We’ve got adaptational inception here, friends: Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is a film adaptation of a YouTube series based on a creepypasta that originated as a one-off comment in a 4chan thread about “disquieting images that just feel off.” Jesus.
This isn’t like that shitty attempt to make a Slenderman movie like in 2018 (another case of genre producers being a day late and a dollar short). This is a particularly influential one, as much as a creepypasta can get — it’s about a sort of liminal space beyond reality, an office-park bardo, in which one can get trapped with scary things — and it inspired Severance and an arc on American Horror Story, of all things.
Now, Parsons and A24 think this concept is ready for The Big Screen, and they’ve got great talent on board to make it happen: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Reneta Reinseve, and Mark Duplass in front of the camera, Shawn Levy and James Wan producing behind it all. And, as such, they’ve dropped a spoopy low-fi teaser trailer for you to procrastinate and panic to.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis for Backrooms:
“A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”
Well, that’s not much help. Here’s thread containing the comment that led to the creepypasta that inspired Backrooms, then:
“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
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you“
Get lost in Backrooms when it hits theaters on May 29.