Kane Parsons’ Backrooms brings his popular series of viral videos into movie theaters. You don’t need to know anything about Parsons’ two dozen YouTube shorts about “The Complex” — a mysterious space filled with bizarre rooms and hallways that seem to go on endlessly in every direction — to understand or enjoy the big-screen version, but the movie is very clearly set within the same continuity as the shorts, and builds upon the mythology that they introduced. So whether you want to go into the movie with a little background information, or you see the movie and want to go deeper (metaphorically, of course) into the Complex, the YouTube videos are the next obvious place to go.
The entire series is embedded below, along with brief descriptions of each of them. They range in length from 30 seconds to upwards of 45 minutes. They’re all interesting exercises in low-budget lore building and sustained horror ambiance, but if you want to watch only the most essential videos to understanding the broader story, these are the ones I would watch:
- “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”
- “Informational Video”
- “Pitfalls”
- “Presentations”
- “Found Footage #2”
- “Reunion”
- “Damage Control”
- “Found Footage #3”
That’s just my suggestion though. If you want to watch them all, in order, you can take your own leisurely tour through the Backrooms below.
The Backrooms (Found Footage)
In the first “Backrooms” short, someone making an amateur movie with their buddies stumbles to the ground and somehow falls into the liminal space of the title. While exploring its endless corridors and rooms, he encounters and then gets chased by a mysterious monster. The creature eventually grabs him and the unseen narrator drops his camera, which falls and falls and then somehow winds up thousands of feet in the air back in the normal world before crashing to the ground. Although shot for basically zero budget, this first short — which has been watched over 78 million times on YouTube — features incredible atmosphere and impressive production design.
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This brief clip gets in and out in under three minutes feels like it was comprised of outtakes and extras from the first short. Images of the mysterious “Complex” (including something called the “Null Zone 4”) and photos of scientists with their faces blacked out play over an ominous droning score.
The Third Test
In less than two minutes, this short introduces a third “experiment” surrounding the Complex, conducted on July 2, 1988 by the Async Research Institute. The final moments for the short gives us a glimpse of a doorway filling with energy and light.
First Contact
The fourth short begins with an onscreen title card that reads “Test #6,” followed by assorted B-roll of scientific equipment and the same doorway portal, now in October 1989. This one goes out of control and sparks fires and explosions. The camera cuts to black and the audience hears unseen voices saying “Wait! There’s something there! There’s an obstruction!” while what seems to be a computer diagram that maps the Backrooms appears onscreen. The image cuts back to the doorway which now opens to the Complex.
Faultline.mov
Repurposed footage from ABC News shows anchor Ted Koppel talking about the famous earthquake that struck Northern California minutes before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series. The addition of atmospheric music suggests that the events of the prior short caused the earthquake and the chaos that followed.
Missing Persons
Another very short clip, roughly 150 seconds total, featuring posters of various missing people — some as young as two years old — along with an animated line graph showing a huge rise in disappearances following the experiment that opened the portal into the Complex. Then a hard cut (and a flash of the logo for the Async Research Institute) takes us into the Backrooms themselves, with VHS found footage of a team of scientists in hazmat suits. The group exchanges dialogue, but it’s muffled by their suits and difficult to understand. In one room, they find what looks like a dead body seated by a wall that’s covered in what the voiceover describes as some kind of “fungus.”
Informational Video
Dated “2/29/1990” in its YouTube description, this eight-minute short begins like some kind of, well, informational video, welcoming viewers to “The Project KV31 Research & Development Team,” followed by a briefing on “required protocols” surrounding “the study and development of the Async Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System.” A picture of the portal from earlier shorts is marked “KV31 – ‘Threshold,” and the video also reveals that it is also called “The Machine,” “The Door,” “The Back Rooms,” “The Complex,” and “Hallways.”
The video skips ahead, offering rules (like no one is allowed to enter “The Complex” with fewer than three people per expedition), and then another journey into the Backrooms. One scientist hears distant noises that sound like voices or moaning, and travels down a side corridor to investigate, then watches as his colleagues appear to blink out of existence. When he returns to the main hallway, they are gone and he is alone.
The lone scientist searches for the rest of his team and finds a larger room with debris on the ground and what looks like courtroom seating against the far wall. He eventually comes to a room with no lights and must use his flashlight to proceed. This area is covered in ugly wallpaper filled with trees; the room also contains old wheelbarrows, and what looks like the facade of a barn or old garage. He eventually finds a room filled with high-tech monitoring equipment, and his entrance sets off an alarm.
Autopsy Report
This video of a supposed autopsy, dated 2/05/1990, contains a not-particularly convincing corpse, making this one of the few videos in the series that doesn’t quite land. B-roll footage makes it clear the body is the one previously seen in “Missing Persons,” and that the fungus is some sort of “mutated strain” that “should be completely benign.” The unseen narrator asks someone named “Mr. Beck” where the autopsy subject came from. No answer is heard before a cut to an old tube television showing a series of black and white pictures including drawings of fungus and President Ronald Regal, along with images of the Complex and the Threshold experiment from earlier shorts.
Motion Detected
March 5, 1990: Another journey into the Backroom with the Async scientists; the area is now filled with various monitors and cameras. Onscreen title cards state that the cameras are modified “to send out an alert and begin recording when motion or substantial noise is detected.” Then final two minutes of the short consists of all the moments where the cameras detected motion on a particular day. Most are innocuous bits of the scientists trudging past the camera’s field of view. One noise is listed as “TBD.” (Spooky.) One mysterious motion is also detected in the very far distance. But what was it???
Prototype
This brief 90 second short purports to contain footage of a science experiment from May 10, 1982, one which seems to foreshadow the same technology used to open the Threshold to the Backrooms.
Pitfalls
This longer video, dated May 6, 1990, follows Async researchers as they venture deeper into the Complex. One room has a geometric pattern of square holes in the floor, with carpet on all sides. A scientist makes it across and opens a door on the opposite wall then demands the rest of the search party join him. (He never reveals what he’s seen.) The cameraman falls through one of the holes and discovers a new subterranean level. While waiting for a rescue he hears someone screaming. He finds a small hole in a wall that leads to a tunnel and then a recreation of a suburban street, complete with a paved road and a starry night sky.
One of the houses on the street seems to have noises and lights inside, so the scientist goes in and finds inverted street signs built into the floor of an otherwise empty room with blue walls. He goes further and begins to lose contact with the rest of the crew over radio. He finds evidence that someone may be living in the house, and hears more screaming, then turns a corner and finds another huge room — with a mysterious creature standing at the other end that begins chasing him. He races back to the hole he fell from. The team tosses down a rope for him to climb back up.
Report
The audio from “Pitfalls” plays over shots of Async’s offices and running tape recorders. Then a team of four researchers returns from the Backrooms and encounters a gray-haired, bearded man in a suit, with an Async security badge on his lapel — one of the first recognizable human faces in the entire series so far. Then more scientists are shown watching the “Pitfall” footage in some kind of lab. The short concludes with more footage of the Complex, and the boarding up of one of the rooms.
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This short is really short: A single 30-second clip of what looks like highway surveillance footage. Upon close inspection, it appears to show a car vanishing into thin air along a bustling road.
Presentation
The appropriately named “Presentation” looks like some sort of corporate commercial, one for Async’s “Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System.” (Distortion is spelled wrong, although it’s unclear whether that’s meant as a wry commentary on bad corporate presentations, or the filmmakers were teenagers who weren’t great at spelling.) The presentation suggests Async wants to turn the Complex into a cheap method of transportation; presumably by connection distant places via multiple Thresholds, avoiding long shipping times. They also want to turn it into a massive storage facility, with nearly unlimited space for customers’ unwanted junk.
After more corporate presentation footage, a security camera shows us the events of “Informational Video”’s final moments from another angle.
Simpsons
Yep, The Simpsons are canonically part of the Backrooms universe. This contains a scene from the 1991 episode “Bart Gets Hit By a Car,” and then some VHS artifacts, and a commercial for Dimacol in Spanish.
Found Footage #2
A woman demonstrates that a square in her garage contains a portal to the Complex by throwing various objects into it. While testing how deep the portal goes with a tape measure and a camcorder, she falls through the portal, and then explores her strange surroundings. She discovers rooms with furniture of abnormal dimensions, and increasingly bizarre architecture, like cavernous atriums and inexplicable ramps.
She eventually comes across a decaying car crashed into a wall, and then an area that looks more like an abandoned home, complete with hardwood floors stained with blood. A darkened series of rooms appears to be covered with vines — but then the vines come to life and begin chasing her back through the way she came. She drops down a hole into a tiled area that���s bathed in green light like a bathhouse from hell. The walls crackle with some kind of green energy, and the VHS tape cuts out, followed by a blue screen that reads “NO SIGNAL.”
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Three minutes and 30 seconds of innocuous home movie footage — at least until some of the faces are shown blacked out, and the camera zooms into a painting in the background of a shot of a family standing around a man playing piano.
Reunion
On May 25, 1990, Async employees take down the partition they built in “Report.” They make their way to the room with geometric patterns of square holes in the floor — which they call “14D.” They take measurements of the holes, then begin boarding them up.
Meanwhile, Mark Blume, Randall Tachi, and cameraman Marvin Leigh explore darkened room 14C — with a heavy-duty shotgun. The room has no carpets, and the ceiling appears to be missing several tiles. They find a hand-drawn map on one of the walls, then get attacked by a man with a flashlight. It turns out to be Peter Tench, the man who vanished in “Informational Video,” who then shoots Mark.
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An audio recording of a phone call by an Async employee who discusses the strange events surrounding the Threshold.
READ MORE: ScreenCrush’s Full Review of Backrooms
Overflow
A machine overloads, with images that recall both the opening of the portal in the Threshold and the green energy from the end of “Found Footage #2.” The camera zooms in on a document signed by “Ivan Beck.”
Damage Control
Security camera footage shows Peter Tench escaping the Backrooms and the Async facility after the shooting. Still photographs and a voiceover then recap the prior events surrounding Peter’s disappearance and Async’s response — namely faking his death prior to his relocation two months later. A voiceover states that Peter didn’t disappear after all; he was transported two months in the future, where he was later discovered.
After he was found, Tench was kept in the Async’s labs while they tried to figure out what to do with him, but his mental state soon deteriorated. When he was about to be transferred out of the building, he snuck back into the Complex and then attacked the team in 14C during “Reunion.”
After his escape, Tench was found dead from an extreme blow to the head. The voiceover claims his death was accidental and not preventable. After a series of flashing images, there’s a shot of a ringing photo mounted on a wall.
Found Footage #3
In what is far and away the longest Backrooms short, a man with a video camera searching for a noise in his basement winds up in the Complex and wanders through an endless maze of rooms and spaces, occasionally encountering terrifying creatures and other strange sights like a cardboard standee of a caveman and a house that seems to exist inside a room whose walls are painted like the sky.
Inside, he hears a man who tells him to leave because he’s trespassing on private property. The two men can’t see each other; one says it sounds like the other is inside his home’s walls. Something happens to the unseen man and he stops talking. Eventually, the guy’s camcorder runs out of battery power while he talks about wanting to go home.
Lighting and Tile Survey
Yes, there is nothing more terrifying than a lighting and title survey! In this video, Async employees remove an acoustic tile from the Complex, then discover that the lights in the Backrooms appear to function without a power source. You think that’s scary? You should see my electricity bills!
Static Dead End
The most recent Backrooms short was released in early 2025, and includes the voices of Async employees debating what happened to Peter Tench over images of the Threshold, and then Room 14D, where Async continues to construct walkways and set up equipment. On the other side of 14D, a man with a video camera explores a bizarre room that is supposedly a dead end, where furniture and sporting equipment are embedded in the walls and floor.
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