When it comes to making movies, source material can come from anywhere. Books are a perennial favorite; Project Hail Mary, one of the most successful movies of 2026 so far, is based on a novel by Andy Weir. Increasingly, Hollywood is turning to video games for inspiration, with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie being the other most successful movie of 2026 so far.
And in May, a new movie called Backrooms looks like it’s going to be the sleeper hit of the spring, and it’s based on digital folklore that originated in 2019.
From copypasta to potential blockbuster
The origin of Backrooms
As you can see, Backrooms is about a man named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers a kind of alternate dimension in the back of his furniture store. The impetus for the movie started in 2019, when an anonymous 4chan user started a thread asking people to post disquieting images. Alongside it, they posted a picture of an empty warehouse space with sickly yellow wallpaper, an image that had been circulating the internet since 2011.
People posted plenty of creepy images in response, but it was a comment from another anonymous user that got everyone’s imagination going. “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in,” they wrote. “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
Before long, people were making up stories about the Backrooms on places like Reddit, inventing new levels and populating it with creatures. According to one branch of the lore, Level 0 is the Lobby, based on the original image. Level 1 is a huge parking garage, Level 2 a network of hallways lined with pipes, and so on. It became a kind of shared storytelling experience, complete with schisms. Some fans didn’t like the new additions and preferred to focus on the feelings that arose from the original picture. They’ve broken off to form their own online communities.
For better or worse, the lore around the Backrooms started to congeal in 2022, when teenage filmmaker Kane Parsons made his contribution.
The Backrooms cinematic universe is born
Just not in cinemas
On January 7, 2022, Kane Parsons — then 16 years old — posted a nine-minute short film to YouTube entitled “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” Created almost entirely with Blender and Adobe After Effects, the video follows a student in the early 1990s who’s making a movie with his friends when he unexpectedly falls through a gap in reality and ends up in the Backrooms. He wanders around for a while exploring this strange space, until he’s caught by some kind of creature, with only his camera making it back to the real world.
As of April of 2026, this short film has over 74 million views on YouTube, and will probably just keep racking them up the closer we get to the release of the new movie. Parsons went on to create over a dozen more short films set in this continuity, introducing new elements to the mythology like ASync, a California-based research and development company that opened a doorway to the Backrooms in the first place. Their plan, seemingly, is to try and sell this pocket dimension to customers as storage and living space. They’re also working with the U.S. government on potential applications. The problem is that the Backrooms are an unstable, sometimes deadly place, and the company may have bitten off more than they can chew.
That story is delivered in drips and drabs in Parsons’ videos and looks like it will continue in Backrooms, where Parsons will make his directorial debut as a major motion picture director. The trailer hints that Parsons will be bringing over elements of the mythology he established on YouTube into the movie; for instance, the people in hazmat suits look like they’re ASync employees, and the image of furniture piled up against the yellow walls of the Backrooms are plucked directly from the YouTube videos.
Backrooms is part of a new wave of hit movies sourced from the internet
Hollywood is adjusting as best it can
This isn’t the first time Hollywood has based a movie on a piece of internet folklore. For example, 2018’s Slender Man movie was based on a creepy digital myth that originated on the Something Awful forums in 2009. The difference is that, since the mid-2010s, Hollywood has started taking this kind of homegrown storytelling more seriously. It’s no longer just something your kids do online that you don’t get, but a major cultural force. That’s apparent in how slick and polished the Backrooms trailer looks. The Slender Man movie was pilloried by fans and critics alike, but my bet is that Backrooms will get a much warmer reception, because we’re now ready for something like this.
YouTube is at the center of a lot of this cultural funneling. Five Nights At Freddy’s was an independent horror game that became hugely popular largely thanks to YouTube streams. Now, the two Five Nights At Freddy’s movies have made over half a billion dollars between them. The YouTuber Markiplier, himself known for streaming Five Nights, scored a huge hit when he self-produced the movie The Iron Lung, which made $50 million on a budget of just $3 million earlier this year. And now Kane Parsons’ Backrooms videos are being turned into what looks like a hit horror movie. Increasingly, the path forward for movie theaters looks like it runs through YouTube.
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Lost in translation
If there’s a downside to internet folklore like the Backrooms getting mass exposure like this, it’s that some of the magic and mystery of the original community experience is drained away. Before, there was no one correct interpretation of what the Backrooms were, or what they meant. But Hollywood movies have a way of crystallizing things. After Backrooms drops into theaters on May 29, 2026, it will be the official version of the story for a lot of people.
Then again, the internet is pretty reliable when it comes to serving up things new and strange. And if Hollywood studios are smart, they’ll be paying attention.
- Release Date
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May 29, 2026
- Director
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Kane Parsons
- Writers
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Roberto Patino
