite maze of uncannily empty rooms. Built mostly in the free computer graphics platform Blender, Parsons’ series also introduced the organization known as the Async Research Institute, a mysterious collective dedicated to opening a door and studying the space that lies outside our own reality.
Across the 24 episodes of varying length, Parsons managed to flesh out a staggering amount of background to virtually elements of the Backrooms concept. While the central mystery about what the Backrooms actually are remains unsolved, Parsons’ series explores several areas of the infinite space via both random people who fell in and Async researchers seeking to map and utilize the space. A24 backed Parsons’ vision for what amounts to a companion piece to his web series in Backrooms, but it leaves many big questions unanswered and many important elements from the web series untouched.
Why You Should Trust Me: Horror is my bread-and-butter at MovieWeb, and has been my comfort zone for movies, TV, and books for more than 20 years. I specialize in separating the themes from the screams, and am a firm believer that horror provides one of the most ideal canvases on which to create art that helps both the creators and the audience process the trauma and terror in their own lives. In that regard, Backrooms is one of the most poignant examples of how truly impactful horror can be.
8
“No-Clipping”
The original way into the Backrooms uses phrasing from the gaming world.
In Backrooms, Clark finds a door to the Backrooms in the basement of his store, and it allows for seamless passage between reality and the Backrooms. In Parsons’ original series, most of the non-Async explorers of the Backrooms wind up there accidentally, after “no-clipping” out of reality. No-clipping is a video game phrase, and refers to a backend cheat code that allows for characters to essentially phase through solid surfaces by turning off physical boundaries. In the series, people essentially glitch out of our reality and into the Backrooms by stepping in just the wrong spot.
7
Null Zones
There are further anomalies within the Backrooms themselves.
Once inside the Backrooms, a discolored bit of wall or a change in elevation could be the result of a weak point in reality, known as a “null zone.” In Parsons’ lore, the null zones allow people to phase into and out of the Backrooms, and occasionally things like birds or insects find their way in that way. The null zones can also act as acoustic echo chambers, allowing sound to pass between two points in space or even two points in time. They can distort time, and even lead into entirely different levels of the Backrooms with wildly different physical characteristics that don’t match the typical monotone yellow halls.
6
Time Dilation
The movie doesn’t even scratch the surface of the twisted physics of the Backrooms.
It’s somewhat implied by Mary arriving at Clark’s store and finding a buildup of mail shoved under his door, but Backrooms doesn’t really get into the level of time dilation the Backrooms are capable of. Because the space lies outside reality, the physics of our conventional reality don’t apply in the same way. As a result, the passage of time in the Backrooms can be wildly different. Ten minutes in the Backrooms could equal ten days in reality, ten months, or ten seconds. It’s completely unpredictable, and doesn’t even match between levels of the Backrooms.
5
The Lifeform, or Bacteria
The movie introduces Still Lifes, but ignores other terrifying monsters.
Backrooms introduces the uncanny monsters known as Still Lifes in the narrative surrounding Clark and Mary, but Parsons’ web series introduces an even more frightening type of creature known colloquially as the Lifeform or Bacteria. The true nature of the humanoid creatures is a mystery, but they are theorized to be a massive, living colony of mutated Hay bacillus bacteria, given that one of the bodies recovered from the Backrooms (presumably killed by the Lifeform) is covered in the bacteria.
4
How Async Opened the Threshold
The web series provides more detail behind the science.
Backrooms gives some loose hints as to the science behind how Async first reached the Backrooms, with the organization’s former existence as a company making MRI machines indicating there was some sort of electromagnetic element gone wrong that resulted in the first entry. In reality, a prototype built by a separate laboratory was perfected by Async (the “Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System”), and it used powerful and concentrated electromagnetic fields to rip open reality. Parsons’ web series shows the testing and first successful opening of the door recognized as the Threshold, which is what Mary and the Still Life Captain Clark are eventually pulled out of at the end of Backrooms.
3
The Backrooms’ Real-World Connection
Async’s entry into the Backrooms triggered a real-world disaster in Parsons’ lore.
In the course of opening the Threshold, Parsons’ Backrooms lore indicates that Async triggered a seismic disaster, and he even points out that it was an infamous earthquake from the real world. Per the web series, the opening of the Threshold triggered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a devastating occurrence along the San Andreas Fault that did more than $6 billion in damage, killed 63 people, and injured more than 3,500 others. There are no real-world connections in Backrooms, and the assumed reality that Clark and Mary live in even seems to be somewhat uncanny itself.
2
The Spike in Missing Persons
A24’s movie only hints at the disastrous effect of opening the Threshold to the Backrooms.
During Phil’s interrogation of Mary at the end of Backrooms, he notes that more and more doors like the one in Clark’s basement have been opening, and Async has no idea why or how to stop them. Parsons’ paints the situation as even more dire in the web series, as one of the episodes, appropriately titled “Missing Persons”, indicates that once the Threshold was open, missing persons cases skyrocketed, presumably because so many people were stumbling into the Backrooms, never to be seen again as they were either lost to the insanity of the labyrinth or killed by the monsters inside it.
1
The Async Research Institute’s True Endgame
Async plays dumb with Mary in the A24 movie.
It’s clear that Phil is not telling Mary the whole story at the end of Backrooms, as even when he breaks out some of the information that likely was supposed to remain classified, his assessment is essentially that Async’s only intention is the exploration of the mysterious space. In the web series, it’s explicitly stated that the point of the experiment for Async was to access the Backrooms, stabilize entry points, and use the infiniteness of the space to solve the steadily worsening storage and housing crises of the world. It’s a seemingly altruistic motivation, but underneath that stated goal are the typical corporate capitalist motivators like profit, ambition, and control. It’s possible that it gets explored more in the potential Backrooms sequel, but there’s nothing at all in Backrooms.
- Release Date
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May 27, 2026
- Runtime
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110 minutes
- Director
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Kane Parsons
- Writers
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Will Soodik
- Producers
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Chris Ferguson, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, James Wan, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson, Michael Clear, Osgood Perkins, Peter Chernin, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy
