The 'Backrooms' Timeline, Explained
A24’s Backrooms (2026) has captivated the nation with its innovative horror premise. The Kane Parsons-directed film expands on what began as a web series inspired by the Creepypasta of the same name. After finding inspiration in a Creepypasta thread, Parsons turned this idea of nightmare-inducing liminal space into a cohesive web series, examining the Backrooms as an extradimensional space from the perspective of the shadowy research company Async.
Backrooms further delves into the creepy location as Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a portal to the dimension in his furniture store and begins exploring the Backrooms. His therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), follows him into the Backrooms, where they are profoundly changed. The Backrooms remain quite mysterious even after the film, including the lingering question of how time works there. Fortunately, the movie drops a few clues for the passage of time outside the Backrooms.
When Does ‘Backrooms’ Start?
Where the Backrooms movie starts on the timeline is easy to determine due to the cold open. The film opens with some Async footage of a researcher lost in the Backrooms after becoming separated from his crew. The date on the footage is June 19, 1990. In the footage, a researcher in a hazmat suit runs from an unseen entity before the camera cuts during an attack. What’s interesting is that Clark enters the Backrooms after this footage is captured. When Clark first goes into the Backrooms, Async scientist Phil (Mark Duplass) watches on surveillance cameras marked with the date June 29, 1990.
Presumably, the entity that attacks the researcher in the cold open is the Pirate Clark (Robert Bobroczkyi) entity. However, if Clark hadn’t yet entered the Backrooms when the cold open occurs, it could be an indication that time works differently in the Backrooms or, even more eerily, that it already generated the Clark entity before he even went inside.
When Does ‘Backrooms’ End?
The entirety of Backrooms’ plot seems to take place over a couple of days. Shortly after discovering the Backrooms, Clark recruits his employee, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to explore them. Things go terribly awry, and Bobby and Kat never return from the Backrooms. The film confirms their absence with a shot of “Missing Person” posters outside the Backrooms for Bobby and Kat, which list July 3 as the date they were last seen.
So, several days pass between Clark’s entry into the Backrooms on June 29 and Bobby and Kat’s disappearances. Presumably, Mary enters the Backrooms around the same time as Bobby and Kat go missing, meaning Backrooms ends around early July.
Where ‘Backrooms’ Fits Into The Wider Timeline
If you’re a fan of Parsons’ original Backrooms (2022) web series, you’ll know that the A24 movie is really just a small blip on the wider timeline. According to the web series, Async first became interested in the Backrooms nearly a decade before Clark came into the picture. Sometime in 1982, Async began testing its Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System, which was the start of the company’s attempt to open a gateway to the Backrooms. The company continues testing over the years, until the sixth attempt in 1989 opens the gateway. Since the test caused the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we know the gateway opened on October 17, 1989.
Async began exploring the Backrooms in early 1990, leading to the discovery of a body in February 1990. By May 6, 1990, a formal report reveals Async’s first detection of lifeforms in the Backrooms. The next major event is the Backrooms movie, when the Async researcher encounters an entity on June 19, 1990.
The web series reveals via found footage that just five days after Clark entered the Backrooms, a teenager (presumably Parsons) accidentally entered them on July 4, 1990. While his fate remained unclear, his camera somehow phased through the Backrooms and was discovered on September 23, 1996, the biggest indication that time does not flow linearly inside the Backrooms. While the known Backrooms lore ends in 1996, there are still large swathes of time unaccounted for, leaving room for the story to expand.
