A24 has released the teaser trailer for new horror Backrooms, and if you don’t know what it’s based on, then you might find the vague footage makes no sense at all. In the trailer, we see a large room, featureless and mostly empty except for a chair, windows, a bookshelf and a few other small items scattered around. The camera sinks ‘beneath’ the ground to show a similar but different room — or perhaps the same room at a different time — and continues the cycle, becoming more abstract as their chair becomes fused with the floor.
The voiceover teases that “it”, implied to be the space itself, creates the rooms. Or rather, it remembers them, doing less and less each time.
The inherently creepy idea isn’t original for the film. In fact, it started in 4chan of all places.
Discussion and photo-sharing about liminal spaces had been going on for a while, with people talking about how things like sterile lighting and wallpaper combined with the fact these rooms exist just to connect other rooms — especially when there’s no-one there — is actually kind of bizarre, like being in a strange alternate dimension between the places that people actually want to go to.
If you’ve ever been in school after-hours and felt a ‘coldness’ walking down a corridor with no-one else around, it’s similar to that.
A24
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It’s commonly believed that a 2019 is the springboard for taking the idea even further, that there’s an entire separate dimension of endless empty liminal spaces known as the Backrooms, all smelling of moist carpets and featuring the drone of buzzing fluorescent lights.
And if you were to ‘no-clip’ (a video game term meaning to walk or fall through the environment into the void where you’re not intended to go) you would be trapped in the eternal maze of the Backrooms with no way of ever getting out.
The ‘lore’ only increased exponentially from there, and in 2022 a short film titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) was released by a then-16-years-old director Kane Parsons to YouTube, and went viral.
It turned into a full-on web series, with a new instalment releasing just over a year ago.
A24
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It’s Parsons himself who has directed this film, with 12 Years a Slave, the MCU and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’s Chiwetel Eijofor leading the cast.
Sons of Anarchy’s Roberto Patino and Ash vs Evil Dead’s Will Soodik have penned with the script, while Stranger Things’ Shawn Levy and The Conjuring’s James Wan serve as executive producers.
Backrooms is set to be released in the US on 29 May.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish.