Apr 01, 2026 11:59am IST
‘Backrooms’ Trailer Review: A24’s Horror Flick Looks Creepy, Controlled and Genuinely Unsettling
"Backrooms” has finally made its way to the big screen and the first trailer suggests A24 and Kane Parsons may actually have a grip on what made the idea work in the first place. That is the biggest relief here. Because this was always the kind of concept that could very easily get flattened the moment a studio tried to make it feel too cinematic or too accessible.
Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, thankfully, the trailer does not seem interested in forcing this into a conventional horror shape right away. It understands that the real fear of “The Backrooms” has never just been a monster or a jump scare. It is the space itself. The emptiness. The repetition. The weirdly artificial feeling of being stuck somewhere that looks familiar enough to make you uncomfortable but wrong enough to make your skin crawl.
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And that atmosphere is very much intact here. The yellow walls, the stale lighting, the maze-like corridors and that constant sense of something being deeply off all come through effectively in the footage. The trailer does not need to do much, as the setting already conveys much of the unease. That is what makes it work. It is not trying to convince you that this place is scary. It just lets the space sit there and do the work on its own.
There is also a smart restraint employed in how the trailer is cut. It gives you enough to understand the scale and the danger without blowing the whole thing open too early. That helps, because “Backrooms” as a concept works best when it feels like it is slipping away from your understanding rather than handing you too many answers too quickly. The mystery is part of its pull.
The bigger question, of course, is whether this can hold for an entire film. A concept this atmosphere-driven can either become hypnotic or start feeling repetitive if the film does not find enough to do with it. The trailer cannot answer that yet. But it does suggest that the people behind it know what they are handling and are not trying to fix something that was already effective in its raw form.
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