Backrooms revealed its spooky first footage for the horror feature that adapts Kane Parsons’ YouTube series.
A24 releases director Parsons’ film theatrically May 29. The project stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia.
Backrooms centers on two people who find a mysterious door in the basement of a furniture showroom.
“I found something,” Ejiofor says in voiceover during the teaser trailer. “I found a place. It’s massive in there and just goes on and on and on. All these rooms — this place builds them. Actually, more like it remembers them, and the more times it remembers something, the less it does.”
Parsons helmed the movie from a script by Will Soodik. A24 and The North Road Company’s Chernin Entertainment co-financed the movie and serve as co-studios for the film that counts 21 Laps Entertainment and Atomic Monster as producers.
Kori Adelson, Dan Cohen, Chris Ferguson, Dan Levine, Shawn Levy and James Wan serve as producers.
Backrooms is inspired by Parsons’ viral YouTube horror series that has amassed more than 190 million views. The 20-year-old Parsons becomes the youngest filmmaker in A24’s history.
The movie’s release follows the recent success of Iron Lung, an indie horror film that filmmaker and YouTube content creator Markiplier self-distributed theatrically earlier this year, with the video game adaptation having surpassed $43 million at the global box office. During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Markiplier explained that numerous studios and distributors had rejected his project.
“There still is a stigma against YouTube,” Markiplier said. “It’s not like I’m going to topple the mountain by myself. It has to be toppled and then toppled again, until it becomes normalized. Once it becomes normalized, then it can become boring, and it’s like, ‘Of course a YouTuber can do this,’ and there’s nothing to question about it.”
