Seen together, the YouTube videos do link up, but not always in useful ways. For instance, a 30-second clip called 9780415263573 appears to just be highway-cam footage of a car disappearing. That clip might explain why there’s a crashed car in the Backrooms in the later 13-minute video Found Footage 2, but that link doesn’t lead anywhere — the entire reward is just in recognizing the possible connection.
Most of Parsons’ YouTube shorts are snippets that elliptically hint at a bigger story without actually telling it, and most of them end mid-scene, without resolving whatever’s going on. Unlike traditional found-footage horror, which most creators style as unearthed video that somehow tells a complete story, Parsons’ YouTube videos really do feel like unanchored digital remnants that someone might have found on a discarded, corrupted hard drive somewhere. Watching them all, you can piece together the beginnings of a narrative. Toward the end, in particular, a few characters persist across different videos, and the shape of a story starts to come into focus. But that story still hasn’t been told.
Still, if you’re new to the Backrooms phenomenon, you loved the movie, and you want more — or you just want the best taste of what Parsons was doing online that inspired boutique studio A24 to chase him to make a feature film — these five are the most essential of Parsons’ Backroom videos.
The original nine-minute viral video that launched Parsons’ fandom, now viewed more than 82 million times, Found Footage tells a rare start-to-finish horror story about a teenager who falls into the liminal space known as the Backrooms while shooting an amateur video with his friends.
Classic found-footage horror told through a camera POV, the video tracks the cameraman’s exploration of the Backrooms, and his encounter with a mysterious entity. Several of Parsons’ other videos play out a lot like this one, but The Backrooms (Found Footage) has the most self-contained narrative, and makes for the best standalone experience.
2
The Third Test
More a curiosity than a vital piece of storytelling, this less-than-two-minute collection of concept sketches and static footage marks the moment where the Async Research Institute (represented in the A24 movie by “Phil,” Mark Duplass’ character) first breaches reality and opens the door into the Backrooms.
There isn’t a lot of information in this technical video, but it’s intriguing to see where this story really started, and what Async’s technological approach to entering the Backrooms looks like. It’s very different from the accidental “noclip” method from several of the other videos, as inspired by the anonymous 4chan post that started the Backrooms creepypasta in the first place.
3
Pitfalls
If you want to take a deeper dive into the Backrooms YouTube series, this 14-minute clip is a crucial starting point. As Async explores and maps the Backrooms, cameraman Marvin Leigh documents a new area where the floor is a grid of deep, square openings. He accidentally falls down one of them and begins to explore the lower levels.
The rest of the video plays out a lot like the original Found Footage short, except that it ends abruptly, with no clear resolution. But it becomes clearer what happened to Marvin in other videos, as he returns as a speaking character in three other videos: Report, Reunion, and Static Dead End. To the degree Parsons’ YouTube videos have a running narrative, it starts here.
4
Informational Video
This eight-minute short starts out as an Async orientation video introducing the idea of the Backrooms project to new employees, complete with safety warnings and some alternate informal names for the Backrooms. There’s some interesting early perspective here on how Async views and is handling the space it discovered, though this one rapidly becomes another “lost in the Backrooms” first-person POV video when one of the researchers, Peter Tench, glitches out of sync with the rest of his team and has to explore on his own.
If you watch too many of Parsons’ videos back to back in short order, they start to feel a bit samey. There are new Backrooms structures and spaces in all of them, but the found-footage experience of watching an unseen camera operator wander around endless yellow spaces, yelling for help or muttering variations on “What the fuck?” and “Oh my God” and “This can’t be happening,” gets redundant quickly. Again, this video ends very abruptly with no sense of resolution, but that’s because Peter’s story continues (obliquely) in Presentation — and eventually syncs up with Marvin’s in Reunion, Damage Control, and Static Dead End.
5
Presentation
Of all the videos on Parsons’ channel, this eight-minute short has the most to offer people who’ve just seen the movie — and it’s also the one video among these fairly grim horror clips that comes with a sharp sense of humor. This in-house informational video lays out Async’s hilariously pedestrian, mundane plans for the Backrooms, with ’90s-era computer imagery showing how the Institute hopes to repurpose this unearthly, other-dimensional space for storage, shipping shortcuts, and even offices and apartments.
After the movie’s take on what a threat the Backrooms can pose to anyone who enters, watching this bland sales pitch for rent-an-office space there is mildly mind-boggling. It speaks to some ridiculously limited thinking at Async, and strongly suggests the institute has tapped into something it doesn’t understand and has no idea how to control. Of all Parsons’ YouTube videos, Presentation also offers the best sense of Async’s internal culture and directives. If you just watch one of Parsons’ videos, this should be it.
