We’re Getting Major ‘House of Leaves’ Vibes From This Creepy New Trailer

An impossible place. Room after room, corridor after corridor, with no ending in sight. It shouldn’t exist. Can’t exist. How did you get in? How can you get out? Why is it here, and what does it all mean?

Those are just some of the thoughts and questions you have after watching the first teaser for Backrooms, a new film directed by Kane Parsons. Parsons rose to fame when his short film series, also called Backrooms, got tens of millions of views on YouTube, following a camera person in a bright, terrifying, impossibly infinite place.

Now that’s becoming a feature with a cast including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass, none of whom appear in this creepy first look.

Having not followed the wild success of Backrooms too closely, our first thoughts with this teaser, as well as the dynamite short it’s based on, turned to Mark Z. Danielewski’s hugely ambitious 2000 book, House of Leaves. In that book, which is way more complicated than this, a man discovers a hallway in his house that defies logic. It shouldn’t be there. But it is, so he hires a famous explorer to go in with him, and together, they document what they soon realize is a terrifying, infinite space that can’t be explained. Again, there’s much more to the story, but that’s the core.

Backrooms certainly has some of that DNA in it, and with this feature, Parsons looks to expand on the idea in some way. For example, the entrance to the space in the short is on a street. In the film, it’s below a furniture store. How much will the film explain the unexplainable? Will it solve the mystery? And will those insanely creepy shadow creatures show up? We have to imagine the answer to that last question is certainly “yes.”

A24 will release Backrooms on May 29, in the heart of the summer movie season. We can’t wait to see how it all comes together. Here’s the original short.

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