By Robert Scucci
| Published
For years, I’ve been saying that YouTube creators, specifically those focusing on analog horror, will be the future of cinema. This past weekend, Backrooms proved my point, and I’m fighting back the urge to spend this entire article gloating about it. But the truth is, I have no right to brag. I’m just a guy who watches a lot of movies. The real hero of the story is Kane Parsons, who built out the Backrooms lore on YouTube and now has his name attached to a directorial debut that brought in $118 million on its opening weekend against a $10 million budget.
He proved the concept that I have been championing for some time now: kids on YouTube have their finger on the pulse, and Hollywood doesn’t.
So, does Backrooms live up to its hype? In so many words, yes. In addition to absolutely cleaning up at the box office, the film currently boasts an intimidating 90 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s worth noting, however, that the Popcornmeter score currently sits at 74 percent. As far as I could surmise, this dip in reception comes from long-time fans of the YouTube series who felt underwhelmed by the film.
Of course, you’ll get avid defenders of all things Backrooms saying that the haters “lack media literacy.” The problem is that nobody knows what “media literacy” means. People are allowed to dislike or feel underwhelmed by things that you like, and calling them “media illiterate” is just a cheap way to avoid engaging with valid criticism, and opening up a wider discussion on something that we’re all rooting for.
As somebody who has been following The Backrooms YouTube series since the early days, I think Backrooms played out exactly how I expected. But I am expecting more at some point, and I’m framing this review around its potential rather than what I got. Kane Parsons has said that he’s not finished, so let’s celebrate the fact that the concept has been proven and see where he takes it.
Needs To Be Appraised Through The Lens Of Potential
There have already been countless thought-pieces on Backrooms, so here’s my take. Parsons triumphantly took his vision to the big screen, but it felt like there were caveats. Not in the form of studio interference or anything like that, but in the form of trying to get this thing to appeal to a wide, mainstream audience. The original series on YouTube is a niche thing for an online audience. Distilling its essence down to the most oversimplified terms, it’s found-footage content of a person running through an endless labyrinth of yellow corridors. The environment is oppressively liminal. Its eeriness comes from the fact that everything looks so familiar, yet so uncanny at the same time.
It’s House of Leaves, if House of Leaves could ever successfully be turned into a visual project (it can’t).
But therein lies the problem. While The Backrooms became incredibly popular with online communities, there’s no way to make it appeal to a wide audience without some concessions being made. Think about it. If you’re primed for innovative found-footage experiments set in a liminal hellscape, then you’re already all in.
For a wide release to work, however, there needs to be characterization and some semblance of a story arc. Yes, there’s lore about the Async Research Institute in the original web series, but that’s not enough to get the average person, who maybe watches two or three horror movies a year, invested. So what’s the solution? Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve).
The film tells the story of a bitter, divorced, alcoholic furniture store owner facing bankruptcy, and his accidental discovery of the Backrooms while searching for an electrical disturbance at Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, the furniture store in which he currently lives after losing his house. There’s obvious tension between him and Mary, who doesn’t believe him when he says he found a seemingly endless stretch of yellow hallways beneath his store, and the film spends a lot of time playing with that dynamic and its inevitable fallout.
While Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve deserve all the praise that’s being thrown at them, their characters’ individual stories are not what drew people into the original YouTube series. It’s the liminal spaces and the never-ending sense of dread that something is always creeping around the next corner, ready to pounce, forcing you to run without thinking, only for you to find yourself even more lost and even more terrified. It’s a feedback loop of nightmare fuel that works exceptionally well in the form of an online mini series.
However, the concept of a Backrooms feature film first had to be proven to put Kane Parsons on the map. There needs to be an actual story to introduce this universe to a mainstream audience, and Will Soodik’s screenplay does so by giving us a compelling narrative about Clark, Mary, and the few other characters they interact with. They both experience a slow-burn psychological horror buildup driven by past traumas and present shortcomings, which manifest within the mysterious realm hidden beneath Clark’s furniture store. In my efforts to keep this spoiler-free, I’ll leave it at this: we get a good story, but I don’t think that’s what people want here.
The Concept Has Been Proven, And We Need To Let It Grow On Its Own Terms
I’m conflicted in my assessment of Backrooms because I feel like Parsons and Soodik had a pretty impossible task ahead of them. They had to reconcile the sheer vibe and mystery of the YouTube series with a mainstream audience’s need for conventional storytelling. We’re talking about an intellectual property centered around an insidious company trying to map out an endless, theoretically impossible space that looks like an alternate reality that some people just so happen to walk into without any rhyme or reason.
That’s an incredibly hard sell.
That’s like saying, “Hey Mom! You love horror. You have to check out this new movie.” And when she asks you what it’s about, you answer, “Hallways and stuff.” That’s not how a low-budget horror movie makes back 12 times its budget (and counting).
Knowing this, Soodik and Parsons give us Clark and Mary, along with Mark Duplass’ Phil, one of the researchers working for Async. It succeeds with a mainstream audience because it attaches a human element to a place that lacks humanity. And if you want up-and-coming filmmakers to have a chance at all, their debut can’t just appeal to your niche interests. Your mom, or whoever in your mind is a casual genre fan, needs to buy into it too.
So, did Backrooms live up to the hype? Absolutely. More importantly, it proved that esoteric concepts coming from teenagers on YouTube are helping pave the way for a horror renaissance, and we have Kane Parsons, who was 17 years old when he started posting the shorts to YouTube, to thank for that. He took something niche and put it in front of a wide audience, and generally speaking, they’re gobbling it up. Now that the concept has been proven, I hope Parsons is given total creative freedom he deserves to continue building this thing out.
For now, I feel confident in my assessment that Backrooms needed its storytelling to succeed and capture the world’s attention and imagination. Now that general audiences know what the Backrooms are as a concept, I think Parsons is smart enough to run with the premise and keep building it out however he sees fit. This is the start of something beautiful, and any disappointment you have about how the storytelling was handled in the film should be gut-checked with the following question: If the whole thing played out like an extended version of the YouTube shorts, would your mom even consider watching it?
In this case, we need to think about Backrooms, not in terms of the movie that diehard fans want to see, but rather the movie that mainstream audiences need to see.
Backrooms saw its theatrical release on May 29, 2026.
