It took a while for YouTube, and social media in general, to be considered a legitimate platform for original horror. Nowadays, algorithm willing, original shorts are a constant presence in user feeds. A lot is owed to the rise of Creepypastas in the 2000s, a style of horror that found its home in internet rumors and digital urban legends (especially in the creation of them). This is where Slenderman comes from, where weird and unsettling shorts such as Lights Out and The Portrait of God built a following.
One of the most notable horror shorts to come out from YouTube is Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, which debuted in 2022. It’s a series of liminal horror segments of varying runtimes that explore a seemingly infinite-sized underground area filled with corridors that lead to more corridors that lead to empty rooms.
On May 29th, 2026, Parsons is set to premiere the feature-length version of his original idea in theaters everywhere, keeping Backrooms as its title. The movie centers on Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner that finds an invisible pathway into a liminal realm of sterilized rooms and floors with no end.
As of late, studios have been resorting to clever marketing tactics to get people into the worlds of the films they’re promoting. Backrooms is the latest project to be given that treatment.
In a new spot doing the rounds on socials and Pluto TV, a faux commercial shows Clark dressed as a pirate to promote a special sale on the furniture at his store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. It’s an idea that tips its hat to the gimmicks of old that salesmen used to employ to lure people into their establishments on the promise of insane price cuts.
The golden age of horror marketing continues to grow here. Like Longlegs, Weapons, and Shelby Oaks before it, the Clark store spot is a simple yet meaningful bit of worldbuilding that gives the story’s world more weight and a greater sense of personality. We get an idea as to who Clark is and what his anxieties might be given the lengths he’ll go to get people to buy his stuff.
There’s a sadness to the video that finds its roots in the same commercials it’s taking from. You’re invited to think about the store’s financial situation given the need for such low prices and whether it’s all a reflection of Clark’s shortcomings as an entrepreneur.
That the spot looks like it’s shot in analog ties it all together to the original YouTube shorts that Parsons developed. The commercial is presented as if it were recorded on analog, which is the very aesthetic that define the original Backrooms videos. A sense of mundanity pervades as well. This isn’t a global scale type of horror. It’s localized and specific, a singular look at how reality can shatter for a small group of people.
The analog aesthetic is important to the story in more ways than one. The VHS quality of the imagery reminds audiences of a certain age of the value we used to put on handheld video recordings in the 90s. If something strange was captured on grainy and jittery video, then people were more willing to at least give it the benefit of the doubt.
How Backrooms will fare in its jump from its natural habitat (YouTube) to the big screen remains to be seen. The trailers point to a desire to bring the same kind of fear the original videos tapped into to an audience that will have to turn their phones off to fully experience (the very place they probably first came into contact with). For a lot of people, Backrooms is an online-first Creepypasta that looked like something that happened to random people in someplace real. Adapting that to movie theaters is the challenge. So far, though, the trailers and the marketing all point to it being a fascinating and terrifying attempt at storytelling that’s worth the price of admission.
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