Backrooms trailer brings YouTube creepypastas to life as Doctor Strange's Chiwetel Ejiofor enters a nightmarish alternate reality

Backrooms | Official Teaser HD | A24 - YouTube

Chiwetel Ejiofor makes a startlingly discovery in the creepy first trailer for new horror movie Backrooms.

The 53-second clip, which you can watch above, doesn't give away much – but we didn't really expect it to spell everything out given that the plot is still a mystery... and the material in which it's based. We do hear Ejiofor's character, though, telling Renate Reinsve's unseen character that he "found something", and it's safe to say we're desperate to know more.

"I found the place. It's massive in there, it just goes on and on and on," he explains. "All these rooms. This place builds them. Actually, it's more like it remembers them. And the more time it remembers something, the less it does."

While they're not glimpsed in the footage, the Doctor Strange and Sentimental stars will be joined onscreen by Mark Duplass (Creep), Finn Bennett (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms), Lukita Maxwell (Shrinking), and Avan Jogia (Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City) in the feature-length adaptation of YouTuber Kane Parsons' viral web series.

Chiwetel Ejiofor — (Image credit: Getty Images/Theo Wargo/Staff)

In the first video, which was uploaded in 2022 and has pulled in over 71 million views, a then-16-year-old Parsons played a cameraman who slips over during a shoot and later awakens in a monster-filled, yellow-wallpapered labyrinth-like dimension. 22 more shorts followed, in which it's established that a research team named Async is studying the alternate reality. Given what goes down in the teaser, we can assume Reinsve and Ejiofor are working for Async.

Parsons helmed the upcoming flick, working with a script from Roberto Patino and Will Soodik. James Wan and Michael Clear are producing under the former's banner, Atomic Monster.

"It was amazing. [Kane] was so impressive. He's young, and it's his first movie, but he has so much life and he was so particular about his ideas and vision," Reinsve previously gushed in an interview with Collider's Perri Nemiroff. "He was very firm about them [but] he was trying all the time to ask how he could give better directions. He was just so humble. He's a great person, and great director."

Backrooms releases on May 29, 2026. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming horror movies heading our way.

I am an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering all things TV and film across our Total Film and SFX sections. Elsewhere, my words have been published by the likes of Digital Spy, SciFiNow, PinkNews, FANDOM, Radio Times, and Total Film magazine.

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