Horror has always found ways to turn ordinary spaces into something hostile, but “Backrooms” pushes that idea into something more abstract and unsettling. The film leans into liminal spaces—the empty, in-between environments that feel familiar but wrong—and builds its terror from the sense that you’re stuck somewhere that shouldn’t exist at all.
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Now, the first trailer has arrived for “Backrooms,” the feature adaptation of Kane Parsons’ viral internet horror series, with Oscar-nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave,” “Doctor Strange”) leading a cast that includes Oscar-nominee Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”), Mark Duplass (“The Morning Show”), Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. The film opens nationwide on May 29, 2026.
Directed by Parsons and written by Will Soodik, the film builds on the unnerving premise that made the original shorts a phenomenon. The official synopsis is spare by design: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. What follows, if the trailer is any indication, is a descent into an infinite maze where architecture itself feels unstable and escape may not be possible.
That concept has become one of modern horror’s more potent tools, tapping into a specific kind of dread—the uncanny emptiness of places meant to be occupied, the panic of being stranded between destinations, the sense that a familiar environment has slipped loose from reality. Parsons’ original series understood that instinctively, using analog textures and degraded imagery to make the horror feel tactile rather than overstated. The feature appears to be scaling that up without losing the stripped-down weirdness that made the shorts land in the first place.
Behind the scenes, the project comes with a heavy-hitting producing team that includes James Wan, Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Osgood Perkins, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, and Kori Adelson. That’s a mix of commercial horror muscle and filmmaker-driven genre credibility, which suggests the film is aiming for something bigger than a simple internet-to-screen cash-in.
Whether “Backrooms” can sustain its premise at feature length is the open question. But as a piece of pure atmosphere, the trailer already suggests a film more interested in suffocating unease than conventional jump-scare mechanics.
“Backrooms” opens in theaters on May 29, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
