Commentary: If you want to understand Gen Z, watch Backrooms

AN EXPERIENCE THAT EXTENDS PAST CINEMAS

Backrooms represents not only Gen Z fears, but the sprawling online communities they participate in.

It began with a 2019 post on online forum 4chan – a haunting photo of a fluorescent-lit, office-like space. Users built on this world by writing stories, adding floors and imagining dangerous entities that roam the hallways. This includes Parsons, who in 2022 created “found footage” of the backrooms and uploaded them to YouTube.

Fans of Parsons’ YouTube series would be well-versed in the world of Backrooms, and would be apt to watch video essays about the movie and debate it online. But for the uninitiated who watched the movie and want more, there are TikTok rabbit holes, Reddit theories, fan edits and even Roblox game recreations to sink into.

For me and my friends, the Backrooms craze led us to watch the movie in the middle of the night in an empty mall. We found the cinema full, with other midnight showings booked almost at capacity everywhere we looked. This shows the lengths Gen Z would go to be a part of such a film – and challenges current narratives that cinema is dead.

A study by US ticketing company Fandango found Gen Z to be the most active movie-going demographic. In 2025, 87 per cent of Gen Zers saw at least one movie, higher than the average of 76 per cent for American adults. The study also found that Gen Z visit the cinema as a social activity, as opposed to millennials who view it as an escape from their daily routine.