Backrooms: Kane Parsons' YouTube liminal space enters Hollywood

British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, exploring the 'liminal space' halls of the Backrooms

A movie poster showing a sheet of mono-yellow coloured wallpaper might typically wash over your head.

Not this one. It's instantly recognisable to millions - and inspires dread.

This is Hollywood's latest horror film - Backrooms - and it knows its audience: one more drawn to whispered horror than A-list names, monsters and gore.

Backrooms are essentially disturbing, abandoned rooms with seemingly no end in sight. It could be an empty office block, a hallway or a corridor - unsettling between-zones.

The concept came about in 2019, when anonymous users on message board 4chan were asked to "post disquieting images that just feel 'off'."

A24's teaser poster for the film adaptation, relying on recognition of the Backrooms' mono-yellow wallpaper

One user posted an image of an abandoned office space, with mustard yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting.

The post read: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality [gaming terminology for glitching or disappearing] 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."

The post continued: "God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."

The original image of the Backrooms uploaded to 4chan in 2019. It has since been sourced to a real furniture store in the US state of Wisconsin

The concept then grew into a hugely popular YouTube mini-series, with creator Kane Parsons, then 16, at the helm. Parsons used a CGI programme called Blender to create environments beyond his budget. Today, the series boasts more than 200 million views.

It proved so captivating that Hollywood studio powerhouse A24 - which is behind Oscar-nominated horror The Substance - enlisted Parsons, now 20, for a film adaptation, which was released on Friday.

Parsons, now A24's youngest ever director, has one solemn tip for survival in the Backrooms: "Make peace with it before anything else, because I don't like to give false optimism."

His task in 2023 was clear: to drag this isolating hellscape kicking and screaming onto the big screen, and in a way that resembles his YouTube series.

He tells me that what excited him most about the project was using a Hollywood budget to dive deeper and bring a "real physicality" to ensure the film feels "distinct from the YouTube series".

Director Kane Parsons, 20, caught Hollywood's attention after his Backrooms YouTube short, inspired by a message board post, went viral

He says the team behind the film achieved this by building a vast 30,000 sq ft set based on his Blender designs. It bears similarity to Parsons' first YouTube video - "Found Footage" - which has 80 million views and featured shaky 90s camcorder footage of the eerie, yellow office block.

"I think it lets us buy into the characters to a greater degree," Parsons says.

A24's adaptation, written by Will Soodik, uses the concept of the Backrooms to explore mental health.

Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a frustrated furniture store salesman struggling following the breakup of his marriage.

As tensions grow between him and his therapist, Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, Clark discovers the store's route to the Backrooms - a space that begins to prey upon the pair's unresolved traumas.

The big screen lure of the Backrooms reflects the online rise of a very particular fear: the idea of a liminal - or transitional - space.

Parsons, seen here on set with Ejiofor, says his relative youth never felt an issue

Neuroscience and architecture expert Meredith Banasiak, who researches the link between buildings and human wellbeing, says hallways and doorways often spark this fear.

This creates what is known as the doorway effect, which confuses our brains. "When spaces start blending together, the way we remember blends too," she explains.

The Backrooms takes this to the extreme - a physical symbol of memories "dissolving into themselves".

As Clark tells Mary in the film: "The more times [the Backrooms] remembers something, the less it does."

Banasiak says her research, and other academic papers, external, suggests trauma survivors often find these spaces challenging.