Filmmaker

Read our Spring 2026 issue, featuring David Lowery and Chloé Zhao in conversation on Mother Mary, Radu Jude on Kontinental '25, Boots Riley on I Love Boosters, and more...

L. P. Hartley

Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms

Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This unlikely source became the starting point for a diffuse, Lovecraftian latticework of anonymous mythmaking and creepypasta, whose locus eventually migrated to Reddit, where it split into separate communities of originalists and revisionists. Their prolific output is a striking example of hypermodern digital creativity predicated on […]
by Payton McCarty-Simas on Jun 2, 2026

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