Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” is the first mainstream film that I’m aware of to have been inspired by, of all things, a 4chan post. Chances are you already know about the Backrooms, especially if you’re Gen Z or a millennial or have spent any significant amount of time memeing on the Internet. If you don’t, then it’s a simple enough concept to explain. Imagine a dank, yellow-wallpapered office space, empty of all features save the blank angularity of walls and a vaguely unsettling openness. Now imagine that going on and on, forever.

It’s a weird alternate take on our reality, as if the universal software had glitched and copy-pasted this uncanny liminal space into its own pocket dimension. An anon on the original 4chan post (which featured on one of the site’s forums dedicated to paranormal phenomena), however, explains it more evocatively:

“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

“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

—Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019) […]