The fluorescent-lit dread of 'The Backrooms' is now a $330 million empire

When the history of 2020s cinema is written, someone is going to have to explain how a grainy internet joke about getting trapped in an infinite, damp office park became a cornerstone of modern entertainment. I am speaking, of course, about The Backrooms. It started as a creepypasta, which is a polite term for a digital ghost story, and it has somehow ended up as an inescapable multimedia juggernaut.

The numbers are frankly absurd. Released last month, Kane Parsons’s feature adaptation cost a relatively modest $10 million to make and has just sauntered past $330 million at the global box office. A24, the studio that usually corners the market on prestige anxiety, has discovered that nothing prints money quite like the collective millennial and Gen Z dread of fluorescent lighting and yellow wallpaper. It is now their highest-grossing film to date.

Naturally, this level of return on investment attracts a certain kind of attention. Google’s DeepMind has just handed A24 a $75 million research and development partnership. They are officially exploring how technology can aid story production and distribution, which sounds like corporate synergy but really just means Silicon Valley wants in on the damp carpet aesthetic. It is mildly amusing, and perhaps entirely fitting, to consider what advanced technology will do with an IP predicated on endless, inescapable procedural generation.

You do not even need to wait for the DeepMind era to experience the fatigue of infinite corridors. The video game adaptations are already here, with Escape the Backrooms and Backrooms: Escape Together both arriving on PS5 and Xbox over the last few weeks. Parsons, who built this entire empire on YouTube, has confirmed he is 'definitely not done' with the universe. With a premium VOD release looming next week, he has sequels and more web episodes currently in the works.

There is a grim comedy in watching the internet’s favourite metaphor for bureaucratic purgatory become a highly efficient, multi-platform franchise. We spent years telling stories about being trapped in an endless loop of identical rooms, only to buy tickets, download the games, and trap ourselves in it voluntarily. The Backrooms used to be the place you ended up when you accidentally slipped out of reality. Now, it just is reality.