Women's Lifestyle June 1, 2026 0 Comments

Unlock the Dark Secret Behind Backrooms’ Ending—Are We Really Just Prisoners of Our Own Mind Games?

Ever stumbled into a space that feels eerily familiar yet utterly wrong—like your office got stuck in a nightmare loop of faded yellow walls and glitchy furniture? Welcome to the Backrooms, a monstrous labyrinth born from a single creepy pic on 4chan back in 2019, which morphed into a wild internet mythos about endless liminal spaces. The real kicker? The scariest thing lurking isn’t some ghoulish monster hiding in the shadows—it’s the twisted reflections of your own mind. During the pandemic, as office cubicles turned ghost towns, the eerie charm of these back-alley corridors hit closer to home, giving life to Kane Parsons’ freakishly immersive YouTube series that channels classic found-footage horror vibes. Now, with a feature film backed by A24 and starring powerhouse talents like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, the Backrooms isn’t just an online cult phenomenon—it’s a chilling mirror showing us how deeply our psyche shapes the monsters we face. So, what happens when your worst fears aren’t out there, but inside? Dive in if you dare… LEARN MORE

You only have yourself to fear when you enter the Backrooms. The infinite maze of fluorescent faded-yellow office rooms, furnished with mutated chairs and desks, will make anyone’s skin crawl, but what’s skulking around the corner or down the hall is only as scary as what your mind can conjure up.

“Backrooms” originated from a single image posted on 4chan’s paranormal-themed board in 2019: a tilted-perspective view into a pallid, yellow-carpeted room. From there, the internet propagated a digital mythology (read more about “creepypasta” if you dare) about these liminal spaces. And when people actually abandoned their offices spaces and other third spaces during the pandemic, the idea of “Backrooms” suddenly felt connected to our everyday life. That’s when the then-16-year-old Kane Parsons developed his YouTube series, The Backrooms, adapting the idea for the screen through horror VHS found footage akin to The Blair Witch Project.

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A24

Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Now 20, Parsons just released a full-length feature film with A24, Backrooms, starring A-listers Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The Backrooms is no longer relegated to the niche corners of the internet (or even Gen-Z); in fact, it’s A24’s largest debut ever at the box office. It tells a bizarre story about a divorced furniture store salesman who “no-clips” into the Backrooms (that’s the technical term), but what he finds is intertwined with his personal psyche. “[Parsons] had the same existential ideas of these spaces that create themselves based on our psychology and the surroundings that we have—that we’re so affected by,” Reinsve recently told Harper’s Bazaar.

Do not read ahead if you want to avoid spoilers!

Clark (Ejiofor) stumbles upon the Backrooms in the basement of his furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Clark, put simply, is not doing well. His career as an architect floundered. His work now requires him to dress as a pirate in television commercials, an attempt to lure people into his mostly destitute storefront; which is also where he lives—and sleeps, on the display bed—because his marriage is breaking down. He attends therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Reinsve), and during one of his sessions we learn that he cannot take accountability for his part in his divorce. His judgment is clouded by anger and resentment, driving him to an even lonelier place in his mind.

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@WENDIGOON

Behind the scenes for Backrooms

Clark finds the “Backrooms” by accident, through a near-invisible incision in a wall. He steps through the wall into the fluorescently lit, labyrinthine office space, greeted by a pile of amalgamated furniture (presumably copies of pieces from his store). As he treads this strange terrain, he encounters increasingly absurd architectures or floor layouts, occasionally encountering quotidian objects—stop signs or flags—protruding from the walls and carpeted floors. Before piecing together anything, his sojourn is interrupted by a monstrous being lurking in the rooms, just out of sight. He manages to escape, yet his mind is tethered to the rooms, determined to map them. He even shows Mary his frenzied scrawling of the rooms, but—like any sane person—she doubts him.

Soon after, Clark coaxes his employee (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend (Finn Bennett), equipped with a digital hand-held camera, to join him in exploring the space. Of course, this jaunt into this surreal nightmare realm ends fatally for these two side characters. It does, however, give Parsons a chance to flex his competence in first-person horror (much of the original series unfolded this way). At this point, we never see the monster, but we do learn via a voicemail to Mary that Clark has decided to stay in the Backrooms.

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A24

Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline entering the Backrooms

This worrisome voicemail galvanizes Mary into finding Clark. She enters the Backrooms, the entrance now conveniently demarcated by blue painter’s tape (a level of therapeutic care you will never ever find); but when she encounters Clark, next to a feverishly drawn mural, she quickly realizes he’s lost his mind (or lost himself in his mind?). Clark attacks her and traps her in a dining room, where he insists that she participate in a role-play therapy session in which she embodies his wife. A heated exchange in which Mary brutally censures Clark for his inability to address his failures and admit his wrongs is interrupted by the lurking monster, who turns out to be a colossal, mutated version of Clark in his pirate costume.

The sequence reveals Parsons’s narrative intention. Backrooms functions as a black mirror of the self, an empty canvas onto which our emotions and memories are projected into reality. Clark, crestfallen about his marriage and his bereft life, sequesters himself in this space, retreating further into himself. Anyone who understands (or has experienced) depression will recognize this pattern; here, we see this withdrawal from the world materialize as physical space.

Clark lives alone “in this echo chamber of sorts,” Parsons told Polygon. “This place is very much becoming a feedback loop of his interior world, vomited out onto the walls, and expressed as something that feels like it’s doing something for him.” It’s a troubling world where his memory and perspective on his life are repeatedly (obsessively) rehashed until they’re completely unrecognizable. In fact, the world he creates is dangerous, not unlike the mental pitfalls that accompany repression. The moment Mary forces him to take accountability, the monster enters the room, devouring part of Clark and killing him. In his vehement rejection of his culpability, he fashioned the monster that inevitably destroyed him.

Mary is left alone in the Backrooms, running away from Clark’s monster through an increasingly terrifying labyrinth where poorly conceived memories populate the rooms. She somehow fends off the monster with a concrete fragment (a memento from her childhood house) until she’s eventually retrieved by men in hazmat suits. These men turn out to be researchers from Async, an MRI machine company that now researches the Backrooms. We first saw a hazmat-suited researcher killed in the first-person opening sequence; then, again, when one, Phil (Mark Duplass), sees Clark on a video camera. But Parsons waits to build out this narrative until the end. Now, Phil sits across from Mary, asking her questions about how she arrived in the Backrooms. It’s doubtful Async—admittedly still largely unsure about anything regarding the Backrooms—will let her free; instead, she is fated to re-enter the Backrooms (the director has hinted that he wants to evolve this into a series).

We get a glimpse of Mary’s personal monsters throughout the movie—her childhood memories and dreams are polluted with fear and anxiety brought on by her agoraphobic mother. Backrooms ends with a montage of off-kilter rooms plucked from her memory, ending with a morphed version of Mary herself, sitting alone in a room. What prowls in the Backrooms is a monster of our own design, fashioned from our memories and projected into the physical world. Perhaps this hits us because we actively live part of our lives online, naturally splitting how we concoct or understand our personalities. In Backrooms, Parsons suggests that this split extends within us: flawed minds cycle through infinite ideas of themselves, with memory the most dubious of all. The scariest part of Backrooms is how it reminds us how little we might know ourselves. And what we bring into the Backrooms with us is what we should be most concerned about.