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The psyche, in considering itself, is architectural and both irreal and surreal in how it configures spatiality, let alone remembers it. This is the unsettling focus of Backrooms (2026), the debut feature-length film by genre sensation Kane Parsons based on his YouTube creepypasta of the same name.
A creepypasta is a short, user-generated horror story designed to frighten readers and widely shared across the internet. The term is a mashup of "creepy" and "copypasta," referencing the early days of digital culture when spooky text was repeatedly copied and pasted across forums and message boards.
Elevating his creepypasta to a full-length feature has enhanced Parson’s initial concept with a claustrophobic yet ever-expanding production design by Danny Vermette who worked alongside set designer Alan Derksen and lead dresser Cheyanne Reinelt to physically bring the viral online universe to the big screen. A realtor might assert, “Location, location, location!” but would be hard-pressed to sell this property.
Mashing together the oneiric set pieces of Charlie Kaufman with the uncomfortable and ambiguous imperatives of David Lynch and the complicated canted angles of Heinrich Emigholz to horrific and provocative effect, Backrooms plunders genre tropes and psychological theories to construct an admirably threatening environment allegiant to its internet origins.
Backrooms is surreal in how it seeks to visualize the connection between dreams / nightmares and the psyche, but irreal in how it posits that what we consider real—including the presumed positive effects of psychotherapy—might not be real at all. Swiss psychotherapist C.G. Jung often used an architectural metaphor—specifically a house or a multi-story building—to conceptualize the structure of dreams and the human psyche. Rather than viewing dreams as deceptive trickery, he treated them as finished, natural constructions that mirror the deepest layers of the mind. His own dream recorded early in his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections marks his descent through architectural layers by way of doors and stairways, starting with familiar furnishings, passing through ancient trappings, and veering into the prehistoric and near primordial.
“I was in a house I did not know, which had two storeys,” Jung writes. “It was ‘my house.’ I found myself in the upper storey, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house and thought ‘not bad.’ But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older. I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were mediaeval, the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another thinking ‘now I really must explore the whole house.’ I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this, I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down to the depths. These, too, I descended and entered a low cave cut into rock. Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old, and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.” (MDR, pp. 158-159)
Cinematographer Jeremy Cox masterfully simulates this layered descent in one of the later scenes of Backrooms, which articulates the experiences of Mary, the psychotherapist played by Renate Reinsve whose marketing strategy is to promise analysands that she will help them go through windows into better lives. The inspiration for that promise seems to have come from her agoraphobic mother’s refusal to let her open the windows of her childhood home. After her mother is institutionalized, Mary pursues a career in psychotherapy in an effort, perhaps, to make sense of the past, though she seems at the same time unwilling to let go of it. In an early scene Mary’s mother encourages her to press her hand into wet cement. What seems like a lovely memory is literally buried underneath a pile of debris from their demolished house being dumped on them. From that origin memory Mary has salvaged the chunk of concrete on which her handprint is impressed.
This triggered a deep memory within me. When I was 7-8, I attended Myron D. Witter elementary in Brawley, California. I walked a long distance from the school to our home on the edge of town, this side of the railroad tracks. One afternoon, shortly before turning onto “H” Street where I lived, I found a roadside curb of fresh cement and pushed my little hand into it. I often looked at it whenever I walked by, proud of my mark on the world. Over the years I have thought about that handprint often and have even wondered if it would still be there should I ever return to Brawley and, if so, if I could also carry it away as a memento? Perhaps it would come in handy, as it does for Mary in Backrooms?
I admire Reinsve’s risk in shifting from an arthouse film like Joachim Trier’s Oscar®-winning Sentimental Value (2026) to a genre film like Backrooms.
As frustrated architect Clark, Chiwetel Ejiofor delivers an energized performance of a bewildered and unmoored man who discovers a dimension that proves his architectural prowess even as it confirms his unwillingness to transform trauma, preferring to wallow in the comfort of not changing, of not becoming anyone else, of remaining rooted in an uncanny familiarity. He befriends the denizens of his own depths. He feeds off of them.
The answer to Mary’s final question, “What’s going to happen to me?” is deeply disturbing and ambiguous. We’re captured in her question. What’s going to happen to all of us?
Within the ranks of new genre experiments, along with Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025), Backrooms reanimates the genre through an electricity that courses through assembled tropes that have been reconstructed into a new body. It’s a satisfying generational shift that feels like a shot in the arm for an enthusiast such as myself.
