The Book Every ‘Backrooms’ Fan Needs to Read ASAP

At the time of writing, the most interesting movies of 2026 so far have belonged to the horror genre… and, technically, one noteworthy release often gets called a 2025 film (Obsession), since that’s when it premiered. Still, most people saw it in 2026, and it came out pretty close to Backrooms, with both getting attention for doing a lot with modest budgets, and raising the profiles of the two up-and-coming directors behind them: Curry Barker for Obsession, and Kane Parsons for Backrooms. Both had made videos online, though, before directing these highly successful theatrical releases, with Parsons having most of his pre-Backrooms (2026) work also related to Backrooms, since that’s the name of the web series he created and directed, with most of its episodes being released in 2022.

Backrooms, both the movie and the series, are about The Backrooms, which is a concept that originated from a post on 4chan. Someone posted a photo of an unsettling image, and then someone else commented about it being “The Backrooms,” which is – to quote this anonymous person – “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.” People ran with it, and built certain mythological concepts to go in it, with Parsons finding the most success, in this regard. The horror of this concept is fresh, but also not entirely unheard of, since there are other works of horror that have played around with the idea of liminal and unknown spaces, and House of Leaves, a novel from 2000 written by Mark Z. Danielewski, might well exemplify it the best.

The Plots of ‘House of Leaves’ and ‘Backrooms’

The world of Backrooms is complex, but the premise of the 2026 film (as it currently exists, without follow-ups/sequels) is quite simple. There isn’t much of a plot there, because a man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an entrance to the titular Backrooms, and is then driven mad by how enormous, eerie, and otherworldly it is. His therapist (Renate Reinsve) eventually sets out to find him and discovers the realm herself. That’s about it, plus some other side characters who are brought in to document an exploration of the Backrooms, which is where the movie gets to become a found footage film, and it’s that stretch of Backrooms that is probably the strongest. It’s worth mentioning the found footage part, because House of Leaves incorporates something like that, too.

Also, House of Leaves is much more complex to try to break down. At its center, there is a documentary that was made about a house that appears to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, while also containing the entrance to some sort of impossibly limitless realm. A man named Zampanò spent the last stage of his life looking into and analyzing this documentary, with another man, Johnny Truant, documenting and analyzing Zampanò’s analysis. There are a couple more layers beyond this, so it’s all quite dizzying to break down and process in its entirety. But, the in-universe documentary, “The Navidson Record” (which might not even actually exist within the main universe of House of Leaves, whatever that universe is), is the part that’s reminiscent of Backrooms, so it’s best to focus on that for now.

How ‘House of Leaves’ Manages To Be So Scary

Image via A24

Even if you don’t find liminal spaces particularly scary (somehow), the madness of House of Leaves – and the madness it aims to inspire – will likely prove unsettling. There are things it does with its formatting and overall style that make you feel like you’re part of that chain of people mentioned before; like you’ve stumbled upon an analysis of an analysis of a documentary, and that you might also lose your grip on reality like all those people before you did. It does all come back to the house and what’s somehow contained in it, though. It’s hard to describe, and that’s part of what makes various people who don’t actually perish within the horrific maze (that it more or less is) go kind of mad, in the end. Capturing it all with filming/recording equipment is not enough, and proves challenging in unforeseen ways.

There’s no reality there, and it would be scary enough to have the story just be the events of The Navidson Record, but it’s the layering that helps. The layering makes it feel like waking up from a nightmare, and then still being in another nightmare that you subsequently wake up from, and then you’re not sure if you’re really awake, or if the nightmares are still going. In this sense, the horror hits a little harder, or cuts a little deeper, than what you get in Backrooms (2026). Then again, that is just one movie, and not a particularly long one at that, while House of Leaves is dense, lengthy, and something that’ll likely take most people a good deal of time to get through and properly digest.

The Ways ‘House of Leaves’ Can Only Work as a Book

Image via Doubleday

This is all scratching the surface of House of Leaves, but that’s hopefully forgivable, because there is so much here that can only be appreciated if you sit down and read the thing. Also, you really have to literally sit down and read it, because the formatting, (sometimes trippy) footnotes, and some of the unusual creative choices throughout House of Leaves make the idea of an audiobook version (at least of the entire text) pretty much impossible. There are even things in the book that make the idea of a Kindle/digital version hard to imagine, at least one that captures everything in the physical version.

It’s the ambition and borderline-insanity of it all that really makes it a special book, though. House of Leaves is easy to recommend, if you liked the Backrooms movie or the sort of horror that Backrooms (2026) explores. House of Leaves goes a bit beyond “just” liminal horror in some surprising and inventive ways, but those things are best left up to each individual person to explore. Even if you’re not wild about reading, and find the idea of a 700+ page-long book intimidating, House of Leaves is well worth giving a shot and getting (so very) lost in.

Backrooms

Release Date

May 27, 2026

Runtime

110 minutes

Director

Kane Parsons

Writers

Will Soodik