A series of disturbing home videos captures supernatural events that terrorize their witnesses.

We are living in interesting times, ladies and gentlemen. A popular internet meme is being turned into a motion picture, and we have the trailer for you here.

Two people centers on two people who find a mysterious door in the basement of a furniture showroom. “I found something,” Ejiofor says in voiceover during the teaser trailer. “I found a place. It’s massive in there and just goes on and on and on. All these rooms — this place builds them. Actually, more like it remembers them, and the more times it remembers something, the less it does.”

Backrooms stars Chiweltel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia. Directed by Parsons from a script by Will Soodik, the film releases theatrically from A24 on May 29.

How We Got Here

The original photograph was taking in a building at 807 Oregon Street, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It was formerly the home of Rohner’s Home Furnishings, which operated there for much of the 20th century. The photo was taken in 2002, during a renovation by Hobbytown USA. The actual room in question was not a basement, but an upper floor undergoing reconstruction.

Strikingly, the whole thing got started from a photo posted on a 4Chan blog site on May 12, 2019, as a prompt asking for “unsettling” photos. The image was paired with text describing the “Backrooms”, 600 million square miles of empty, yellow-wallpapered rooms, characterized by the stink of old moist carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights, and that mysterious photograph was the genesis of it all.

Then in early 2022, American YouTuber Kane Parsons started a series of Backrooms short films, which went viral.

The photograph has inspired a number of horror games, and even a TV show (Severance).

The lore suggests that this place is entered by use of the principle of “noclip”, which is a video game term, allowing the viewer to bypass normal collision detection and pass through game geometry to see things from game space where players aren’t supposed to be able to go. The whole thing grew into a massive collaborative project, featuring multiple levels, and then just exploded in a thousand different directions after that. Since no one person “owned” the concept, everyone was free to embellish it and make some version of it their own..

The liminal spaces of the Backrooms has snowballed into an amazing cultural artifact.

And now, astonishingly, here we are.