A24 has released new posters for their most unconventional horror project yet, and they look exactly like the kind of yellowing wallpaper you’d find in your grandmother’s basement—if your grandmother’s basement happened to be a gateway to infinite, eldritch corridors filled with unspeakable entities.
The Backrooms, based on the viral YouTube phenomenon created by teenage filmmaker Kane Parsons, is shaping up to be the studio’s weirdest release of 2026, and these posters perfectly capture the liminal dread that made the internet fall in love with the concept.
Parsons was just sixteen years old when he uploaded the original Backrooms video to YouTube in 2022—a nine-minute found-footage nightmare that depicted a cameraman falling through reality into an endless maze of fluorescent-lit corridors, empty rooms, and the distant sound of something wet moving in the walls. The video went viral instantly, racking up millions of views and spawning an entire subgenre of “liminal space” horror that dominated online discourse for months.
Now, four years later, Parsons is twenty years old and directing his first feature film for the most prestigious indie studio in Hollywood, because apparently the timeline we’re living in is just as surreal as the Backrooms themselves.
The new posters released by A24 embrace the minimalist aesthetic that made the original videos so effective. One features nothing but yellowish-beige wallpaper patterns—the signature visual of the Backrooms—while another shows the faintest outline of a doorway leading into darkness. There are no jump scares in the marketing, no images of monsters or screaming victims, just the oppressive emptiness of spaces that feel familiar but wrong.
It’s the visual equivalent of the uncanny valley: you recognize the patterns (office carpets, drywall, fluorescent hum) but something in your lizard brain knows you shouldn’t be here.
The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a therapist whose patient goes missing into the Backrooms, forcing him to venture into the dimension beyond reality to rescue her. He’s joined by Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian actress who broke out in The Worst Person in the World, along with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia.
It’s a cast that suggests A24 is treating this YouTube adaptation with the same seriousness they bring to their Oscar contenders, which makes sense given that the film is being produced by Shawn Levy and James Wan—two producers who know a thing or two about turning internet culture into box office gold.
What makes The Backrooms fascinating as a cultural phenomenon is how it evolved from creepypasta—a type of internet horror story passed around forums and message boards—into legitimate cinema. Parsons didn’t just adapt someone else’s work; he adapted his own, expanding the nine-minute short into a feature-length exploration of spaces that exist between realities.
The found-footage style that defined the original will apparently be maintained, giving the film the gritty, lo-fi aesthetic that fans loved while allowing for bigger set pieces and more elaborate creature designs.
The posters are clever marketing because they require context to understand. If you don’t know what the Backrooms is, they just look like weird wallpaper ads. If you do know, they trigger immediate recognition and dread. It’s the kind of insider-baseball marketing that builds cult anticipation, turning the film into an event for the online generation that grew up with the original videos.
A24 knows their audience, and they know that the kids who watched Parsons’ YouTube videos are now old enough to buy movie tickets and appreciate the irony of a major studio spending millions to recreate the cheap, DIY aesthetic of a teenager’s bedroom production.
The Backrooms arrives in theaters May 29, 2026, and if the posters are any indication, it will be the most unsettling theatrical experience of the summer. No ghosts, no demons, just the horror of infinite, empty spaces and the knowledge that somewhere in the maze, something is looking for you.
Enter the maze—see The Backrooms in theaters May 29, 2026, and discover why A24 is betting on a 20-year-old YouTuber to redefine horror for the internet age.
Also Read: Why 2026 Is The Biggest Year For Cinema Releases in Modern History