Why Everyone Is Scared of Backrooms

This summer, the film «Backrooms» was released in theaters — a new horror movie about secret laboratories, creepy offices, and liminal spaces. It was directed by a 20-year-old American blogger, who based the plot on an internet creepypasta.

The horror film has already recouped its budget 30 times over at the box office, becoming the most commercially successful film of independent studio A24. Critics and audiences have both embraced it. But what is so special about it? And what exactly is creepypasta, and what are liminal spaces? We break down why this box-office hit, made for next to nothing, has become such a phenomenon.

What the film «Backrooms» is about

Furniture store owner Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, known from «12 Years a Slave» (12+)) is having a very hard time. His business selling cheap chairs and beds is collapsing, his wife threw him out of the house for drinking, so he sleeps in the store.

The man is disappointed in himself and everyone around him; he has problems with alcohol and pent-up aggression. He discusses this with his psychologist Mary Klein (actress Renate Reinsve from «Sentimental Value» (18+)). One night, Clark notices something strange happening in the basement of the store.

After a hasty inspection, the unlucky businessman steps into that famous «backrooms» — an office space frightening in its emptiness, with yellow walls, partitions, and endless corridors. It is something like another dimension, where the laws of time and space do not work as we are used to.

Clark begins to explore it and draws several other people in, including his psychologist. Meanwhile, it turns out that this place is not frightening for nothing — these nooks and crannies do hide dark secrets.

We will not tell you more — spoilers.

Who will like «Backrooms»

In the world of the Backrooms, for a long time it seems nothing is happening. Clark walks through corridors, finding strange objects, mysterious rooms, and odd sound anomalies. All the while, he clearly hears something following him. The film’s entire suspense rests on this feeling of unrelenting dread.

The film has become a hit with both critics and viewers. With a budget of $10 million (a pittance for film production), it has already grossed $300 million at the box office. In Russia, by the way, the film has collected half a billion rubles (about $5.5 million at current exchange rates).

The picture is being compared with the work of Lynch and Kubrick (an exaggeration, in our view, but telling). Critics also single out its visuals, noting that the director manages to build horror almost without resorting to traditional jump scares.

As for the director: Kane Parsons, an American YouTube blogger born in 2005 (!), made the film. For this young man, it is a feature debut — previously, he had only made short films for his blog. One of those shorts became the basis for «Backrooms», released in 2026.

The film will very likely appeal to fans of horror with a science-fiction slant. There is a lot here from «Stranger Things» (16+), «The X-Files» (18+), and the much-talked-about series «Severance» (18+) about office nightmares.

«Backrooms» will certainly appeal to fans of psychological horror as well. One of the film’s root ideas is precisely a metaphor for psychological trauma and the inability to cope with it. There are several references here — the mainstream «The Babadook» (18+) and the less mainstream «Beau Is Afraid» (18+) or, for example, «Hereditary» (18+).

How an internet horror story became a film

The history of the Backrooms began in 2019, when an anonymous user of the foreign forum 4chan (Russia has a similar forum called «Dvach») urged people to share photos of places that, for no explainable reason, make us uncomfortable or even afraid, because they seem «wrong».

Another user attached a photo of a yellow office lit by fluorescent lamps. Forum participants began discussing that the office resembled a place you end up in after «falling out of reality».

Eventually, one of the participants came up with a short mystical description for the picture.

«If you do not exercise enough caution and fall out of reality in the wrong place, you will end up in the Backrooms, where there will be only the smell of old damp carpet, the madness of uniform yellow wallpaper, the unceasing hum of loud fluorescent lamps in the background, and approximately 1.5 billion square kilometers of randomly combined empty rooms. And God forbid you hear something wandering nearby, because that means it has already heard you», — his message read.

That is how the creepypasta about the Backrooms was born. Later, other users developed it further, inventing levels of the endless office, the mystical creatures inhabiting it, and a scientific laboratory that studies the Backrooms phenomenon at the risk of people’s lives.

What is creepypasta?

Essentially, it is what we used to call scary stories and urban legends. The difference between ordinary folklore and creepypasta is that the latter is born and spreads on the internet, having a viral effect.

The universe has spawned video games and a web series (the latter was created by the film’s future director), and over time the Backrooms gathered an army of fans.

The mystery of liminal spaces

The yellow office is a typical example of liminal spaces. This is a place usually filled with people, so without them it looks empty, abandoned, and frightening.

When pictures of liminal spaces went viral in internet folklore, the phenomenon attracted the attention of psychologists and sociologists. The result of this scientific interest was an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. In it, psychologists linked our fear of liminal spaces to a paradox that our mind registers: a place almost always full of people looks, without them, like something unhealthy.

Scientists linked this to another very well-known phenomenon — the «uncanny valley» effect. Roboticists first began studying this effect when they learned to make human-like robots. Engineers noticed that the more people recognized themselves in a machine, the more positive a reaction it caused.

But at some point everything changed to the exact opposite: a person would notice that the robot sitting in front of them looked «almost alive» but was not alive. And this frightened the subjects. In other words, the more an object resembles a real person, the faster our brain detects that «something is wrong with it».

There are several hypotheses about why this happens. One of the most popular is connected with an evolutionarily developed mechanism for detecting signs of illness and threat of infection. This effect is believed to explain why some people are afraid of clowns, mannequins, or sinister dolls.

Roughly the same thing happens in our heads when we see liminal (boundary, transitional) spaces.

This phenomenon also has a slightly different dimension — the cultural one. For example, many peoples considered the threshold of a home an important place. Bodies of dead relatives were even buried beneath it so they would guard the entrance from evil spirits. This is how a culture of «border» places developed — neither one’s own nor someone else’s, no one’s. Something between the world of the dead and the world of the living. According to belief, it became the abode of all sorts of devilry. That is why monsters in Russian folklore could live, for example, in bathhouses.

Such places exist in modern times too. For example, stretches of line and dead-end branches of the metro, abandoned buildings, or even ordinary stairwells. Have you ever been afraid to go into your own building’s stairwell and run to your apartment? That was your brain playing scary games with you.

By the way, there is a project similar to the Backrooms in Russia too. For example, a popular creepypasta in found-footage format about a secret Soviet research institute K.O.N.T.U.R. is going viral on social media. The account has almost half a million subscribers.

Yes, sometimes we tell all kinds of interesting things about culture, memes, and trends. For example, our colleague Pavel Krasotkin has dived into the world of Gen Z jokes about Cheremsha, Burmalda, «six seven» and the USSR to explain their meaning.