A24’s The Backrooms: When Viral Creepypasta Creeps Into the Big Screen

By the flickering glow of your midnight screen, a labyrinth carved from memetic dread begins to pulse with cinematic life—A24’s The Backrooms is no longer just a whisper among redditors. It’s real. It’s rolling cameras, casting magic, and it’s about to unmoor your nightmares from their digital cages. Let’s step inside, shall we?

The hum comes first. Low, persistent, like a fluorescent chorus in a cathedral of beige. The walls stretch on forever, jaundiced and unkind, and the carpet smells of something that died decades ago—if time even exists here. You’ve seen this place before, haven’t you? On Reddit threads, in eerie TikTok loops, whispered about in YouTube horror dives. The Backrooms—a viral creepypasta that slithered from the depths of 4chan into the fevered collective mind—has finally broken through the membrane of screens and is becoming something far more tangible: an A24 film.

Yes, the studio that drenched the world in folk terror (Midsommar), grief-haunted corridors (Hereditary), and surreal psychodrama (Under the Skin) has decided to pry open those liminal doors and let us inside. And the internet? It’s vibrating louder than the fluorescent lights in those cursed halls.

From Meme to Myth to Movie

It started with a single unsettling image back in 2019—a sickly yellow maze, walls too close for comfort, with a caption that read like a dare: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” That one sentence cracked reality wide open for thousands of digital wanderers. Soon came stories, then full-blown lore, until teenage filmmaker Kane Parsons—just 16 at the time—turned the myth into a haunting analog horror series on YouTube.

Now, at 19 years old, Parsons is stepping behind the camera again, this time under the sacred (and blood-stained) banner of A24. That alone feels like a glitch in the matrix—what were you doing at 19? Certainly not directing one of the most anticipated horror films in years.

“It’s a dream, and it’s terrifying in the best way,” Parsons confessed in a recent interview snippet circulating in fan forums. “The Backrooms is about unease, about being lost in something familiar but wrong. A24 gets that. They want to make it unsettling, not cheap.”

Casting Shadows: Who’s Staring Back at Us?

For months, whispers drifted through Reddit threads and entertainment news. Who would brave those buzzing corridors? Names floated like phantoms: Cristin Milioti was rumored early on, though she didn’t stay attached. Then, reality warped and solidified:

• Chiwetel Ejiofor—the magnetic force from Doctor Strange—anchors the cast with his trademark gravitas.

• Renate Reinsve, the Cannes darling from The Worst Person in the World, joins him, bringing a fragile intensity that might shatter under humming lights.

• And as the hallways stretched deeper, we learned of Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia, rounding out a cast as unpredictable as the spaces they’ll inhabit.

Fans have been quick to weigh in. “I mean, it could speak to the quality of the script,” one user mused on r/A24. “Really excited with this cast!” Another chimed in with existential dread of their own: “He’s 19? Really? What am I doing with my life?”

Behind the Buzzing Walls

Filming crept into motion under the working title Effigy, quietly beginning in Vancouver in July 2025 and wrapping by mid-August. A blink. A heartbeat. Or maybe just a fluorescent flicker.

What’s striking isn’t just the speed—it’s the weight behind the scenes. Horror maestro James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw) is producing alongside Shawn Levy of 21 Laps (Stranger Things), ensuring that the project isn’t just a meme cash grab but a meticulously sculpted descent into paranoia.

Why This Matters

This isn’t the first time the internet spawned a monster, but it might be the first time it birthed an art-house darling. The Backrooms speaks to something raw and modern—the fear of in-between spaces, the dread humming under everyday architecture. It’s the stuff of liminal dreams, now magnified through a lens polished by the studio that thrives on discomfort.

And for those who lived and breathed this myth online, its ascension feels personal. It’s a shared hallucination crossing over into collective reality. A24 isn’t just making a movie—they’re canonizing a piece of digital folklore.

So, What Awaits Us in the Backrooms?

Yellow walls. Endless hallways. A hum you can feel in your teeth. And somewhere, something watching. If A24 delivers on its promise, this film won’t just scare—it’ll infect your perception of space itself. Every empty office building, every too-quiet hotel corridor will become suspect.

Parsons summed it up best:
“The Backrooms isn’t a monster story. It’s an existential one. It’s about getting lost in the spaces no one should ever see.”

Are you ready to wander?