Backrooms (2026) Review

A good horror outing, but I expected more.

I’m a big fan of the Backrooms YouTube series and have been for many years. I was let down by the movie, though. Backrooms (2026) finally has its feature-film debut after many years of YouTube Shorts. This series has revolutionized horror in the modern age. It has spawned many video games and other like-minded shows and movies. I’ve been a big fan of Kane Parsons, who is responsible for the Backrooms craze. 

Of course, the back rooms originated from a 4chan photo, but Kane Parsons really brought them into the mainstream with his short films. It’s impressive what he’s been able to do given how young he is. He was making some of these shorts on YouTube when he was still a teenager.

So I was very excited when I found out that A24 and he had paired up to make a feature-film version of The Backrooms. I found the movie enjoyable, but it felt like this could’ve been the culmination and peeling of the onion, so to speak, of the backrooms.

For so many years, we’ve got all this lore and story, but it felt like the movie should’ve been the one to really tell us what was going on and give us more details. But the movie didn’t really give many answers, and the ones it did weren’t ones I liked.

Some parts I liked are when they used the VHS footage.

Now I'm really a sucker for that sort of found footage thing. I love found footage so much that I've made a found footage film of my own. Back Rooms has some shorts online that are just found footage tapes. The movie opens with a found-footage short of sorts, and it was really cool. 

Later in Backrooms (2026) when they are investigating the Backrooms they use a VHS camera to film what they see. The movie itself is set in that VHS-era time frame, so it works. When they use the VHS camera to film the horrors they see, it feels much scarier. Of course, that's just how VHS footage works for people like me who grew up with it.

Those things we had as kids, being used for something scary, will always scratch an itch for us. There was one scene I really liked when they had the camera crew in the Backrooms looking at this strange room. In that room they'd have to slide down and use a rope just to get there as it was hard to get back up it.

Think of it like a trap door, almost. So when they went down there, they saw what looked like a laundry room, but some of the clothes were clothes they had worn before. Then they start hearing strange sounds, and we start really focusing on the VHS camera. Once we have that, we get a good look at our monster in the film. 

Seeing the monster in VHS footage of the course looks scarier than just seeing it in plain footage. We also get some cool and classic running with the VHS camera as the monster chases them. That makes it feel like we can't really see exactly what is going on, but we want to see more. It leads to a good payoff scene with Clark and a creepy figure, and I'll leave it at that. From that point on, though, Backrooms (2026) went downhill. 

The movie has incredible set design, music, and some good acting, but the story is where it falls flat, unfortunately. 

I’m going to be comparing Backrooms (2026) a lot to Silent Hill, specifically Silent Hill 2. Not the movies, the video games. I’m doing this because they are very similar in the concepts they share. Both are about people entering a strange world that seems to be altered by the minds of the people who enter it. They also share that some of the people going into these worlds have trauma and/or are troubled people.

What Silent Hill does better than Backrooms (2026) is the depth it adds to this. And in Backrooms (2026), we just get a surface-level feeling from this. For example, our main character, Clark, in the back rooms, is an alcoholic. It doesn’t seem to go into enough detail to make this sort of thing any deeper. Instead, it’s just pretty superficial, where he had to work hard for his wife, who was in school. It doesn’t feel very deep. It feels pretty inexperienced.

With Silent Hill 2, we see an extreme amount of TLC given to the characters' backstories. The trauma and story they have are very well thought out, and the way they're adapted into the horror is incredible. In the Backrooms (2026), once Clark enters the backrooms, he eventually meets a monster in there that is basically a version of himself.

The monster is the mascot that he has to portray for the store he works at, which he doesn’t like. It’s a tall and scary version of it. What could’ve been interesting is that, since he had his issues with alcoholism, as if there were more symbolism placed on the monster he created. Maybe he could’ve been stuck in the water with this monster, and he had weights on his feet to show the symbolic nature of alcoholism drowning you.

The monster could also be big and bloated and disgusting like a bloated alcoholic.

There are so many options for what they could do with this, and they could really go all out on it, but it seemed more like a creepy image they had of the tall monster, and they didn't wanna change it. In line with the surface-levelness they show, Clark starts to realize that the back rooms have created a morbid, reality-based version of his memories.

The only worthwhile memory that we see is the scene of him in his house with his wife. What would’ve been cool is if we saw a strange version of the first date, their first argument, or anything else besides just one worthwhile memory.

If they had more and maybe just focused on Clark, it would have made the movie feel more complete and less all over the place, in my opinion. Having just one makes it feel less important or more surface-level. His whole culmination is his anger towards his wife for leaving him due to his being an alcoholic. But we don’t ever really find out more beyond that.

It doesn’t feel like there’s enough story to actually mean anything. Some of that might just be where they rushed his story, where they ended up giving a lot more of the movie to the therapist that Clark sees than I anticipated. I feel like the movie really went downhill after that, as it had a lot of great tension early on.

 
I’m hard on this movie because I really felt like it could’ve shown the mainstream what this kind of Internet horror genre is all about. The potential is there to create something completely unique and interesting, but instead, we seem to have gotten a surface-level version of a good story. Of course, the set and sound design are incredible.

But all of those things fall apart when there’s not a good story, unfortunately. Especially when certain themes feel surface-level. I feel like if you’re going to talk about trauma and these horrible events, you have to really show them better.

They don’t ever flesh it out, and it feels like just a generic version of an alcoholic or someone with abandonment issues. Some of that might just be that they rushed the script, or that it was getting close to a two-hour run time, and they didn’t necessarily want the movie to be longer than it was.

I'm excited to see what Kane Parsons's future holds, though, because he is super talented, and I think he'll definitely get even better with time.

To be able to do what he’s done at his age is definitely miraculous, and I really hope he continues to make backroom movies. As much as it sounds like I don’t like this movie, it’s more just issues I had where it could’ve been so much better. I don’t think I’ll watch this movie again, but I’ll definitely watch a sequel if it’s made. I’ll also continue watching the Backrooms shorts on this YouTube channel, as I have been for many years.

On his YouTube channel, I'm sure he will keep doing shorts to fill in some gaps and keep the hype going. The movie is connected to the shorts he made online, of course, and he could expand on some of the gaps in the movie. Spoilers ahead, the ending of the movie was when we finally started to get some backstory on how the Backrooms are being used and studied by others in a lab.

But before we really understand much more, we are left with more questions. With that being said, we could see more shorts going over more about the lab we see at the end of Backrooms (2026). There are some cool ideas for some shorts that could be lab reports, journals, or even some footage of the lab itself. We really only see a few minutes of the lab at the end of the movie, so we still have much to learn.

What I want to know is if we will ever learn more about all that's going on with the Back Rooms being studied in this lab of sorts. 

That's something I feel like needs to happen. You don't have to give it all away or completely spell it out for people, but you need to have some sort of answer. With this movie, I really felt like it was time to really show us what was going on, but it didn't really show me much. I didn't have any sort of big revelation as I had hoped.

Once again, I don't need it spelled out by any means. But if you are going to make years of content for this universe and not really have many answers, it is sort of annoying. With the movie, I feel like they should have shown a little bit more. I know they really wanna make more movies and more content for this universe, but this really was the time to show us more. 

I might have overlooked that if some of the issues I spoke about, trauma and all, were done better. Beyond it having some good scare scenes, great sound and set design, I was let down.  I wanted a lot more.