Movies
‘Backrooms’ Movie Teaser Trailer – A24 Horror Film in Theaters May 2026
A24 escorts you into a liminal nightmare in the upcoming horror movie Backrooms, a big screen expansion of director Kane Parsons’ massively viral YouTube horror universe.
From producer James Wan, A24 will release Backrooms in theaters May 29.
The very first teaser trailer has been unleashed this morning…
“I found something… I found a place,” a man says in the unsettling teaser trailer. “It’s massive in there. It just goes on and on and on. All these rooms. This place built them. Actually more like it remembers them. And the more times it remembers something, the less it does.”
In the movie, “A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”
The Backrooms movie cast includes…
- Chiwetel Ejiofor
- Renate Reinsve
- Mark Duplass
- Finn Bennett
- Lukita Maxwell
- Avan Jogia
The science fiction horror film is based on the world of Kane Parsons’s viral videos. A24’s original press release detailed, “Kane Parsons is a 19-year-old director and VFX artist. His viral found footage YouTube series The Backrooms has amassed nearly 100 million views.”
What are the Backrooms?
Wikipedia explains, “The Backrooms are a fictional location originating from a 2019 4chan thread. One of the best examples of the liminal space aesthetic, The Backrooms are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting (“no-clipping out of”) reality.” It was Kane Parsons who took the Backrooms mythology to a new level with his Kane Pixels YouTube shorts, which now get a movie expansion.
A24, Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment and 21 Laps Entertainment are joining forces on the project, with Will Soodik and Roberto Patino writing.
James Wan and Michael Clear are producing for Wan’s Atomic Monster.
NEON is also getting into the liminal horror space with their upcoming Exit 8 movie, based on the popular video game created by Kotake Create. It’s releasing in theaters on April 10.
Watch the official teaser trailer for the Backrooms movie below.
Movies
‘Backrooms’ Director Kane Parsons Is No Fan of Generative AI: “Defeats the Purpose Entirely for Me”
There has been a lot of talk recently about filmmakers embracing generative AI as part of the filmmaking process, from Darren Aronofsky to Martin Scorsese. But what about filmmakers that are against the use of Gen AI for creative pursuits? You can count 20-year-old Backrooms director Kane Parsons among that group, which should give you some hope for the future.
In a new chat with The Australian, the self-taught young filmmaker makes it crystal clear that he won’t be using generative AI in any of his upcoming filmmaking projects.
“I think I’m in the same boat as most well-adjusted people,” Parsons tells the outlet. “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.”
“What interests me more is interrogating it artistically,” Parsons notes. “We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”
He explains, “I’m interested in using that iconography in art – not using AI to make the art itself, but examining what it represents. I definitely want to explore it further in future projects.”
Kane Parsons also notes during the interview with The Australian, “… there’s so much at stake and so many genuinely harmful consequences already happening.”
Backrooms marks young prodigy Kane Parsons’ feature directorial debut, and it’s based on his own series of YouTube videos that were brought to life using Blender, the open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. So it’s no surprise that Parsons, who has hand-made his filmmaking career up to this point, isn’t buying into the hoopla around Generative AI.
His debut feature is the #1 movie in the world, so perhaps he’s onto something.
What’s next from Kane Parsons, you ask? Stay tuned…
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