A24's New Horror Movie 'Backrooms' Has a Strange Origin Story — Here Is What It's Actually About

A24's new horror film 'Backrooms' is based on a 4chan creepypasta thread. Here is the origin story, the cast, and why internet horror mythology makes for genuinely terrifying cinema.

A24's 'Backrooms' — the horror film based on the specific internet mythology that emerged from a single 4chan post in 2019 whose specific combination of liminal space aesthetics, existential dread, and procedurally generated unease produced one of the most effective pieces of online horror in the internet's history — has been a topic of sustained fan discussion since A24's involvement was confirmed, and the specific challenge of adapting an internet mythology into a theatrical horror film is the production question whose answer the film's release will provide.

The Backrooms mythology, for those unfamiliar: the original post described a specific type of space — yellow-wallpapered, fluorescent-lit, infinite rooms with no exits and no inhabitants, reached by 'noclipping' through reality — whose specific atmospheric quality (the specific unease of institutional spaces emptied of people) resonated with an online audience whose cultural vocabulary was already primed for liminal space horror aesthetics.

The mythology grew through collaborative fan expansion across Reddit, YouTube (the most viewed Backrooms content is a 12-year-old's found-footage short that accumulated 90 million views), and a network of wiki documents that mapped an increasingly elaborate fictional geography. The specific collaborative nature of its development means that A24's adaptation is adapting both an original concept and a mythological tradition built around that concept.

For A24's specific challenge: the company has produced horror cinema that engages with artistic and thematic content beyond the specific jump-scare and gore conventions that define mainstream horror. The Backrooms mythology is specifically interesting to A24's aesthetic sensibility because its horror is existential, atmospheric, and derived from specific spatial and psychological conditions rather than from conventional horror mechanisms.

For the audience: horror cinema whose roots are in internet mythology has a specific fanbase dimension that theatrical film rarely navigates well. The adaptation's relationship to the specific community expectations that the mythology has generated is the specific critical question that early reviews will address.