Backrooms (2026): Box Office Records, Reviews & Where to Watch

Backrooms debuted to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, the biggest opening in A24's history, more than tripling the studio's previous record (Alex Garland's Civil War, $25.5 million in 2024). It has since crossed $200 million worldwide to become A24's highest-grossing release ever, and it is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. At twenty, Kane Parsons is the youngest filmmaker to direct a number-one box-office movie.

It did this in a crowded month. Two weeks earlier, Focus Features opened Obsession, another horror film from a YouTube-creator-turned-director, Curry Barker, made for around $750,000. Obsession became Focus's biggest movie ever at more than $220 million worldwide and is the highest-grossing horror film of 2026 so far. Two internet-native filmmakers broke their distributors' all-time records in the same month, and Backrooms held its numbers despite opening opposite Obsession's word of mouth.

Backrooms opened Friday, May 29, 2026, with Thursday previews on May 28. It is Kane Parsons' first feature. He created the look of the Backrooms videos online, and A24 hired him to direct the film adaptation. It is still in theaters, and there is no digital or streaming release yet (see the streaming question below).

May 2026 was a crowded month for horror. Focus Features' Obsession opened two weeks earlier on May 15 and was performing strongly, and Paramount moved Passenger up a week to May 22, reportedly to avoid opening against Backrooms. Backrooms outgrossed both.

A24 co-financed the film with Chernin Entertainment and gave it the Memorial Day weekend slot, a large commitment for a first-time director. The opening weekend exceeded projections.

On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user posted a photograph to 4chan's /x/ board: a vacant, yellow-walled office room lit by fluorescent lights, captioned with a short piece of fiction about "noclipping" out of reality and ending up in the Backrooms. The photo was real, taken in an ordinary building that was mid-renovation.

The Backrooms is a creepypasta: a fictional horror story or urban legend that gets copied and circulated across internet forums and social media, built up collectively rather than authored by one person. Most creepypastas stay as text and never gain much traction. The Backrooms grew unusually large. That one image produced thousands of pieces of fan fiction, competing wikis, a fictional research organization called "The M.E.G.," and a numbered system of "levels" that fans catalog in detail.

The original photo also fixed the look: the mustard walls, the carpet, the overhead fluorescent hum. The fan community rejected contributions that deviated from it. If a piece did not match the original frame, it was not treated as the Backrooms.

Kane Pixels posted his first Backrooms video in January 2022, at sixteen: a nine-minute found-footage short that turned the static image into a physical space with its own geometry and a creature moving through it. It went viral within days. His follow-up videos built a serialized universe around a fictional research organization cataloging entities and exploring deeper levels. By the time A24 signed him, his videos had tens of millions of views and a recognizable visual style.

Now that it is out: critics certified it Fresh and audiences praised the atmosphere, though some came away wanting more from the payoff. It is not a jump-scare film. Parsons' shorts almost never use them, and the feature does not either.

The fear comes from the spaces themselves: long hallways, repeating carpet patterns, constant fluorescent hum, and symmetry that reads as unnatural. When something does appear, it tends to appear in the middle distance, with the camera moving past rather than cutting in to confirm what you saw. The feature works the way the shorts did. That consistency is a large part of why A24 hired Parsons.

The style is usually called liminal-space horror. A liminal space is a transitional place, somewhere designed for moving through rather than staying in: an empty office corridor, a parking garage, a bridge at night. Such spaces read as wrong on camera when held longer than expected, because they are empty of the activity they were built for.

This fits the pattern of A24's horror output (The Witch, Hereditary, Talk to Me): slower films built on dread rather than frequent scares, released to an audience that has shown up for that. The most common comparison for Backrooms is Skinamarink (2022), covered in the next section.

Skinamarink is the film Backrooms gets measured against most often, and the comparison is mostly fair. Both treat empty architectural space as the threat and use patience as a horror device, and neither is for viewers expecting a body count.

They differ on two main points.

The first is framing. Pixels frames wide and architecturally, with long corridors receding to vanishing points, so the whole space is the subject and you always know where you are. Skinamarink director Kyle Edward Ball frames in extreme close-up on inanimate objects, such as corners, carpet patterns, or a static TV screen, and often withholds any sense of the room's layout.

The second is what gets shown. Pixels puts his entities on camera. Ball keeps almost everything off camera: voices, sounds, and brief glimpses.

If you liked Skinamarink, Backrooms is an easy recommendation. If you did not, the differences above are large enough that it may still work for you. The two share an approach, but the execution differs.

Pixels' shorts have a recognizable look: a handheld camera in long takes, little to no dialogue, and horror that comes from the spaces more than from events. Going into the feature, the choice he faced was whether to stay inside the rules of the universe his shorts established or to expand it, at the risk of either being called slow or losing the YouTube fans invested in the lore. His production company, Atrium Archives, owns the lore, which meant the direction stayed his to set.

A24 has a track record of giving first-time horror directors control. Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) and Robert Eggers (The Witch) both debuted there, and both of those films divided audiences on release before their reputations settled.

On casting, A24 gave Parsons a far deeper bench than his shorts had. Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange, The Martian) leads as Clark, a furniture-store owner, with Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) as a psychologist, plus Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. Before release, directing an ensemble of that caliber was the largest open question about Parsons, whose shorts used small casts and little dialogue.