User:Not0nshoree/Backrooms (webseries)

Backrooms is a sci-fi horror web series created by American YouTuber Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels). It is loosely based on The Backrooms urban legend. The series debuted in 2022 with the short film "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" which has over 56 million views as of February 2024. Parsons would expand his series to include fourteen more short films. The series is slated for a film adaptation with Parsons set to direct, alongside A24 producing.

The series revolves around Async, a fictional research institute that discovers the Backrooms and attempts to document and research it.

Development and themes
After making several Attack on Titan themed videos, Parsons was looking for "new things to do". He was in between projects and was inspired to create a found-footage style animation of the Backrooms after rediscovering a render he had saved some time prior. Parsons was vaguely aware of the Backrooms in terms of the original image and caption he saw on Instagram two years prior. However, he was not aware of the community behind it. In an interview, he stated: "I came across the original image on my computer … and I just thought, huh, it would be interesting to see if I could go to my 3D software, Blender, and try to recreate a scene in this environment,". He would use Blender to create a test animation of a chair in the Backrooms being thrown and hitting a wall. The shot would later be used in the first video of the series. Parson's would use Blender alongside Adobe After Effects to create the first video. It would take Parsons a month to complete the short.

Michael Dobuski of ABC News would describe the themes of the series as "It's a slow burn story focusing on both the politics of Async and the United States government, as well as the otherworldly, confusing functions of the Complex, or The Backrooms."

Reception
Reception for the series has been mostly positive. The first video of the series received positive reviews from critics. WPST called it "the scariest video on the Internet". Otaku USA categorized it as analog horror, while Dread Central and Nerdist compared it favorably to the 2019 video game Control.

Kotaku praised the series for exercising restraint in its horror and mystery. Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza predicted that the Backrooms, like the creepypasta Slender Man and its panned 2018 film adaptation, would eventually be adapted into a "slick but dismal 2-hour Hollywood movie."

Parsons said he had "no idea" there was a fan community behind the original Backrooms legend, and recalled being surprised to see comments on his first video from people saying "You're doing the Backrooms wrong. What is this?" or "There's supposed to be smilers on level one." He said that this continued until eventually "people almost forgot about the old one" and his version had "sort of been adopted" by fans.

Film adaptation
On February 6, 2023, A24 announced that they are working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Parsons' videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino is set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps are set to produce.