A24’s BACKROOMS Trailer Cranks Up the Terror With Found Footage Chaos and Liminal Nightmares
A24 has released a new trailer for Backrooms, and it leans harder into the unsettling tone fans loved from the original viral videos, blending eerie liminal spaces with that grainy found footage style that feels way too real for comfort.
The footage centers on Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays a man desperately trying to convince his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, that he’s stumbled into something impossible.
According to him, there’s a hidden dimension lurking behind an ordinary furniture store. Naturally, she doesn’t buy it. That is, until she follows him in and discovers just how wrong she was.
Once she crosses that threshold, things spiral fast. The environment shifts, the walls feel like they’re pressing inward, and that familiar analog camcorder aesthetic kicks in. It’s the same low-fi visual language that made Kane Parsons’ YouTube series so unnerving in the first place, and it works just as well here.
What makes the trailer so interesting is the sense that Ejiofor’s character isn’t just exploring anymore. He’s pulling others into this nightmare with him, building a team to map out the unknown. As you’d expect, that plan doesn’t exactly go smoothly.
The official description keeps things simple: “A therapist ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient.” But the trailer suggests something much bigger and far more disturbing is going on beneath that premise.
The film also stars Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia, rounding out a cast that’s stepping straight into one of the internet’s creepiest concepts.
Parsons directs the feature, expanding on his original series, with a screenplay written by Robert Patino and Will Soodik, both known for their work on Westworld.
For those who’ve been following this phenomenon, the roots of The Backrooms go back to a single unsettling image that started circulating online in 2019. It showed a vacant, yellow-tinted retail space under renovation. The lighting was harsh, the carpet looked damp, and something about it just felt off. That image snowballed into a full-blown mythos.
Parsons took that idea and ran with it in 2022, creating a series where a mysterious 1990s company uncovers “The Complex,” a sprawling network of empty, looping spaces where people vanish without a trace.
While the film shifts the story a bit, that core idea of people slipping out of reality into something unknowable is still very much intact. That’s what makes this so effective. It taps into a weirdly familiar fear.
The Backrooms hits theaters on May 29, 2026, and if this trailer is anything to go by, it’s shaping up to be a seriously unsettling ride.