The Truth Behind A24’s ‘Backrooms’ Is Stranger Than Any True Story You’ve Heard

With A24’s much-hyped horror film ‘Backrooms’ finally heading to theaters, audiences are diving headfirst into the eerie yellow corridors that have haunted the internet for years. The first reactions are rolling in, the trailers are inescapable, and one question keeps surfacing across social media feeds. Is the ‘Backrooms’ movie actually based on a true story?

The short answer is no, but the longer answer is far more fascinating than any haunted house tale. What began as a single anonymous post on a paranormal forum has snowballed into a full-blown horror franchise, and the path from internet folklore to feature film involves a teenage prodigy, a viral YouTube series, and a real-world location nobody could find for years.

The ‘Backrooms’ Movie True Story Question Finally Has An Answer

Despite the unsettlingly real feel of those endless yellow halls, the upcoming A24 film is pure fiction. ‘Backrooms’ is an American science fiction horror film directed by Kane Parsons and written by Will Soodik, based on Parsons’ web series and inspired by the ‘Backrooms’ creepypasta. The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner, and Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, his therapist who ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient.

Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell round out the supporting cast in what is shaping up to be one of A24’s most anticipated horror releases. The film is scheduled to be released in the United States by A24 on May 29, 2026.

Critics who attended the early premiere at Beyond Fest left with mixed-to-positive impressions, with the film tracking somewhere between 25 and 30 million dollars for its opening weekend. So while the movie pulls heavily from real internet folklore that millions of people obsess over online, every entity, every level, and every glitch in reality you will see on screen is invented.

The Creepypasta Roots That Started It All

To understand whether ‘Backrooms’ could be based on something real, you have to go back to one 4chan post. The Backrooms are a fictional location originating from a 2019 4chan thread, one of the best known examples of the liminal space aesthetic, usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms accessed by exiting reality.

On May 12th, 2019, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread in the site’s paranormal board /x/ inviting users to post pictures of disquieting images that just feel off. Another user replied with the now famous warning about “noclipping” out of reality and getting trapped in endless empty rooms filled with the smell of old moist carpet and the buzz of fluorescent lights. That single comment set the entire mythology in motion.

From there, the concept exploded across the internet. A fandom developed around the Backrooms, with creators expanding upon the original creepypasta by inventing additional floors or levels and entities that populate them. By the time the dedicated subreddit hit 157,000 members in early 2022, the lore had already spilled onto YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok in massive waves.

None of it, however, is rooted in documented events or real disappearances. The closest thing the ‘Backrooms’ has to a true story is the genuine cultural phenomenon it created online.

Kane Parsons And The YouTube Phenomenon That Caught Hollywood’s Eye

The leap from obscure internet pasta to A24 horror movie happened almost entirely because of one teenager. On January 7, 2022, Kane Parsons began uploading a video series titled Backrooms onto his YouTube channel Kane Pixels. Using free tools like Blender and After Effects, the then sixteen year old created a found footage style short that racked up tens of millions of views and reignited mainstream interest in the lore.

His series eventually spawned a much larger storyline involving a fictional research organization called Async, and the videos collectively pulled in well over 190 million views. Hollywood took notice fast. A24 has greenlit the science fiction horror film, with Parsons becoming the youngest director in A24 history at 19 years old when the project was officially announced.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Parsons spoke at CCXP Mexico about why the concept resonates so deeply with modern audiences. He explained that the series struck a chord because of a collective anxiety around the system, economic, industrial or otherwise, that has been building for the past few centuries.

The production itself went hard on practical authenticity. Over 30,000 square feet of Backrooms were built for the feature film, which reportedly led to people getting lost on set. Producers include James Wan’s Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps, and Chernin Entertainment, meaning major Hollywood horror muscle is behind every yellow wall.

The Real Location Behind The Liminal Horror Aesthetic

While the ‘Backrooms’ itself is not real, the iconic photo that started everything absolutely is. For years, fans tried and failed to track down where the original yellowish corridor image had actually been taken, since reverse image searches kept coming up completely blank. The mystery only deepened the creepiness of the whole concept.

That changed a couple of years ago. In May 2024, a Twitter user announced in a viral post that their friend had discovered the image’s origin, the result of a combined effort in a Backrooms dedicated Discord community, which traced the image to an archived webpage from March 2003 using the Wayback Machine.

The image was found to have been taken during the renovation of a former furniture store with partitions and fake inner walls in Wisconsin, specifically a HobbyTown branch at 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh. A water leak had reportedly damaged the original space before the photo was snapped, which explains why the room looked so weirdly off and uncanny in the first place.

So the image is real, the location is real, but the haunted dimension is firmly invented. Now that you know the whole ‘Backrooms’ phenomenon grew from one anonymous 4chan comment into Chiwetel Ejiofor walking through a fluorescent yellow maze, do you find the story scarier knowing it is pure fiction, or would a true story angle have made the upcoming A24 film hit even harder?