The Backrooms have risen up from the quiet corners of the internet to become a worldwide movie phenomenon. Director Kane Parsons (creator of the hit Backrooms web series) has become the youngest director to ever reach No.1 at the box office, with Backrooms earning $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend, and scoring well with both critics and audiences. The Backrooms franchise and its lore are now much more famous, and a lot of new fans are headed back to the original web series to see what it is all about.
There are two main threads to the Backrooms web series: Standalone encounters that different people have with being “clipped out” of reality and falling into the mysterious realm, where they must escape and/or survive. The other is a serialized story arc that chronicles the Async Research Institute’s explorations into the Backrooms, and the corporate espionage invovled with it. While the Async lore does help widen the scope of the Backrooms movie, it also makes some of the videos harder to understand. But here are 5 chapters of the Backrooms web series that will definitely satisfy you just like the movie did, ranked by how scary they are.
“Reunion” is much more steeped in the Async lore, but it helps that it’s also sort of a sequel to another video, “Pitfalls,” featuring a return to the iconic room with the square pits in the floor (“Room 14D”). It’s not scarier than “Pitfalls” (hence the ranking positions), but if you watch both, watch “Pitfalls” first, for clarity.
In “Reunion,” the Asyc team begins to construct new walkways to get teams across the square pits of Room 14D safely. Meanwhile, a three-man team is sent to survey a connected room, which is vast, dark, and filled with thick column structures. The three men are ambushed when walking through the dark space, only this time it’s a threat they never expected to find…
As stated, this film takes place in the middle of the Asyc arc, but it’s still a consequential one. “Reunion” dips into Backrooms lore about what prolonged time in the mysterious realm does to a person’s mind, creating human threats to go along with the entities. The Backrooms movie certainly made use of that plot point, so this will be a helpful reference.
One of the easiest entries into the Async research team and its side of the story in Backrooms. This chapter takes place after Async has opened a portal (the “Threshold”) into the Backrooms, which is referred to as “The Complex.” While mapping out the Complex, a survey team finds a room whose floor is filled with dark rectangular openings. The cameraman who is following the team falls into one of the openings and finds himself in a new area of the Backrooms. He discovers things like displaced spaces, like a suburban street lit in red lights, before encountering a pale, screaming entity that begins chasing him.
“Pitfalls” is the perfect synthesis of the standalone “Found Footage” chapters of Backrooms and the larger Async lore. The surrealist spaces in this video are particularly striking, and the “entity” featured at the end is one of the creepiest. This is as good an introduction to the series as any.
Honestly, if you were going to watch just one Backrooms video, and wanted the most basic taste of what the series is, “Fount Footage #2” is your best bet. As part of the first run of videos in 2022, it has those early (read: limited) production values, but shows some of the biggest and earliest potential in Parsons’ abilities as a director.
The video follows a young woman who discovers a small portal to the Backrooms in her garage and gets pulled while filming the strange phenomenon. She stumbles through half-furnished and oddly elongated rooms, culminating in a wide room featuring one of the series’ most striking visuals and set pieces. The ending of the video features one of the better entity chases (and a legitimate jump scare), as well as a finale that still has the fandom theorizing and debating its implications
After a year-long run of web series in 2022, Kane Parsons put out one more video at the end of January 2023, before taking a hiatus from doing Backrooms videos. However, he premiered a new set of videos in the fall of 2024, starting with a 45-minute video called “Found Footage #3”, his longest one yet. And it showed growth in Parsons as a filmmaker, and the growth in his production budget.
The third “Found Footage” video sees a man named Ravi fall into the Backroom after investigating a strange noise in his basement. Ravi’s expedition through the Backrooms is longer and features some of the most interesting spaces in the series, with Ravi being “clipped out” of his basement into a giant office building and/or apartment complex that first teased the lore of the Backrooms also being a twisted parallel copy of soul real-world spaces like suburbia and the corporate office, populated by twisted humanoid “copies” instead of entities. The video also arguably has the scariest “chase” moment in the series, and a finale that is dark and depressing, with one of the most complete and satisfying endings.
You can’t beat the original! With his first short film (released in early January of 2022), Kane Parsons took a mythos that had been cooking in online chat threads like 4Chan and turned it into a short film that made the Backrooms lore blow up into a cult hit. The original short really does stand up as an example of how to execute on a concept the right way, even if its visual effects do not. It starts off in the real world with the meta twist of teenage kids trying to make their own movie, then does the sudden twist of having the cameraman “clip out” and end up in the Backrooms.
Parsons chooses some great spaces to create the concept of what the realm is and how it functions, and throws in a climactic twist of a monster (or “entity) reveal. It’s bare bones production for the most part, and that very first entity looks even rougher now, knowing how far the series has come. Still, this first installment had all the ingredients to grow an entire series, even the time displacement lore teased by the ending.
Backrooms is now playing in theaters. The Web Series can be viewed HERE. Discuss the film and this milestone year in horror on the ComicBook Forum!
