Flush It Friday: Backed Rooms

Flush it Friday, New Stuff, Not Metal, Open Swim, Opinion, Reviews

June 5, 2026

The zoomers are coming for Hollywood and breaking box office records with ease. That’s right, this FiF is a movie review.

It’s quickly become glib to remark on it, but it is truly remarkable that a 20-year old director released a film as high profile and successful as Backrooms. After all, he is the youngest director of all time to reach number one in the box office, in addition to Backrooms being A24’s most successful domestic box office performance thus far. It’s an incredibly impressive theater showing for a director who’s work was previously confined to short films on YouTube. Yet, it’s those said short films that lead us here, as Kane Parsons’ Backrooms short film series is what caught the attention of various movie studios and triggered a bidding war for a full-length film based on the creepypasta. Parsons’ work has also been foundational in the lore and worldbuilding of the Backrooms as an internet urban legend, making him the ultimate filmmaker voice to adapt the story onto the big screen.

That said, I can’t say I (or anyone else I knew) was particularly excited for a Backrooms movie. Meme movies are a non-starter from the pitch for me and, fair or unfair, I can only associate the Backrooms with community Fortnite maps and low effort Reddit posts. Compare this then to the Five Nights At Freddy’s movies, which were some of the dumbest horror flicks I’ve seen in theaters in a long time (even if the second one was so bad it’s good, as far as I am concerned), and you can see why I truthfully wasn’t expecting much—even if the trailers made the movie look pretty good. Even still, I’ll see most things put out by the “elevated horror” studios like A24 and NEON, as their movies are engaging at the bare minimum. With relatively low expectations, I was decently impressed with Backrooms. As far as internet adaptations go, this might as well be A Clockwork Orange.

Backrooms follows a furniture store owner named Clark, who discovers a hidden door to a strange dimension of vaguely familiar office floors that seem to go on endlessly, vaguely resembling real locations while not making any logical sense in terms of space or layout. These halls are filled with remnants of Clark’s store, chairs, signage, tables, etc. clipping through each other and the floors, getting more nonsensical and foreboding as you get deeper into the realm. As the film’s runtime proceeds, Clark’s employees, Kat and Bobby, and therapist, Mary, become entangled in the Backrooms and Clark’s own descent into madness. Clark and Mary both carry excessive baggage that affects how they move through the world and what manifests in the Backrooms, a space our protagonists soon learn they aren’t alone in.

Without spoiling the way events unfold, I can tell you that the story’s plot points serve a larger metaphor around trauma, mental health, and how they affect us and the way we treat others. While I do think the dialogue becomes a bit too ham-fisted and tends to overexplain the movie’s themes towards the end, the metaphors that Backrooms plays with are layered and feed into what makes the original story scary. Many have argued that what makes these liminal spaces unnerving isn’t big scary monsters, but the unsettling feelings that come from being trapped in vaguely familiar areas that you can’t trust, playing on your memories and playing tricks on your mind. This movie has its fair share of scary movie monsters (one specific one that seems to be a bit contentious with viewers, who I didn’t mind but did seem the tiniest bit silly), but luckily does not shy away from what truly engaged online audiences. The nuance of the film’s themes in the abstract is the most successful part of the movie, but the first half of the runtime is stronger than the second and parts of the narrative and metaphors feel a bit underdeveloped.

Even still, there’s a lot to appreciate here. The cinematography is fantastic, with memories and outside portions being shot like oversaturated, unnerving dreams and the Backrooms portions feeling florescent and dim. Parsons and Edo Van Breemen’s soundtrack is evocative (and includes some pretty inspired choices for needle drops) and fits in with the environment’s inherent themes of nostalgia and memory. Maybe most importantly, Parsons’ voice as a filmmaker is refined for someone of his age. Parsons claims to have only seen one David Lynch movie in interviews, which, if anything, is a testament to Lynch’s influence on modern movies in general, where a director who hasn’t seen much of his work can still be so indebted to Lynch’s artistic voice. That Lynch-like dreamscape vibe that Backrooms deals in is shared with director (and one of the many producers on this film) Osgood Perkins, whose breakout hit, Longlegs, was one of my favorite horror flicks of this decade.

It’s clear that, in addition to surrealist takes on elevated horror exceptionally engaging audiences, Hollywood and the movie business would do well to further incorporate younger voices who have interest in telling stories that they are passionate about (considering fellow zoomer director Curry Barker also doing impressive numbers with his horror film Obsession, as well as working on two new movies (including an A24 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre for some reason? Please stop rebooting TCM!)). Parsons has already begun work on a sequel to Backrooms, expressing his belief that a series would be necessary to fully explore the narrative. I won’t lie, I’ve learned to not expect much from horror sequels, but I am curious to see what Parsons does next, as his talents are clear and his potential is undeniable. As for Backrooms, it’s rough around the edges at times, but still a thoroughly entertaining and surprisingly well-paced theater experience that I had a lot of fun with (even if the crowd was really annoying when I saw it a second time). Your mileage may vary, but fuck you and your mileage, pal.

You know what’s scarier than the Backrooms? Missing out on our fantastic content from this past week! Get lost in some stellar metal writing:

TMP // TTT for thee.

Diary of Doom gave some insight on his time at Maryland Death Fest and, luckily for my slow-to-write ass, saw almost none of the same bands as I did. Hopefully we can meet at the next one!: