A24’s Much Anticipated Horror Film ‘Backrooms’ Gets Ominous First Trailer

A24’s ‘Backrooms’ film is one of the most anticipated films of 2026. And recently, the studio has unveiled the first footage from this film which is dated to be released theatrically on May 29th, 2026. This project stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve in the lead roles. The Plot of the film reportedly focuses on two people who find a mystifying door in the basement of a furniture showroom.

The teaser doesn’t feature any physical presence in it. But rather It opens with the shot of a room in which there is an arm-chair located in the farthest corner with Ejiofor’s voiceover describing about some discovery, he starts to tell “I found something…” , Then the camera starts to descend further and further revealing a series of duplicate but slightly altered rooms before settling down in the infamous backroom, when his character says, “I Found a place, It’s massive in there and just goes on and on and on. All these rooms, this place builds them. And the more times it remembers something, the less it does”, which foreshadows on the entire luminal aesthetic of that place.

This film is directed by Kane Parsons who is 20 years old, and he became one of the world’s youngest person to direct a film even in A24’s history. The Screenplay is being helmed by Will soodik and it is based on the Youtube series of the same name created by Parsons. This series is inspired by a creepy pasta that an anonymous user posted on the platform 4chan featuring an image of an endless maze of empty rooms that look like an office setting or storage space. The user had initially left the lore to the imagination of the readers. The eeriness from the original image arrives from it’s ‘liminal space’ aesthetic which is popularized around the internet showcasing abandoned places that are surreal and uncanny.

Kane parsons got inspired by this urban legend and released his own take of this phenomenon on Youtube in 2022 as a found footage analog horror video. Later this series had become so popular among the video sharing platform that many people has praised it, with WPST even terming it, ‘the scariest video on the internet.’

Due to this reputation, many studios have approached Parsons for making a feature length adaptation of these series. In 2023, A24 has successfully won the bidding war and many big names like James Wan (The Conjuring), Shawn Levy (Deadpool) were attached to produce this film. And Currently, due to the release of a new trailer the excitement levels doesn’t seem to drop at all.

The Recent surge in Youtubers entering into the film industry with horror content is adding up more names to it’s list day by day which is in-turn overturning the industry expectations. Among them, notable examples include The Phillippou brothers who’ve rose to fame with their 2022 horror film ‘Talk to me’ which was a box office and critical smash. A few months ago, the famous film critic Chris Stuckmann has also debuted with ‘Shelby Oaks’ a crowdfunded movie that was later backed by Neon, and has generated a lot of buzz among the netizens but got released to unfavorable reception. And More recently, the youtuber Markiplier has also released a self funded independent film in theatres titled ‘Iron Lung’, that has been a commercial triumph. And Kane Parsons’s name is the latest addition to this list, with Backrooms hoping to break the records previously set by other films in it’s league.

This article is authored by Yoga Adithya, a student of Loyola Academy, interning at Deccan Chronicle, Secunderabad.