Five Essential Backrooms Videos to Watch on YouTube After the Movie

If you have questions after watching Kane Parsons’ hit horror movie Backrooms, you will not find many answers in the more than 20 Backrooms videos he made for his YouTube channel. Parsons began making those videos in his mid-teens as early experiments with Blender effects and environmental sound design. They are exercises in mood and vibes, but they are largely fragments rather than narratives. They function as scattered clues to a mystery that has not fully come into focus. Parsons has a big-picture plan for a movie series that would explore that mystery more fully.

The YouTube videos do connect, though not always in particularly useful ways, and they might help you deepen your understanding of the movie. A 30-second clip called 9780415263573, for instance, appears to be highway-camera footage of a car disappearing. That clip may explain why there is a crashed car in the Backrooms in the later 13-minute video Found Footage 2, but the connection does not lead anywhere. The entire payoff lies in recognizing the possible link.

Most of Parsons’ YouTube shorts are snippets that elliptically suggest a larger story without actually telling it, and many end in the middle of a scene before resolving whatever is happening. Unlike traditional found-footage horror, which creators generally style as unearthed video that somehow contains a complete story, Parsons’ uploads truly feel like unanchored digital remnants recovered from a discarded, corrupted hard drive. Watch them all and you can piece together the beginnings of a narrative. In the later videos especially, a few characters persist from one installment to another, and the contours of a larger story start to emerge. That story still has not been fully told.

If you are new to the Backrooms phenomenon, loved the movie, and want more, or if you just want the best taste of the online work that inspired boutique studio A24 to pursue Parsons for a feature film, these are the five essential videos from his Backrooms series.

5 The Backrooms (Found Footage)

The original nine-minute viral video launched Parsons’ fandom and has now been viewed more than 94 million times. Found Footage tells a rare beginning-to-end horror story about a teenager who falls into the liminal space known as the Backrooms while shooting an amateur movie with his friends.

It is classic found-footage horror presented through a camera’s point of view, following the unseen operator as he explores the Backrooms and encounters a mysterious entity. Several of Parsons’ later videos unfold along similar lines, but The Backrooms (Found Footage) has the clearest self-contained narrative and remains the best standalone experience.

4 The Third Test

More a curiosity than an essential piece of storytelling, this collection of concept sketches and static footage runs less than two minutes. It marks the moment when the Async Research Institute, represented in the A24 movie by Mark Duplass’ character Phil, first breaches reality and opens a doorway into the Backrooms.

This technical video does not offer much information, but it is intriguing to see where the story truly began and how Async’s technological approach to entering the Backrooms works. It is markedly different from the accidental noclip method seen in several other videos, itself inspired by the anonymous 4chan post that launched the Backrooms creepypasta in the first place.

3 Pitfalls

If you want to dive deeper into the Backrooms YouTube series, this 14-minute clip is a crucial place to start. As Async explores and maps the Backrooms, cameraman Marvin Leigh documents a new area where the floor forms a grid of deep, square openings. He accidentally falls through one and begins exploring the lower levels.

The rest of the video plays out much like the original Found Footage short, though it ends abruptly and offers no clear resolution. What happened to Marvin becomes clearer in other installments, as he returns as a speaking character in three more videos: Report, Reunion, and Static Dead End. To the extent that Parsons’ YouTube series has an ongoing narrative, it begins here.

2 Informational Video

This eight-minute short starts out as an Async orientation video introducing the idea of the Backrooms project to new employees, complete with safety warnings and some alternate informal names for the Backrooms. There is some interesting early perspective here on how Async views and is handling the space it discovered, though this one rapidly becomes another lost-in-the-Backrooms first-person POV video when one of the researchers, Peter Tench, glitches out of sync with the rest of his team and has to explore on his own.

If you watch too many of Parsons’ videos back to back in short order, they start to feel a bit samey. There are new Backrooms structures and spaces in all of them, but the found-footage experience of watching an unseen camera operator wander around endless yellow spaces, yelling for help or muttering variations on swearing and shouting in panic, gets redundant quickly. This video ends very abruptly with no sense of resolution, but that is because Peter’s story continues obliquely in Presentation and eventually syncs up with Marvin’s in Reunion, Damage Control, and Static Dead End.

1 Presentation

Of all the videos on Parsons’ channel, this eight-minute short has the most to offer anyone coming directly from the movie. It is also the one entry among these otherwise grim horror clips with a sharp sense of humor. Framed as an in-house informational video, Presentation lays out Async’s hilariously mundane plans for the Backrooms, using 1990s-style computer graphics to illustrate how the institute hopes to repurpose an uncanny other-dimensional space for storage, shipping shortcuts, offices, and even apartments.

After the movie demonstrates the threat the Backrooms pose to anyone who enters, watching this bland sales pitch for rentable office space there is mildly mind-boggling. It reveals Async’s absurdly limited thinking and strongly suggests that the institute has tapped into something it neither understands nor knows how to control. Of all Parsons’ YouTube videos, Presentation also provides the clearest look at Async’s internal culture and priorities. If you only watch one video from the series, make it this one.

Source: Polygon