One of the most eagerly awaited summer releases is an A24 film, but Backrooms is hardly just a movie. Helmed by filmmaking prodigy Kane Parsons, it consolidates internet culture as a major influence on mainstream storytelling and gives the man responsible for most of the original creepypasta’s popularity the chance to make it into a feature film himself. Although Backrooms has been circulating for seven years now, it was thanks mostly to Parsons’ original YouTube series that they became the internet phenomenon they are now. In this series, the young filmmaker firmly establishes much of the lore and tone for his upcoming film debut.

Kane Parsons’ Unique Interpretation of the Popular Creepypasta in His YouTube Series

It might be hard to pinpoint exactly when most urban legends began, but with creepypastas, they can usually be traced to the last few decades on the internet. That’s how the backrooms began back in 2019, when an anonymous 4chan user posted a picture of an old, yellow office-like room that was completely empty, and later, someone else creatively described that place as a realm separate from reality entirely, where people end up if they’re not careful where they step. And that’s all it took.

So, the backrooms weren’t conceived by Kane Parsons himself, and one may find different versions of backrooms lore depending on what corner of the internet they go to. But his take is so good that it became the unofficial definition of the creepypasta itself. It all started when he released the first short film in 2022, eventually becoming an entire series expanding the concept, following a guy who ends up in the titular Backrooms after simply stumbling for balance in the real world.

This short led to 22 more episodes of varying lengths, each exploring different corners and aspects of the sprawling Complex that forms the Backrooms. Each entry has its own format, characters, and storyline, ranging from found footage to corporate information videos. Even if some of them feel enclosed and separate from the rest, by the end of the series they tell the whole story of the Backrooms, from its supposed origin to all the people who lost their lives there.

The Webseries Clarifies Much of the Backrooms’ Lore and Rules

A24 has started a viral marketing campaign for Backrooms with a commercial for Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s character’s store, and fans have been calling the phone number and searching for the address that appears. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pre-existing Backrooms lore, with speculation now focusing on how it connects to what the YouTube series has previously established, because they are more complex than one might think.

There’s a whole context for Parsons’ Backrooms. There are countless rooms and levels, each seemingly designed to make it harder for people who accidentally no-clip there to escape (“no-clipping” being the act of stumbling to an area beyond reality, referring to a popular term for glitches in a video game). As if that weren’t enough, there are also weird creatures roaming around the complex hunting these people, each of them creepier than the next. There is nothing inherently human about any of that, but it’s almost as if they were made to appear so.

The very nature of the Backrooms is the biggest mystery, one that the series hints at but never delivers a clear answer. Many of the videos take place between the late 1980s and early 1990s — a period when the number of people going missing skyrockets in the series’ world — though there are registers of experiments dating back as far as 1972, with actual Backrooms activity dating back to 1989, both these dates coinciding with historical natural disasters.

At the center of all this is the mysterious Async Research Institute. Following the series’ story, they were the ones to make first contact with the Backrooms as part of an experiment supposedly aimed at solving potential storage and housing needs in the future. As research progresses deeper into the Complex and more people start disappearing into it, though, Async’s true intentions for the Backrooms become murkier and more suspicious.

The Series Might Fit Within A24’s Movie Canon in Unexpected Ways

So far, marketing for A24’s movie hasn’t mentioned anything from the series, hinting that they might not connect directly and be completely separate stories. While that may be true, there are visual callbacks in Backrooms trailers that lead back to the series, like blue tape framing the threshold through which Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve no-clip into backrooms, a caveman cutout that also appears in one of the episodes, and people and objects “melting” into Complex’s walls.

Still, since Kane Parsons made both works and is now directing A24’s film, there is bound to be a common thread between them. In a recent interview, he revealed that he has “a very specific timeline that this whole story abides by,” strongly implying these two works exist within the same universe. It might be that characters in this movie are in a completely different area of backrooms from what we see in this series but it’s still part of same Complex.

Even if there is no direct connection between film and series, Backrooms has massive potential to become a franchise, so these ties might even be developed after movie comes out. Regardless of what form that takes — sequels or series — interest in concept is likely to remain. Seeing how much mark original creepypasta left on pop culture, no-clipping back into Backrooms is always a possibility.

Backrooms premieres on May 29 in theaters.