A24 Has Just Released a 'Haunting' The Shining Replacement

A24's Backrooms has officially hit the silver screens, premiering amid overwhelmingly positive reviews. One of the most notable threads in early reactions is that some viewers are comparing the newly released film to Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shining.

Backrooms is an unusual project in more than one way. For one, it is a horror film inspired by the eponymous internet creepypasta that originated on 4chan. Online stories about the Backrooms, infinitely large liminal spaces dominated by pale yellow walls, eventually inspired a semi-anthological web series by American visual effects artist Kane Parsons, better known by his YouTuber moniker Kane Pixels. In 2023, A24 Films announced it was making a feature film adaptation of the series, with Parsons directing. Herein lies the second highly unusual thing about Backrooms: Parsons is only 21 and was 19 at the time of the announcement. This makes him A24's youngest feature director by a considerable margin.

What Early Reviewers Are Saying About Backrooms

Part Creepypasta, Part Haunted House, Pure Horror

Backrooms had its theatrical premiere on May 29, opening to excellent reviews, as reflected in its 88% Rotten Tomatoes score. The early consensus is that Parsons has managed to turn an internet-born horror concept into a feature-length movie without losing the essence of what made it haunting in the first place. Critics have been especially positive about the film's atmosphere, production design, sound work, and use of familiar spaces that feel ever-so-slightly wrong. Rather than relying only on jump scares, Backrooms is said to unnerve viewers by lingering on empty rooms, harsh lighting, and a strange but pervasive sense of detachment from reality.

The early praise is not completely free of reservations. Some reviewers have suggested that Backrooms is strongest as a mood piece and becomes less striking when it moves deeper into story, lore, and third-act spectacle. Others have argued that its characters and emotional threads do not always match the power of its visual ideas. Even so, the broader response has been unusually strong for a feature-length adaptation of an online horror myth, with many critics treating the film as a serious, technically assured debut rather than a gimmick built around a viral concept.

What Backrooms Has in Common with The Shining

Mazes, Dreamlike Horror, and More

At first glance, Backrooms and The Shining may not seem like obvious companions. One is rooted in internet folklore and liminal-space horror, while the other remains one of cinema's defining haunted-hotel stories. The connection becomes clearer in how both works use a strange physical location to reflect a character's worsening mental state. In Backrooms, the protagonist's alcoholism and negative emotions appear to shape the endless rooms into an outward expression of his own collapse. That is where some early reviewers have found the strongest overlap with The Shining, in which the Overlook Hotel is strongly implied to exploit trauma and addiction. Both films also disorient viewers through dreamlike horror sequences.

The settings themselves strengthen the comparison. The Overlook Hotel is not an endless maze in the same literal sense as the Backrooms, but Kubrick films it as a place with a strange layout that becomes harder to understand the longer the characters remain inside. Backrooms takes a more direct version of that idea, placing its characters inside a seemingly infinite network of yellow hallways and artificial rooms that do not obey normal spatial logic. In both stories, escape becomes the central problem. The characters in Backrooms cannot find a reliable way out, while Jack Torrance and his family are cut off from the outside world after winter weather traps them at the Overlook. The result is similar in both cases: a building becomes a prison, giving the horror time to take hold.

Given its rave early reviews, Parsons's directorial debut appears well-positioned to recoup its $10 million budget and then some, especially considering horror flicks tend to have a loyal built-in audience. Regardless of its commercial success, Backrooms appears unlikely to disappoint fans of the original creepypasta the way American Horror Stories Season 3 did.