A24’s ‘Backrooms’ builds the internet’s creepiest maze

A24’s ‘Backrooms’ – A24’s new surreal horror film, debuting May 29, turns the internet-born Backrooms into a real 37,000-square-foot wallpaper set and 29,000-square-foot carpeted labyrinth—complete with a lighting system designed from scratch and musty, rain-soaked props for the

The first thing you notice isn’t the corridor. It’s the lighting—fluorescent hum, a brittle kind of brightness that never feels quite steady. In A24’s new surreal horror film, that sensation has to become physical, not just a screenshot you scroll past and immediately regret.

The Backrooms debuts on May 29. It’s directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons. A24’s youngest-ever director. and it leans on a very specific kind of dread: the liminal spaces people recognize without ever being able to explain why. Parsons found the concept of the Backrooms as a middle schooler by trawling through sub-Reddits, fan forums, and wiki posts. Since then. he has built his own Backrooms canon through a series of videos on his YouTube channel. amassing a fan base so fervent it’s getting its own mainstream movie spinoff.

The film adaptation expands a small narrative snippet Parsons has already crafted for YouTube. The story is set in 1993 and follows a furniture store owner (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers a portal to the Backrooms in his warehouse’s basement. He is ultimately followed into the unknowable space by his psychiatrist (played by Renate Reinsve).

Parsons’s production design team was given a daunting imperative: turn the internet’s most iconic liminal space into a physical film set, so viewers could experience the claustrophobic repetition alongside the characters—walking into it, reacting to it, and surviving it.

Before A24’s version existed, the Backrooms lived online. The first known reference traces back to a 2010s post on 4chan showing empty rooms with yellow wallpaper. close ceilings. and fluorescent office lights. One comment on the post—one that has come to define what the Backrooms “feels like”—warns that if you’re not careful and “no-clip out of reality in the wrong places. ” you’ll end up in the Backrooms. where the description stacks up relentlessly: “the stink of old moist carpet. ” “the madness of mono-yellow. ” endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz. and “approximately six hundred million miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.”.

That post took on a life of its own, spawning user-written stories, a wiki, graphics, and countless theories. The concept later solidified when Parsons, then 16, published his first YouTube video about the Backrooms in 2022. The video, titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” has more than 78 million views and is the first in a 16-part series. Over time. the videos reveal a mysterious corporation called the Async Research Institute. described as responsible for spawning the Backrooms in an apparent effort to deal with overpopulation and create an infinite storage space. even as its exact motivations and operations remain shrouded in mystery.

Parsons scripts the installments and, in addition to storytelling, performs major roles on the visual effects (VFX) platform Blender, with videos that have drawn millions of views and a legion of fans ready to dissect the frames for information about how the Backrooms came to be.

For the film itself, that attention to detail had to survive contact with reality. Parsons’s movie will be the first time the Backrooms have been constructed in real life. To capture the space’s unsettling ambience. production designer Danny Vermette built a giant physical set for the actors to interact with. The team then combined the footage with digital shots created primarily in Blender in postproduction.

Vermette’s account makes clear how much of the work wasn’t about imagination—it was about repetition. control. and constraints. Fast Company sat down with Vermette—whose other credits include horror films like Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs and The Monkey—to discuss how he brought the Backrooms to life. The interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Vermette said he was aware of liminal space and a trend happening. and that he has long been a fan of awkward design with a surreal quality. But he “had no idea how in depth it went.” He watched about five hour-long videos explaining the Backrooms and felt he was “barely scratched the surface of the lore.”.

His research also collided with timing. Vermette said he watched “some of the wrong videos”—not Kane’s work at first—and only later did the idea resonate strongly. “This is way before we knew we were going to do the movie,” he said. “It was very preliminary.”

When he eventually found Kane’s materials and watched quite a bit before their first chat. Vermette said the film needed to match the rules of the world Parsons had created. “The way that he speaks to it so eloquently—and he hates the word ‘lore. ’ but I’m going to say it—it has a tangible sequence and feel. ” Vermette said. He described the Backrooms as an entity with rules and boundaries.

When Vermette got the original script. he said there were elements that “just didn’t fit within that lore. ” and that Kane made it clear the material would need to change. Vermette said his first pass at making the film work was wrong because the Backrooms don’t change “in front of your face.” They are “this repetitive space that is limitless.”.

The earliest practical step. Vermette said. was asking Parsons for a dream scenario and what he wanted to build “practically.” Parsons spent a couple of weeks building everything in Blender. Vermette said that when he received the file. it crashed his computer. because it was “100. 000 square feet.” From there. Vermette explained the hard tradeoff between what the digital world could show and what the physical film set could support. He said they were working with a budget and limited square footage that would be tangible space. The job was figuring out which levels Parsons wanted and how far into the Backrooms they wanted to go. including how much they wanted to show practically so talent could interact with it.

Vermette also said they created a plan after reviewing Parsons’s YouTube series and focusing on the parts that interested him most.

The physical scope, once it was decided, became enormous. Vermette said the set was “maybe just slightly under 30,000,” clarifying that it was 37,000 square feet of wallpaper and 29,000 square feet of carpeting.

Those numbers weren’t just bragging rights. They were a logistical problem made harder by location and cost. When asked about hunting down materials that could replicate the recognizable yellow Backrooms. Vermette said the wallpaper was “huge. ” and that two things were on his mind: the sheer volume and timing “right around the time when the tariff threat showed up.”.

He said they were in Vancouver and that many of their main producers were in the U.S. so they couldn’t afford to bring the materials up from elsewhere. Instead, they sourced locally and found a new company “like five blocks from the office” that agreed to help. Vermette said they produced 30 to 40 renditions of the wallpaper to get the right tonality, print, and scale. They had to ensure the backing versus the print didn’t have too much contrast. running tons of samples and variations and pairing them with carpet and lights to make sure it stayed recognizable for the fan base.

He described a contentious debate online about what the true “yellow” is and said there are multiple factors beyond color alone—lighting among them. Adding a cinematic camera and actors and real tangible furniture changes the tone. So Vermette said they developed a “recipe” intended to translate into something “very close to a Blender image.”.

The lighting work proved just as exacting. Vermette described how. with the drop ceiling predominant throughout the sets. the usual approach would be a trougher with fluorescent bulbs on an overhead grid. But they realized it wouldn’t work for quality of light and other factors. so they “had to invent our own strategy.”.

They used film lights suspended high above the lens of the drop ceiling and created a mask to control the light. Vermette said if the lights were too close, the bulbs would show. If too far away, there wouldn’t be enough light. He called it a “really fine balance to get the light quality.”

The set design also pushed actors into discomfort in more direct ways. Vermette said they wanted to add interesting elements and verticality that pushed actors out of their comfort zones. That meant introducing sets on 15- and 20-foot risers. In scenes where they’re going down tunnels, the tunnels are practical and were built on 20-foot stilts.

Then came the props—specifically, the parts that were supposed to look like they’d been forgotten long enough to rot.

Vermette said that in one scene, they needed piles of clothing as set dressing. They obtained massive containers of clothing, but he said the clothes “apparently… had been left out in the rain.” When they went to dress the set, Vermette said they were all musty and “they just reeked.”

He added a blunt aside: “I mean, it did look like it smelled terrible down there!”

At a crew screening, he said, “the whole crew just howled,” because the team had spent days inside it and it was not pleasant.

The way the Backrooms is built—part physical set. part Blender-driven digital shots—shows how one online nightmare became a production problem with real-world consequences: wallpaper sourced locally. color tuned through dozens of iterations. lighting engineered so fluorescents never look quite right. and props that ended up smelling as bad as the scene demanded.

For audiences. May 29 will be the first chance to step into what Parsons and Vermette have treated like a place with rules. For everyone else watching from the outside. the internet’s creepiest liminal space will finally have a scale you can measure in square feet—and a smell you never get out of your head.

A24 The Backrooms Kane Parsons Chiwetel Ejiofor Renate Reinsve Danny Vermette production design Blender VFX liminal space horror film Async Research Institute