Kane Parsons Adapts 2019 Backrooms Meme Into Feature Horror Thriller

5 articles · Updated · The Conversation · May 26

Kane Parsons is turning the Backrooms into a feature-length horror thriller, expanding the internet-born setting he helped popularize through viral YouTube found-footage videos.
The project builds on a phenomenon that began with a single 2019 4chan image and grew into a collaborative online mythology of endless fluorescent-lit rooms outside normal reality.
Backrooms fandom now spans Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and games: #backrooms has more than 500,000 TikTok posts, while the r/backrooms subreddit has hundreds of thousands of members.
That scale reflects how audiences engage with the Backrooms less as a fixed story than as a participatory world—creating maps, survival guides and diary entries that keep the setting evolving.
The adaptation signals the meme's move into mainstream culture as digital, collectively imagined spaces increasingly function like destinations people revisit and emotionally inhabit.

Can a Hollywood film capture the horror of a mythos that was collaboratively built by millions of internet users?

What does our fascination with a fictional empty world reveal about anxieties in our densely populated real one?