The Backrooms Movie Opens May 29 in Theaters

A24’s Backrooms movie opens May 29, turning Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube horror into a feature film.

The Backrooms movie opens in theaters worldwide on May 29, 2026, after A24 teamed with filmmaker Kane Parsons on a feature adaptation of his online horror series. Parsons’ first short hit YouTube in January 2022 and the series has since grown into a 22-video universe with 77 million views.

What changed

The Backrooms started as a 2019 4chan post pairing a yellow, empty room image with a short warning about “noclipping” out of reality. The idea spread through Reddit and later YouTube, where Parsons, then 16 and posting as KanePixels, gave it a cinematic form with found-footage style, Blender animation, and a 1990s video look.

That short, KanePixels’ The Backrooms (Found Footage), pushed the concept into mainstream horror fandom and grew into an ongoing series. The lore expanded with the Async Research Institute, the “Complex,” and Project KV31, a program framed as a way to use the Backrooms as infinite space for storage and housing.

• Origin: an anonymous 4chan post in May 2019
• Breakout short: The Backrooms (Found Footage) in January 2022
• Series size: 22 videos and counting
• Audience scale: 77 million views on the first short

The feature film shifts away from Parsons’ YouTube storyline. Instead, it follows a furniture-store owner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who finds a Backrooms entrance in his basement and tells his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve.

Why it matters

This is a rare internet-to-studio handoff where the original creator is still driving the adaptation. For horror fans, that lowers the odds of a generic brand extension and raises the chance that the movie keeps the unnerving logic that made the Backrooms work online.

For developers and indie creators, the path is a useful case study in how a small, tool-based project can scale. Parsons built the original breakout with Blender and After Effects, then turned a niche creepypasta into a studio release backed by A24.

The release also shows how a fandom can splinter and grow at the same time. Backrooms lore now includes strict canon fans, expansionist fan theories, and a feature film that may pull new viewers into the same maze-like mythos.

The big question is whether the movie can keep the Backrooms’ internet-born dread intact once it leaves the screen-size of a browser and becomes a ticketed theater release.