5 Best Episodes Of The Backrooms Web Series, According To IMDb

Summer movie season is where tentpoles and other IP-related films come to thrive, but this year has painted a very different kind of success story with the meteoric rise of independent horror. Kane Parsons' "Backrooms" has become a full-blown phenomenon at the box office, in addition to garnering positive reception from both audiences and critics, with Looper's Matthew Jackson calling it a horror movie with big ideas in his review. Who would have thought that a 4chan creepypasta post from 2019 about a yellow-tinted furniture store with an unseen evil lurking inside would lead to a feature film that's proving to be more popular than a "Star Wars" movie? But before Parsons made the leap to the big screen, he expanded upon the idea of the "Backrooms" on YouTube first.

Since the infamous picture was posted anonymously, just about anyone can use the "Backrooms" concept for their own media portrayal. It was Parsons' online web series "The Backrooms," however, that proved to be the most popular, and what ultimately led him to directing the feature film companion piece for A24. The young protege started making these videos in 2022 on Blender when he was only 16 years old, and is now the youngest filmmaker to ever have a number one film at the box office at just 20. The YouTube series consists of mixed media videos surrounding different people coming across this unsettling liminal space and the horrors within.

Your best bet would be watching them in release order as they narratively flow into one another, but according to IMDb users, these are the five highest rated episodes that are among the series' best.

"Damage Control" acts as a sinister coda to the events of the previous video "Reunion," and how the Async Research Institute responds to it. The episode opens with a mixture of different perspective footage of Peter Tench, the research scientist who got separated from his team in "Informational Video," trying to make his escape from the Async facility. We hear an undisclosed researcher explaining the journey of Peter getting lost to shooting another researcher in the chest with a shotgun at the end of "Reunion." In between these videos, Peter found his way back to the Threshold that separates our reality from this other place, and was taken in by Async. He's held in custody within the Complex, considering the company had already faked his death, with plans to reintegrate him back into civilian life. But Peter's paranoia takes over and compels him to run into the Backrooms.

Unlike some of the other videos that terrorize through found footage, "Damage Control" delves into this series of horrifying events through a corporate conference meeting. We get a timeline that may or may not even be reliable, as Async's recollection of events don't always align with the footage we're seeing on screen. The unseen speaker says that Peter died after hitting his head on a rock after falling down a hill, but little details hidden within this video shows that the company is no stranger to cover-ups, and would do anything to prevent word of their project from getting out.

The episode "Reunion" brings us back to the perspective of a returning character with Marvin Leigh (Kane Parsons), an Async explorer who had an encounter with a Backrooms lifeform in "Pitfalls." The events of that episode led the company to temporarily board up the doorway in the episode "Report." Here we see Marvin driving on a buggie to the boarded up doorway, and promptly pushes some of the plywood open to send a little remote control rover in with a camera rig attached. After some exploring, it leads them to the pitfalls room. We then cut to a montage of images showing Async building a walkway over the cavernous holes in the ground so they can explore a setting they call Room 14C. When they get there, they're shrouded in total darkness, with only their flashlights helping them see much of anything. Things turn deadly, however, when a mysterious man starts attacking them.

This is the kind of episode where it's not so much the Backrooms causing the terror, but the actions of Async themselves. Even after everything Marvin experienced during "Pitfalls," he still pushes himself to keep exploring this nightmarish liminal space for the sake of understanding it. Naturally, wandering around in a dark room and not knowing what's in it is ripe for tension. What sets "Reunion" apart is that the creepy figure is not a half-remembered Lifeform, but someone whose perception of reality is warped, leading them to act the way they do here.

Keeping in line with the first episode in this series, "Found Footage #2" follows the perspective of someone who passes through a physical barrier (or no-clips) into the Backrooms. This time around, it's an unnamed woman filming the discovery of a barrier called the Null Zone on the floor in her garage. After throwing some odd objects through the blue-taped square, she gets sucked through herself, along with the camera. She's rightfully frightened by this mysterious location, especially when she approaches a dark room with a set of dining room chairs that go as high as the ceiling. From there, she encounters a series of disturbing anomalies like a crater-like hole in the ground, a ramp that leads to a towering space with dilapidated ceiling tiles, and a demolished car that seemingly drives into the wall after being no-clipped. What she finds deeper within the recesses of the yellow liminal space is more horrifying than she could possibly imagine.

It's one thing for the Async scientists to come across something creepy together, but it's another when it's a person all by themselves in a space that makes no sense. A strength of the "Backrooms" series is that Kane Parsons doesn't go for the easy scare, as he has enough restraint to build up so much dread and nightmarish imagery that when he does get you, it's all the more impactful. "Found Footage #2" introduces a few new mechanics to how the Backrooms operate, while still holding the viewer at arm's length.

After "Found Footage #2" delivered another pulse-pounding liminal nightmare from Kane Parsons, "Found Footage #3" takes the terror to a whole other level. It's the longest episode in the "Backrooms" series by a half hour, clocking in at 45 minutes in total. The protagonist this time around is a man named Ravi (Aakash Valdivia), who no-clips into the series' void after exploring a noise in his basement. But rather than being greeted by the yellow walls, the space looks like a brightly-lit conference room that's been leftover from Async. Ravi initially tries to laugh off the strange anomaly he's found himself into, but after getting lost in an expansive labyrinth of deeply distorted hallways and rooms, his resolve to escape starts to wither away. And he's not alone either.

 "Found Footage #3" feels the most like Parsons proving that he could turn his YouTube series into long form entertainment. The project that would ultimately become his 2026 feature film debut was already in development with A24 when this episode dropped in 2024. Ravi's descent through the increasingly unnerving levels puts you in a position to feel his frustrations and terror of never finding an exit. It's the most impressive scale of the Blender animation, which creates a tangible Dante's "Inferno"-type space. It's no wonder this is so high on the IMDb ranking, especially with a terrifying scare where he closes a door after seeing a light off in the distance, followed by what starts as an ordinary knock. The surprises in this episode would catapult "Found Footage #3" to the top spot — that is, if it weren't for an earlier episode that rattled viewers even more.

Just about everyone's had that kind of dream that ends with finding yourself falling from a great height. But the difference here is that when an Async explorer takes his long tumble, his nightmare is only beginning. "Pitfalls" starts with Marvin Leigh (Kane Parson) crossing the Threshold that leads him and three other scientists into the Backrooms. They stop in their tracks when they discover a section that contains a bunch of massive square holes in the ground, along with a door on the other side. The team tells Marvin not to move after he gets sucked into one, but he feels compelled to investigate a distorted voice yelling for help in the distance. In following it, he's brought to a crooked hallway with an open gap at the bottom of the wall that leads to a suburban street illuminated by red.

It's easy to see why "Pitfalls" resonates with IMDb viewers above the rest. Previous episodes with the Async scientists show them setting up shop and coming across strange anomalies, largely auditory. But this is when one of them actually sees something in the distance that appears to look like a human, but isn't. The terror factor is accentuated with moments like Marvin walking into a home that has a whole bunch of inverted street signs sticking out of the ground in an empty room. This is one of those small details in the "Backrooms" movie whose foundation is effectively set up here. It excels at the kind of goosebumps-inducing horror that Parsons would comfortably find himself playing around with as the series continued.