Backrooms

In 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels) released a nine-minute found-footage short that quietly became a sensation, racking up over 78 million views. Now, partnered with A24, the 19-year-old filmmaker makes his feature-length directorial debut with his original concept, becoming the youngest director in the studio's history.

The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a man who discovers an endless, disorienting infinite maze hidden beneath the basement of his Ottoman Empire building, and Renate Reinsve as his therapist, who descends into that labyrinth herself after Clark vanishes without a trace.

The Backrooms has its roots in one of the internet's most enduring creepypasta's. For the uninitiated, a creepypasta is a short, user-generated horror story copied, pasted, and spread across the internet, not unlike a chain letter. The creepypasta that inspired the film traces back to a single eerie photograph, taken by an unknown photographer during a 2002 renovation of an old furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and posted to a 4chan thread with an unsettling message in 2019. See for yourself.