Hollywood is having an identity crisis. Ever since the advent of television and movies, the power over what is shown to the public has been held by wealthy corporations. This is what gives us the fleshy bloated corpse that is the MCU. It’s why Netflix has produced thousands of original properties, most of which are entirely forgettable.
Back in 2005, YouTube broke the internet, and what started out as 480p clips of people singing badly in their bedrooms has now become a platform with 2.7 billion users. YouTubers have been making movies for years, but rinky-dink films like Fred: The Movie (2010) and Smosh: The Movie (2015) have recently been outshone by truly professional films.
This phenomenon caught my eye in 2022 with Talk to Me, produced by RackaRacka. More recently came Iron Lung by Markiplier, Obsession by the channel that’s a bad idea, and Backrooms by Kane Pixels, all released in 2026. These films had a combined budget of over $18 million, and (so far) a combined worldwide box office of over $752 million.
The “backrooms” concept originated from a single picture posted on the Paranormal thread of 4Chan in 2019:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
Anyone unlucky enough to fall into the backrooms dimension becomes lost in an eerie maze containing a creature made of twisting fungus and human body parts, which mimics the final screams of its victims, hoping to lure new prey.
From this unassuming post came a massive online community. The most prolific and memorable contributions came from a 16-year-old creator, Kane Parsons, who created a disturbingly realistic series of found-footage videos soaked in VHS artifacting. In 2025, Parsons was given full creative control in a feature-length A24 backrooms film, now in theatres.
As a fan of the low-res VHS series, I was concerned that a Hollywood production would polish the unsettling terror completely out of the film, and studio interference would prioritize mass-market appeal, creating a shallow, corporate product.
I needn’t have worried. While not quite a masterpiece, Backrooms is certainly Parsons’ magnum opus, and he holds the title of youngest A24 director yet, 20 years old at the time of production.
Although most of the film is in high-def, it frequently utilizes the VHS style fans love. The story admittedly collapses into some overdone horror tropes in the third act, but it’s still a stupendous achievement from a guy who previously used Blender on his bedroom laptop.
Backrooms is a perfect example of how modern Hollywood is being challenged by independent creators. No longer must viewers be beholden to movies surgically designed by hundreds of board members as a calculated bid to gain as much revenue as possible. The landscape and historical trajectory of film has been irreversibly altered. Small creators are making interesting films just for the hell of it, which, when it comes down to it, is really the point of filmmaking anyway.