The pipeline of popular YouTube creators becoming feature horror directors is reaching Roman Aqueduct levels. While Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks was a modest festival fave, the recent massive success of Markiplier’s Iron Lung signals, perhaps, that millions of online views can translate to millions at the box office. One of the higher profile efforts was A24 picking up Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels, to make a feature version of his wildly impressive analog horror series, The Backrooms, based on the creepypasta. Three years in the making, and we have our first teaser for the movie.
It’s certainly an evocative teaser. We hear the voices of—presumably—stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve as they discuss finding something. A room. It just keeps going and going. It’s like the rooms themselves remember, but “the more times it remembers something, the less it does.” Accompanying these words, we see an unfriendly but otherwise normal living room with a recliner. The camera pans down through the floor to the same room, but less. Until eventually we see the familiar endless hallways with the off-white wallpaper and carpeting and the nauseating neon lights. It’s the Backrooms, baby!
The poster is equally sparse, resembling a wallpaper swatch. Good, minimalist stuff, which you’d expect from this project.
Kane Pixels grew to prominence on YouTube with his initial short film, The Backrooms, which showed his superb skills at using Blender and other digital rendering software to create unfathomable and creepy vistas. That led to an analog horror series exploring more of the Backrooms—where you go when you No-Clip out of reality. He later created another, even weirder series called The Oldest View about an abandoned mall with a monster of a parade float of a bearded historical figure lurking. It’s bizarre, but I liked it.
In addition to Ejiofor and Reinsve, the cast includes Mark Duplass, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ Finn Bennett, and Shrinking‘s Lukita Maxwell.
Backrooms hits theaters May 29, 2026.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.