Backrooms has returned to the big screen with 15 minutes of bonus footage.
After grossing over US$330 million (11 billion baht) worldwide on a roughly $10 million budget, A24 has released Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition to boost its record-breaking success.
Directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, the leftfield horror film's extended version runs for 2 hours 6 minutes.
A24's youngest ever director earlier launched the Yellow Wallpaper Zine, trapping readers inside the reprint of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story of the same name. Published in 1892, it is a spooky tale of a woman confined in a nursery by her physician husband as treatment for her "depression".
Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who manages a quiet, dreary furniture store in the 1990s. Divorced and drinking, he goes to see Mary (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, who is haunted by childhood memories of being shut in by her mentally ill mother.
In the middle of his treatment, Clark discovers an infinite array of mustard yellow rooms in his store's basement. However, Mary does not entirely believe him. Only when he goes missing, she ventures to the unknown to rescue him.
The cast includes Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell), two furniture store staff, as well as Phil (Mark Duplass), a scientist and researcher into "Backrooms".
Parsons created Backrooms as web series while still a teenager. It went on to be a low-budget smash hit, along with Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, who cut his teeth on YouTube. As one room leads to the next without end, the concept emerged in 2019, when a user replied to a post on the anonymous website 4chan.
"If you're not careful and you 'noclip' out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately 6 hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in," reads the post.
Parsons adapted the internet lore into web series on YouTube as part of a phenomenon called "creepypasta" -- a horror story that grows endlessly because other users keep adding new details to it.
Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition is in local cinemas now.
