A24 Just Dropped the Final ‘Backrooms’ Trailer and May 29 Cannot Come Fast Enough

Few horror concepts born from the internet have had a journey quite like ‘Backrooms.’ What began as an anonymous photograph and a cryptic caption on a 4chan message board in 2019 slowly evolved into one of the most fertile creepypasta myths of a generation, a sprawling, communal nightmare about falling out of reality and into an infinite maze of humming fluorescent lights and musty yellow carpet that seemingly goes on forever.

It was Kane Parsons, a YouTuber known online as Kane Pixels, who truly brought that mythology to life when he uploaded a short found-footage film titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” in 2022. The nine-minute video depicted a cameraman slipping through the floor of familiar reality into something deeply wrong, and the horror community lost its mind. That original video has since surpassed 71 million views, cementing Parsons as one of the most exciting voices in analog horror.

Now the final trailer for A24’s ‘Backrooms’ has arrived, and it confirms that this theatrical adaptation carries the same suffocating dread that made the original series so compelling. The two-minute video presents a combination of grainy camcorder footage and more conventional filmmaking, offering a careful look at the film’s liminal atmosphere and its psychological stakes.

The story follows furniture store owner Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who discovers a strange doorway in the basement of his showroom that opens into an expanding, apparently infinite carpeted maze. Renate Reinsve co-stars as Dr. Mary Kline, a psychologist who must enter that dimension to find her missing patient.

Behind the camera sits Parsons himself, who at just 20 years old becomes the youngest director to ever work with A24. The achievement is all the more remarkable given that Parsons originally built his entire YouTube series using Blender and Adobe After Effects, with characters’ faces rarely shown and the horror carried almost entirely by atmosphere and environment.

Throughout production, Parsons was deliberate about preserving the internal logic of his world, telling The Hollywood Reporter that he always tried to stay away from the idea of the backrooms being a dreamy headspace where rooms could simply change when a character turns around, because the real terror comes from how the space preys on the human brain’s ability to map and understand environments.

The production attracted major Hollywood names behind the scenes, including James Wan and Shawn Levy as producers, alongside a screenplay from Homeland and Westworld writer Will Soodik. The practical commitment to the material was extraordinary, with over 30,000 square feet of Backrooms sets physically constructed for the film, a build so massive that people reportedly got lost on set. The supporting cast includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia.

With ‘Longlegs’ director Osgood Perkins also serving as a producer on the project, Parsons has described Perkins as a strong mentor figure during the making of the film. The pedigree assembled around this debut is almost absurdly stacked for a first-time feature director, but anyone who watched Parsons build an entire cinematic mythology from free software in his bedroom already knew the talent was real. The feverishly anticipated liminal space horror film hits theaters on May 29.

Whether ‘Backrooms’ becomes the definitive big-screen horror event of the summer may come down to whether A24 and Parsons can translate that deeply personal, internet-native dread into something a packed theater can feel, so share your thoughts below on whether the final trailer has you convinced they pulled it off.