It started, as so much does now, on YouTube. Kane Parsons built his version of the Backrooms — those unsettling, liminal, fluorescent-lit nowhere-spaces that became a genuine internet mythology — as a series of short films uploaded to a channel most multiplex programmers had never heard of. That was then.
On Thursday night, Backrooms the feature film grossed $10.4 million in preview screenings, shattering A24’s all-time record for a single-night preview haul. The studio, which has spent the better part of a decade reshaping what “prestige horror” means at the box office, had never seen a Thursday night like it.
The Backrooms as a concept predates Parsons — it originated as a 4chan creepypasta in 2019, spreading through Reddit and YouTube before becoming one of the more durable pieces of internet folklore of the early 2020s. Parsons gave it visual grammar: the hum of bad lighting, the carpet that goes on too long, the sense that something is wrong with the geometry. That aesthetic translated. Thursday night suggested it translated all the way to the suburbs.
For context, A24’s previous horror benchmarks — Hereditary in 2018, Midsommar in 2019 — were critical events that built slowly. Backrooms arrived pre-loaded with an audience that already knew the lore, had watched the YouTube chapters, and showed up opening night dressed for it. The YouTube-to-screen pipeline has produced modest hits before. A $10.4 million preview night is a different conversation entirely.
Full opening-weekend estimates are due Sunday morning.