In the world of horror movies, Backrooms is something brand new. But on the internet, the Backrooms are well established, with 24 official chapters and thousands of hours of fan-made content backed by a Wiki’s worth of original lore. As Inverse’s Chrishaun Baker explained when the Backrooms movie trailer was first released, Backrooms lore is equal parts community-sourced — the phenomenon originated on a message board devoted to “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” — and auteur-driven.
21-year-old Kane Parsons is the key architect of that lore, the creator of the Backrooms YouTube series that forms the backbone of the new A24 film. So we asked him: Should viewers who are new to the Backrooms brush up on some explainer videos before seeing the movie? If so, what are the key things to know?
It’s “a thing I’ve long debated and grappled with,” Parsons tells Inverse, noting that he’s spent the “majority of [his] time” over the past several years thinking about the continuity and mythology of the series. “The hope has always been to create a film that works for my audience, as well as people who have no familiarity with the Backrooms whatsoever,” he adds.
That being said, the story “build[s] off of what’s there, so it’s going to be inherently more compelling if you’re a fan of the original works, because you can appreciate some of the structural details behind what appears on screen,” Parsons says, adding that the films is “built to have a little more depth for people who have spent time with [the Backrooms] prior to this” while also being easy to follow for new viewers.
New Characters
Backrooms the movie does this by introducing two new characters: Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the depressed, recently divorced owner of a struggling furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), his therapist. The storyline that follows is pretty simple: Clark discovers the Backrooms through a portal in the basement of his store; he tells Mary about it, making her concerned for his mental health; she follows him into the Backrooms, where scary things happen.
That’s a simplified version, of course. But it does point to some concepts from the series that are important to the film, like...
No-Clipping
First is “no-clipping,” a term taken from video games and repurposed for Backrooms. In a game, it refers to a glitch that allows a player to walk through walls; it means basically the same thing here, as Clark literally stumbles into the alternate world of the Backrooms through a soft spot in the wall of his furniture showroom. It’s a spot that he later marks with electrical tape, allowing others to follow him in (and, crucially, back out) of the eerie alternate reality.
Entities
Backrooms opens with a standalone scene that’s modeled after Parsons’ original “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” a first-person nightmare that begins with an unseen cameraman materializing in the Backrooms and, well, freaking out — as we all would in that scenario. That’s when we spot the first of several “Entities” that appear from behind dark corners and out of deep shadows to terrify wanderers in the Backrooms — which later includes Clark’s employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), followed by Dr. Kline.
The first Entity spotted in the film looks like a giant spider crossed with an AT-AT Walker from Star Wars, but there are hundreds of Entities lurking in the Backrooms, several more of which appear in the film. (No spoilers on which ones.) Where do they come from? What do they want? This is left vague, and that’s part of the horror.
Async
Another crucial piece of lore from Parsons’ Backrooms series is Async, a former biomedical firm that’s gotten into some pretty freaky stuff since it pivoted into exploring the Backrooms through an artificially created interdimensional portal known as “the threshold” at its headquarters in San Jose, California.
Much about Async’s origin and purpose remains mysterious, and without revealing any spoilers, only some of the questions surrounding it are answered in the movie — although it does give a definitive answer to a long-standing fan debate about the nature of the Backrooms, namely whether it’s one big complex or a layered series of infinite complexes, each shaped by the person exploring them.
For his part, Ejiofor has an unconventional approach to the series lore: “I think you can go the reverse as well, seeing the film and then going down the rabbit hole,” he tells Inverse. “I think a lot of people are going to do that.”
