Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Storytelling for the Screen: Backrooms
- Saturday, October 24, 2026 / 2:00 PM - 4:45 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (105 minutes)
- With Kori Adelson (producer)
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Director: Kane Parsons
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Backrooms (2026) follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner who discovers that a mysterious doorway has appeared in the basement of his showroom, leading him into an endless maze of eerie, nondescript rooms. After Clark disappears, his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) enters the doorway in search of him, confronting a disorienting liminal space where the boundaries between reality and perception begin to collapse.
Inspired by a single eerie photograph of an empty, fluorescent-lit room, the backrooms started out as an anonymous imageboard post with no established mythology or narrative. Online communities soon expanded out the initial post into a larger internet phenomenon, collaboratively developing a sprawling archive of fan art, “creepypasta” short stories, amateur videos and animations, and online games. In 2022, 16-year-old director Kane Parsons adapted the viral image into a series of acclaimed found-footage short films on YouTube and rapidly found a devoted audience. Backrooms producer Kori Adelson brought Parsons and the project to A24, which subsequently greenlit its feature film adaptation, bringing this distinct slice of internet culture to mainstream cinema. The journey of Backrooms from online post to one of this year’s most successful (and talked about) theatrical releases raises compelling questions about where films and directors now originate, who gets to make them, and how audiences encounter cinematic worlds.
Producer Kori Adelson will join moderator Ross Melnick (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB) for a pre- and post-screening discussion of Backrooms.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Kori Adelson (producer)
In her ten years at Chernin and now as President of Film at North Road Films, Kori Adelson has produced films across A24, Netflix, and Fox, working across commercial studio projects, streaming franchises, and filmmaker-driven independent films. She served as lead producer on Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, pioneering its first-of-its-kind back-to-back release strategy, as well as Fear Street: Prom Queen. Her credits also include Spy, The Mountain Between Us, the animated hit Spies in Disguise, and A24’s Dicks: The Musical. Most recently, she produced A24’s Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons, which had the biggest opening weekend in A24 history and has gone on to gross over $400M worldwide. She also produced The Last House, Netflix’s sci-fi thriller starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura and directed by Louis Leterrier, which premiered on Netflix in August to #1 globally for two consecutive weeks. Adelson is currently in post-production on A24’s Altar, written by Will Soodik and directed by Egor Abramenko.
Moderator Ross Melnick (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Ross Melnick is Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, Presidential Chair in Media Studies, and Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012), co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004). His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.