The stench of wet carpet, the buzz of fluorescent light, the abundance of dated yellow wallpaper – welcome to The Backrooms. If that description doesn’t exactly fill you with dread, just wait until you enter the labyrinthian world brought to screen by Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels). A place you unexpectedly fall into with no warning, a never-ending maze of dull office rooms you can never leave, a nightmarish land inhabited by a stuttering, screaming monster, this might just be one of them most unforgettable horror shorts we’ve seen in some time.

A film that gets under your skin and refuses to leave, The Backrooms begins with handheld camera footage of amateur filmmakers creating what looks like a truly awful movie. As the director informs his camera-operator that they need “a wide-angle and then we’re done”, we watch as the footage begins to widen, as the person in charge of the camera takes tentative steps backwards. Those steps don’t last long however, as soon we hear him stumble and see the camera tilt upwards, before going black and landing in a strange space, lit by artificial light.

From here on out, just 40-seconds into the short’s nine-minute duration, nerves will begin to shred as we witness this unfortunate cinematographer begin to explore the disorientating space, desperate to find a way out. Pitched as a found footage movie, the whole film is told from this first person perspective and much like other horror films that employ the same technique – The Blair Witch Project, REC – being trapped in this restricted viewpoint, the buzz of the lighting and the echo of your footsteps your only companion, only works to amplify the terror of the piece. 

With the story of The Backrooms beginning with a photo, posted on 4chan’s paranormal board, of a strange, discoloured room added to a thread of ‘disquieting images that just feel off’, the backstory really kicked off when a commenter left the following description to go with the image:

From here, the internet took The Backrooms concept and expanded into the stuff of creepypasta legend, spreading to Reddit, Twitter, Tik-Tok and even spawning a computer game before becoming a viral YouTube sensation. That doesn’t mean that Parsons was on to an easy win with his version of The Backrooms legend though, with the filmmaker obviously putting a lot of consideration into the short’s aesthetic and backstory.

Visually, The Backrooms may open with grainy handheld live-action, but once we descend into this perpetual hellscape we’re thrust into a CGI world cleverly disguised by retrograding the aesthetic and maintaining the handheld camera perspective. The transition into the computer generated world is fairly smooth, a cleverly inserted focus-pull and the yellow lighting disguising the artificial nature of the images at first and although it becomes more obvious that the visuals are digital later on, Parsons does a great job in maintaining the analogue feel of the piece.

With the film gaining instant traction online (it currently has over 21m views), Parsons didn’t just sit back and let the short rack up views, instead he focused on the backstory and world building to drum up even more interest in his take of The Backrooms. Explaining the origins of The Backrooms as a science-experiment gone wrong, much like ‘The Upside Down’ in Stranger Things, provided the filmmaker with a plethora of fresh opportunities to explore his fictional universe and he continues to do with so impressive creativity. Releasing a series of additional films, on his YouTube channel, he’s frequently transported viewers back into his liminal space through informational videos, autopsy reports and motion detection footage, each time adding a little something extra to his limitless universe. He’s not the only one expanding this particular version of The Backrooms either, with his short inspiring fan theories, reaction videos and more.

Having made a name for himself on YouTube with a series of Attack on Titan videos it’s not clear how long the filmmaker will continue his Backrooms project before moving on to something else. So dive in while you can…just make sure you know how to get out again.