It all started with a picture of a yellowing office that creeped people out. That’s where “The Backrooms,” the viral internet sensation that has now inspired a major motion picture, comes from. Director Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” is poised to be the biggest box office surprise of the summer. But where did this movie originate? What is it based on? The history of this internet sensation is bizarre, but it’s also part of a larger trend.

What became known as “The Backrooms” traces its roots to a thread on 4chan in 2019. Several years prior, an image of a large, carpeted, empty, yellow room had circulated on various message boards. However, when a user on 4Chan posted the image and asked users to quote “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off,'” it became something more.

Users did precisely that, helping to create the sub-genre we refer to as liminal horror, which includes films like “Backrooms” and “Exit 8.” As for “The Backrooms” more specifically, a user in that 4chan thread shared one very important comment, which helped build out the fictional history of this particularly creepypasta. Alongside an image of strange, steel structures in the water, the following text appeared:

“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.”

The devotion to building out the lore of and obsessing over the collective, non-linear tale of “The Backrooms” was so feverish that people spent years trying to find the actual, original image that started it all. As reported by Boing Boing in 2024, it was revealed to have been taken in 2002 at a HobbyTown franchise in Wisconsin that was being renovated.

Thanks largely to that 4chan thread, “The Backrooms” became a wildly popular creepypasta in certain corners of the internet. It’s not altogether unlike other famed creepypastas like the monster known as Slenderman, as chronicled in the 2016 documentary “Bewared the Slenderman.” Sony also made a very poorly-received “Slender Man” movie in 2018.

There are entire subreddits, wiki pages, forums, and all sorts of gathering places online devoted to “The Backrooms.” What helps set it and creepypastas in general apart from other scary stories is that they are often community-generated, making their lore somewhat flexible and all the more mysterious.

“If you’ve ever been at your high school after hours, like after a sports game or something, and it’s empty, there’s sort of this really strange sense,” as writer/filmmaker Samantha Culp told ABC in 2022 while breaking down the phenomenon. “A lot of these writers — young creators and writers and artists that are engaging with liminal spaces and The Backrooms talk about that being a formative … experience of liminality.”

Notably, there’s a bit of a divide within the “Backrooms” community. A subreddit called r/TrueBackrooms sought to do away with some of the more complex world-building in favor of keeping it all ominous and simple. “This is a subreddit for discussion of the Backrooms and the feelings it evokes, rather than role-playing and building lore,” the subreddit’s description reads.

However, when almost anyone talks about this particularly creepypasta in the here and now, one name comes up above all others: Kane Parsons. That’s because, in January 2022, Parsons uploaded a video to his YouTube channel titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” It incorporated much of the lore that was built online but gave it more life. It also added some f*****g creepy monsters into the mix.

The video has since amassed nearly 79 million views, inspiring a whole series on his channel. What Parsons did with “The Backrooms” essentially became the definitive version of the lore around this creepypasta (not unlike “Marble Hornets” in regard to Slenderman). Now? A24 has turned the “Backrooms” viral internet sensation into a movie, with Parsons, who is only 20-years-old, directing and going from no-budget YouTuber horror to making a feature film with a $10 million budget and multiple Oscar-nominees starring.

What’s more, the reception has been quite positive thus far. Writing for /Film, BJ Colangelo called “Backrooms” a “skin-crawling liminal nightmare” in her review. Basically, Parsons managed to parlay his take on this whole online horror phenomenon and turn it into a mainstream movie — one that looks like it’s going to be hugely successful. As a result, the legend is only going to grow, now reaching the masses who don’t spend their time in the weirdest corners of the internet. “The Backrooms” have gone mainstream.

“Backrooms” hits theaters on May 29, 2026.