Everything You Need to Know Before Seeing The Backrooms

One of the strangest horror success stories of the modern era officially opens in theaters today. Backrooms, distributed by A24 and directed by a twenty-year-old who was still weighing college applications when his career launched, is in cinemas nationwide as of May 29, 2026. It carries an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The film cost real money and real production time and it all traces back to a single anonymous photograph of an empty office posted to 4chan in 2019 by someone who probably did not expect to birth a cinematic universe.

So before you buy your ticket tonight, here is everything you actually need to know.

What Are The Backrooms?

Picture the back hallway of a mid-grade office building. The one nobody goes into. Yellowed wallpaper that has been slowly absorbing fluorescent light for three decades. Carpet that smells like it has been moist since the Clinton administration. No windows. No exits you can locate. Fluorescent tubes humming overhead at the exact frequency designed to make your nervous system register that something is wrong without being able to name what.

Now imagine it goes on forever. Approximately six hundred million square miles of it.

That is The Backrooms. The concept slots neatly into what horror fans call liminal spaces. Transitional places, in-between zones, locations that feel like they were never meant to be destinations. Hotel corridors at 3am. Empty shopping malls after close. Playgrounds with no children in them. Spaces that look familiar and register as fundamentally off at the same time.

The Backrooms proved that an empty office building can be scarier than most haunted houses. The haunted house, at least, has furniture. The Backrooms has wallpaper and fluorescent light and the certainty that you are never finding the door.

The Original Lore

On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan’s paranormal board /x/ opened a thread asking people to post “disquieting images that just feel off.” One image surfaced that had been drifting around the internet since at least April 2018: a photograph of a yellow-wallpapered room with no doors, no people, and nothing to indicate where or what it was. Just walls, carpet, and light. The photo itself was taken in Wisconsin, at what turned out to be a hobby-grade RC car racetrack. Someone walked into the back room and took a picture.

Another anonymous user replied with the paragraph that launched everything:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

That is the whole original text. No backstory, no mythology. No explanation for what “noclipping out of reality” means beyond the intuitive gut sense that sometimes you slip through the wrong gap in the world and land somewhere you were never supposed to be. The isolation was the point, The infinite space was the point. The uncertainty about what was making the sound at the end of the corridor was the point.

The first Backrooms wiki appeared less than two months later, in June 2019. The internet had found something it wanted to live inside.

Wait, There Are Levels?

Yes. Hundreds of them. This is where it gets complicated, so here is what actually matters.

The original creepypasta has one location. The fandom expanded it into a numbered system of levels, each with its own appearance, hazards, and rules. Most of this level taxonomy is fan-created community lore, built collaboratively over six years of wiki entries, YouTube series, and forum threads. No single person owns it. No single version is canonical. Keep that in mind as we go.

Level 0, called “The Lobby,” is the starting point and the one closest to the original image. The yellow wallpaper. The moist carpet. The fluorescent hum. The geometry is non-Euclidean, meaning the floor plan does not obey the rules floor plans are supposed to obey. Rooms connect to rooms that should not be adjacent. You cannot map it. According to the wiki, 85% of people who noclip into The Backrooms never make it past Level 0.

Level 1 is often described as “The Habitable Zone” and imagined as the basement of Level 0. Think a parking garage with no cars: dim, industrial, lit by those same fluorescent tubes casting their yellow-green light onto concrete. Quieter than Level 0 but not empty. This is where you start meeting things.

Level 2 goes darker. Pipes. Machinery. The sound of something mechanical you cannot locate. The further down the levels, the less hospitable.

Level 3 takes that into electrical station territory. The hum from Level 0 graduates into something with more intent behind it.

Level 188, known in the community as “The Windows,” is a fan-created level that demonstrates how elaborate this mythology has grown. It presents as an enclosed structure resembling a hotel, centered on a large open courtyard ringed by rows of small square windows. Most are curtained. Some are not. The open ones appear to look into entirely different locations. Shadow-like figures have reportedly been seen behind certain windows, beckoning from inside the rooms. The only way out is through one of those windows, which can deposit you somewhere new entirely.

The Poolrooms, found at Level 37, are a fan favorite and probably the most visually memorable location in the entire mythology. An endless network of indoor swimming pools, all connected, all slightly wrong. The water is a specific shade of blue that should feel peaceful. It does not. The pools go deeper than pools should go. Sounds echo from rooms you cannot find. Something about the combination of the familiar and the impossible hits the liminal nerve more precisely than almost anything else in the lore.

What Lives In The Backrooms?

The original post mentioned “something wandering around nearby.” It did not specify what. The fandom specified what.

Smilers are the entities most fans bring up first, and the concept behind them is almost annoyingly effective: the more afraid you are of what might be lurking in the dark, the more likely a Smiler is to actually be in the dark. They are named for what you see right before they reach you. Do not stare into the corners of Level 0.

Hounds are common in Level 1. Fast, predatory, and drawn to sound. The general survival advice for Hounds is not to run and not to make noise, which sounds reasonable until you are actually in Level 1.

Skin-Stealers are the ones that linger after the lights go out. They do not simply hunt, they replace. They impersonate people who were already in The Backrooms, which means that even finding another human being down there is not straightforwardly good news.

Worth repeating: these entities come primarily from the fan-expanded wiki lore. The original post mentioned only a sound in the distance. Six years of collaborative horror writing filled in everything else. Kane Parsons made his own decisions about what appears in his films, which may align with wiki canon or may not. Every mythology adapts when it hits a new medium.

Kane Parsons Changed Everything

On January 7, 2022, a sixteen-year-old from Petaluma, California named Kane Parsons uploaded a nine-minute short film to YouTube. He titled it The Backrooms (Found Footage). He made it at home using Blender, which is free software. The video went from one million views to seven million views in forty-eight hours.

He was a high school junior thinking about his future. Then that happened.

Parsons made roughly two dozen more Backrooms videos over the following years, expanding the mythology through his own creative lens. Together they have accumulated more than 197 million views. The found footage approach was exactly right for the material: handheld cameras, bad lighting, the shaky documentary texture of something that was never supposed to be captured on film. Parsons understood that The Backrooms was already built for found footage. The aesthetic of the lore and the aesthetic of the format were the same thing, and he had figured that out at sixteen in his bedroom with free software.

A24 greenlit the feature film in 2025. Parsons, now twenty, became the youngest director in A24’s history. Written by Will Soodik, the film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture store owner who discovers a dimension of liminal spaces accessed through his basement, alongside Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. The world premiere was at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on May 7, 2026.

Today it opens everywhere else.

What You Actually Need to Know Before The Movie

Here is the honest answer, not much.

Do not spend three hours reading the wiki before you walk in. The levels are fascinating and the entity taxonomy is genuinely creative, but the movie is not an adaptation of six hundred fan-written pages. Parsons is telling his own story inside this mythology. The film is built around the core of what made The Backrooms work in the first place. Liminal fear, the wrongness of infinite empty space, the specific dread of getting lost somewhere that does not follow the rules of anywhere you have ever been.

What actually matters going in is the feeling the original paragraph was going for. You slipped out of reality by accident. You are somewhere that looks like a building but is not and you are not alone. That has been the engine of this thing since 2019, and it is almost certainly still the engine of the film.

iHorror has been following The Backrooms from the beginning and the full review will be up shortly. Newcomers do not need to memorize a single level number. Longtime fans will have opinions about every creative choice and they will enjoy having those opinions. Both groups will find something in that corridor.

Final Thoughts

Step back and look at the full arc of this. An anonymous photograph of a racetrack back room in Wisconsin, taken sometime around 2002. An anonymous paragraph on 4chan in 2019. A teenager in Northern California making found footage horror in his bedroom on free software. A24 writing a check. Chiwetel Ejiofor walking down a yellow corridor.

That is the most internet thing to ever happen to a horror movie. It also produced something that, by all early accounts, is genuinely worth seeing.

Somewhere out there, an empty office building is feeling very validated right now.

Backrooms is in theaters now.