Sightlines · reception
How Backrooms was received
2026 · Kane Parsons · Backrooms on Sightlines
The arc
Pre-release, the snark was 'a 16-year-old's YouTube short stretched to two hours?' — then it opened to 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and an $81.5M weekend, more than tripling A24's previous best debut (Civil War), and became the studio's highest-grossing film ever.
What’s debated
The recurring fight is whether Parsons' extraordinary atmosphere survives the script — 'an exceptional first act that doesn't stick the landing' is the review cliché — and, bigger picture, whether internet creepypasta can be real cinema at all.
Its footprint
It dragged the whole liminal-space aesthetic — mono-yellow wallpaper, humming fluorescents, 'noclipping out of reality' — from 4chan and YouTube into the multiplex, and the origin story itself (teenager's viral short becomes an A24 tentpole) is now the most retold anecdote in film Twitter's arsenal.
Where it stands
Too new for canon but already a generational marker — the internet-native crowd's first event horror movie, the thing everyone on Letterboxd logged opening weekend.
Did you know? At 20, Kane Parsons became the youngest director ever to open a film at #1 at the US box office, taking a record Josh Trank had held since Chronicle (2011), which he made at 27.
Named by the director
- One Hour Photo (2002) — Parsons named Mark Romanek's thriller among the works that shaped the film's unsettling, sterile mood.
- Mr. Robot (TV series) (2015) — Parsons called it 'probably his single biggest visual and tonal reference for Backrooms' — the work his team referenced most.
- Portal (video game) (2007) — Parsons cited Valve's game as 'the earliest influence' — its vast, rotting 'eternal indoors' fed directly into his Backrooms.