If an endless maze of boring-looking rooms doesn’t seem so scary to you, perhaps you’ve not seen the new trailer for Backrooms. Set for theatrical release on May 29, the buzzy horror movie from A24 has a new trailer that shows its Oscar-nominated stars navigating a terrifying labyrinth of (almost) nothing.
On Tuesday, A24 released the full-length trailer for Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons. The movie is adapted from Parsons’s YouTube miniseries, itself based on the popular creepypasta birthed on 4chan. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was up for Best Actor for 12 Years a Slave in 2014, stars as Clark, who stumbles upon the titular “Backrooms” and becomes obsessed with mapping out their mysteries. Renate Reinsve—nominated earlier this year at the Academy Awards for Sentimental Value—costars as Clark’s therapist who follows him into the Backrooms.
You can watch the trailer below.
Unlike the teaser that released in February, the new trailer is clearer about the Backrooms—what they are, how they work, and why it’s all so damn freaky. Put simply, the Backrooms are an endless, and endlessly transforming, space of fluorescently-lit rooms that exist just outside our normal reality. Notably, Ejiofor and Reinsve both “clip” into the Backrooms, which is the only way to enter them. “Clipping” is a key part of Backrooms lore, a term lifted from video game development to refer to avatars glitching through the walls and floors of their environments.
Clipping into the Backrooms isn’t as scary as what’s in the Backrooms, however. While the rooms are initially empty, things get creepier as random objects begin filling them. The horror intensifies when unexplainable bipedal monstrosities show up to surveil the hallways and the bloody remains of missing people are found. At least, that’s how the Backrooms were in Parsons’s YouTube show. We’ll have to wait and see if all those things also haunt his new movie for A24.
Are we looking at this year’s Weapons? We might be, if competition weren’t so unexpectedly stiff right now. Also coming to theaters on April 10 is EXIT 8, a psychological-horror thriller from Japanese director Genki Kawamura. Based on the indie video game The Exit 8, the movie takes place inside a looping hallway at a Japanese subway station. EXIT 8‘s sleeper buzz might either eclipse Backrooms entirely or set the stage for everyone to get lost in its appeal.
Either way, it really feels like liminal horror is the subgenre of the moment. FDR once said there is nothing to fear but fear itself. But what if nothing is what we should be afraid of?
