A24 has released the first teaser for Backrooms, their adaptation of the viral internet horror phenomenon. And if you're wondering "what the hell are the Backrooms?"—well, that's kind of the point.
For the uninitiated: The Backrooms started as a creepypasta, an internet horror story that imagines an endless maze of empty, fluorescent-lit office spaces that exist outside reality. The concept is simple and terrifying: you "noclip" out of reality and find yourself in an infinite liminal space that feels simultaneously familiar and deeply wrong.
The original 4chan post that sparked the phenomenon described it perfectly: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality 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."
It's the kind of concept that could only come from the internet—this collective anxiety about bland, corporate architecture and the uncanny valley of spaces that feel almost normal but aren't quite right. It's tapped into something deeply unsettling about modern life.
And naturally, A24 saw it and thought, "Let's make a movie."
Say what you will about A24, but they understand internet culture in a way most studios don't. They turned a Minecraft-style internet aesthetic into The Squid and the Whale. Wait, no. They turned... look, the point is they know how to adapt weird internet stuff.
The teaser is appropriately unsettling—lots of yellow walls, buzzing lights, and the creeping dread that comes from being somewhere you can't escape. It feels less like a traditional horror movie and more like a feature-length anxiety attack, which is honestly what the source material calls for.
The big question: can you sustain a feature film on a concept that works brilliantly in short bursts? is terrifying because it's endless and inexplicable. The moment you start explaining it, adding mythology and rules, you risk losing what made it scary in the first place.
