Kane Parsons
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
This feature—like Blair Witch Project, Chronicle, and Cloverfield before it—makes an evocative case for the genre…
Like the aforementioned Creep or The Blair Witch Project — both of which evidently haunt Parsons’ search history — Backrooms is terrifying at face value, especially when framed as faceless found footage…
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
Much of the film thrives on its atmosphere, leaning into a lo-fi, analog horror aesthetic that clearly draws inspiration from early found footage staples like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity,” while filtering those influences through the sensibilities of the creepypasta generation.
…first person perspective is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project…
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
(Perhaps The Shining is ground zero for this subgenre?)
You know, spaces that exist outside their usual context, like school hallways, closed shopping malls or the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” spaces usually buzzing with activity but now devoid of people and sparking a surreal feeling of dread and dislocation.
While there are scenes which draw on and resemble iconic moments in The Shining and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
Backrooms is in the same surreal-unreality dream-state lineage as The Shining (those hallways!)
…evoking the impossible architectural geography of The Shining, where rooms take on haunting dimensions with hallways that exist outside the confines of spatial logic…
Backrooms has been linked with the likes of Exit 8, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as examples of Internet-inspired, liminal-space horror…
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink has proven a harbinger of the 2020s horror cinema scene…
At one end of the spectrum lies the story-absent Skinamarink while the other champions the absurdist Being John Malkovich, each leaning into their own brands of madness experiencing in-between spaces.
A movie like Skinamarink didn’t work for me because I needed more of an actual plot.
Like "Skinamarink" before it, "Backrooms" may not entirely live up to the impossible hype surrounding it for everyone.
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, which threads a similar strand of analog nostalgia through a murky, nocturnal child’s-eye perspective…
Curry Barker’s Obsession is presently setting box office records, single-handedly ushering in this changing of the guard.
Curry Barker’s excellent Obsession exploded this aesthetic into the mainstream only a few weeks ago…
…not every reviewer is as sure you’ll be as “obsessed” with The Backrooms as you may have been with the recent Obsession release…
The previously mentioned Iron Lung and Obsession are proof of that.
…most recently punctuated by the bloody, highly profitable explosion of Curry Barker’s spine-chilling Obsession (2026)…
Like Curry Barker, the 26-year-old behind the box-office phenomenon Obsession, and Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind Australian breakout Talk to Me, Backrooms director Kane Parsons is a creature of the internet.
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
Synecdoche New York…
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
Backrooms is one of the most out there art-horror features since Eraserhead.
…after a particularly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre-reminiscent scene between Clark and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve)…
…a DALL-E text-to-image AI-generated version of the dinner table climax from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
Being John Malkovich…
At one end of the spectrum lies the story-absent Skinamarink while the other champions the absurdist Being John Malkovich, each leaning into their own brands of madness experiencing in-between spaces.
Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999)…
The unnerving tone of the short films in the series successfully established a sense of world building, even if his approach borrowed heavily from Lost and other sci-fi works…
“Backrooms” feels like a mash up of “Identity” (2003) meets “The Shining” (1980) meets “Smile” (2022) meets Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, “House of Leaves,” meets “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Lost,”…
See “Exit 8” (2025) instead if it is still playing in theaters near you.
Backrooms has been linked with the likes of Exit 8, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as examples of Internet-inspired, liminal-space horror…
…the recently released Exit 8 (man in an endless looping subway corridor)…
…recent films such as Exit 8 have also emerged from or are adjacent to game logic…
…takes a great premise and fails to build a fully satisfying narrative around it (see "Undertone," "Obsession," Genki Kawamura's second feature "Exit 8," and the third film from Daniel Goldhaber, "Faces of Death"")…
The previously mentioned Iron Lung and Obsession are proof of that.
Coming off self-financed YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s $50 million-grossing early-2026 success Iron Lung…
…from Mark Fishbach’s surreal, slow cinema-adjacent Iron Lung to Curry Barker’s brutal black comedy Obsession…
Completes a trilogy of sorts of YouTube content creators pivoting to massively successful feature filmmaking. Backrooms success, like that of Obsession and Iron Lung before it, represents something significant in the modern history of cinema.
Even including something like Stranger Things, what with Async channeling the Hawkins Lab researchers, complete with monitoring an alternate dimension/portal to another world called the Upside Down, itself a sinister foil for the “real world” Hawkins.
Some of the beats resemble the final season of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” while avoiding the maliciousness of 1408 (these rooms aren’t evil; they just are).
It seems likely that the next big burst of fresh ideas in the genre will come from the internet, from creepypastas to memes to the digital versions of urban legends, the kind that provided the engine for haunted-podcast movie Undertone.
…takes a great premise and fails to build a fully satisfying narrative around it (see "Undertone," "Obsession," Genki Kawamura's second feature "Exit 8," and the third film from Daniel Goldhaber, "Faces of Death"")…
The design feels reminiscent of unhinged choices like the stop-motion rabbit monster from Dante’s segment in the 1983 Twilight Zone film…
…all of what Peter McCallister (John Heard) appeared to have in Home Alone, a primary 90s movie that Gen Z homes in on mostly for how incredulous they are that someone could afford to live in a house like that…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
influenced Backrooms (2026)
Themes
…a fun house of distorted memories in both the Eternal Sunshine sense…
Much of the film thrives on its atmosphere, leaning into a lo-fi, analog horror aesthetic that clearly draws inspiration from early found footage staples like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity,” while filtering those influences through the sensibilities of the creepypasta generation.
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
…while avoiding the maliciousness of 1408 (these rooms aren’t evil; they just are)…
…expands his viral liminal-horror web series of the same name into something more ambitious than a straightforward creepypasta adaptation like "Channel Zero."