If you ask the internet, the creepiest place to find yourself these days isn’t in some creaky, haunted house. It’s in a “liminal space”—typically empty and lit by fluorescent lights, with a soulless, eerie feel. (Think the hallways of Severance, an abandoned mall or, in the case of the Backrooms, a bland room with yellow wallpaper and damp beige carpet).
And now the Backrooms concept has been given the A24 treatment, with an upcoming horror film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass due out May 29. To get audiences in the right mindset of existential dread, the studio has created an immersive Backrooms experience in Burbank, where you can walk through the eerily bright space—for free.
The conception of the Backrooms as we know it dates back to 2019, when a prompt on 4chan asked users to post “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.’” Among the many responses was a photo of the now-famous yellow room, uploaded by an anonymous user (avid online researchers later pinpointed its location as a former furniture store in Wisconsin). Someone else chimed in: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”
Thus the seed of the Backrooms was planted, and the “creepypasta” soon took on an online life of its own among worldbuilding fans—with some claiming to have visited the liminal space themselves. Severance creator Dan Erickson even cited the Backrooms as an influence on the Apple TV show.
But the Backrooms are perhaps best known as a web series, directed and posted on YouTube in 2022 by then-16-year-old Kane Parsons. The budding filmmaker (now a ripe 20 years of age) was tapped by A24 to translate his vision of the liminal space to the big screen, adding some more overt horror elements and thrills to the concept.
Photograph: Gillian Glover for Time Out
Now, ahead of the film’s release, A24 has brought the Backrooms to life inside of an unassuming building in Burbank, where it’s re-created the dismal yet trippy setting of the film—with some fun surprises. If you want the chance to lose yourself in a maze of windowless rooms, you can “noclip” out of reality and into the Backrooms yourself from May 13 to 17. And the best part: Admission is free. Just sign up for a time slot here (some are all booked up, but you can join the waitlist).