This 'Backrooms' Detail You Missed Makes It So Much More Terrifying

Published Jul 17, 2026, 8:11 PM EDT Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself. One of the biggest movies of 2026, Backrooms took the world by surprise, becoming A24's highest-grossing movie ever on the strength of 20-year-old Kane Parsons' vision. Part of a Gen Z changing of the guard in Hollywood that includes Curry Barker's Obsession, Backrooms entranced viewers with its eerie world of vacant hallways and empty corridors that blur the line between reality and nightmare — a setting adapted from Parson's own YouTube series, which was inspired by a 4Chan post and defined by its unsettling liminal spaces. Parsons' visual approach has justifiably been the key takeaway for Backrooms fans, but there is even more to the film than meets the eye on first (or even subsequent) viewings. One Easter egg, found in the backroom of Clark's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) furniture store, underlines the poignant thematic depth of the film and its relation to fate and mortality. And now that it's out on streaming, it's the perfect time to rewatch for this detail. Image via A24 Clark, the disillusioned owner of a failing furniture store, reeling from a divorce and his lost dreams of being an architect, has seemingly found a second chance when he discovers a strange, hidden door in his store's basement. To document this odd, unearthly space filled with limitless halls and rooms, which looks like an abandoned, decrepit shopping mall, he recruits his employee, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to capture the evidence via videotape. Backrooms transforms into a mesmerizing, sobering found-footage horror movie during this sequence, which sees the two young people consumed by the powers of the mysterious, titular realm. But while Kat and Bobby's disappearance feels sudden and random in the moment, the film hints that actually, they were always doomed. During Clark's initial foray into the backrooms, two pairs of shoes can be seen halfway stuck on the ground. Furniture and other paraphernalia are also scattered throughout each room, creating a sense of uneasy randomness. However, these shoes—a pair of sneakers and a pair of sandals—are hardly a fluke. If you pay close attention, you'll see that these are the shoes worn by Bobby and Kat during their eventual demise inside the backroom. Before the two young people had even heard such a crazy theory from Clark, their fates were already sealed. How exactly did this happen? 'Backrooms' Reflects a Broken Sense of Time and Displacement There's no right or wrong answer to interpreting Backrooms, but Kane Parsons certainly has more on his mind than spooky tracking shots of a building that looks like an abandoned mall; there is an uncanny valley that suggests that it's something nefarious. And the 2026 horror sensation, which takes place in a vague re-creation of the 1990s, revolves generally around a sense of displacement and unstuck time. Clark's television advertising campaign — which sees him dressing up as his store's mascot, a pirate — as well as his aimless malaise from being a failed architect stuck running a deserted retail store, speak to a broken reflection of time. Clark's therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), has a successful line of self-help audio tapes, but she feels equally lost in time. Inside the backrooms, the past, present, and future all collide into one mirage of regret and sorrow — a projection of one's subconscious. When Clark first emerges into this world, the evidence of Kat and Bobby's demise has already manifested. The backrooms are a time continuum with no rhyme or reason. Clark isn't the type of person to be transfixed by otherworldly life, so his motivation to give himself over to the backroom is born out of a desire to break free from his dire reality. This is where Kane Parsons' jump from YouTube to feature film saw its greatest impact, as his main thesis elevates Backrooms from Internet Creepypasta to a calculated study of human psychology. The foreshadowing of Kat and Bobby's fate is a reminder that you can't run away from the world and your interior life, and the backroom is anything but a fantasy for Clark. The divorced store owner hoped that a new universe could rewrite history or grant him an epiphany, but his infectious pessimism resulted in his own hellscape, bringing down the helpless Kat and Bobby, who were courageous enough to go the extra mile for him. Backrooms shows that we can’t escape our demons and past woes simply by running away from them. Backrooms Release Date May 27, 2026 Runtime 110 minutes