Ultimate Backrooms quiz tests your knowledge of liminal space

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Published May 29, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Can you correctly identify Backrooms from Backrooms?

Backrooms, the debut film from Blender wunderkind Kane Parsons, is set to light up the U.S. box office with familiar-yet-terrifying liminal-space creepypasta. The A24 horror movie might be the beginning of a franchise — or maybe it’s a single movie you never escape. Who really knows? Time will tell. But what is time?

We at Polygon really dug Parsons’ take on the Backrooms lore and we know we won’t be alone. That’s why we created the ultimate Backrooms quiz, to test out how well you really know Backrooms. There are a lot of imitators out there who would love to say they made Backrooms or think they’re liminal spaces have the same juice — very “my kid could do that” — but Parsons’ Backrooms is its own thing. Test your knowledge of the film with the quiz below.

Four questions, one right answer.

Movie still

Which movie is this?

While you're playing, consider that Backrooms may also be one of the best "video game movies not based on a video game" ever made. Parsons is not just a devout film-lover. The 20-year-old director grew up on blockbuster movies and the emerging elevated horror (A24 is nearly as old as he is), but Parsons was also weaned on genre-breaking games of the 2000s. In a number of interviews, he's cited Portal and Portal 2 as a direct influence on how he extrapolated the Backrooms concept from forum chum to feature film. Here's what he told Letterboxd not too long ago:

Portal would be the earliest influences, the easiest one for me to pin down is the strongest influence over everything I've done in my entire life probably. It's a two game series. So if anything, I would say Portal 2 is the bigger inspiration for me. It was all built around this mechanic of having this gun or tool that's able to open a portal in one wall and another one there. And it's sort of a physics-based puzzle game where you're traveling through this AI operated test center, this testing track and you're slowly unraveling. As you wake up out of a stasis pod at the beginning of the game, you're slowly seeing that there's only a monotone, what feels like a robot slightly inhuman voice talking to you the whole time. And it's very corporate. It feels like there's something slightly wrong with it. It's inherently kind of comedic and absurd. And that's kind of what I like about it. All of these bleak creative choices come from an inherent humor.

It was like on specific thread that really stuck with me when I was younger, which was throughout the first game and more so in the second game when they've sort of solidified their art direction, you can see these murals on the wall of like one other person. You can clearly see traces of another human being in this place. And there's some specific moments in the film with these murals. I guess, just in general, it's probably obvious how and why this connects to backrooms. And I think you can probably tell that this is maybe the one that's most special to me because I won't stop rambling about it.

The general set construction of the Portal games is something that's been in my brain for so long. I frequently have dreams where I'm just in the Aperture Enrichment Center. It's not yellow. It's very gray and blue and kind of bleak and by the second game it's rotting and it's totally falling apart, but it's vast and in a lot of ways it feels like an internal indoors and it goes on in all directions that is just absurd in its scope. So I think it's actually very similar to Backrooms in that front.

It just goes to show you, if you can descend far enough into gaming and internet culture to discover its weirdest corners, then actually escape the Backrooms back to real life, you too could tell a heck of a story. Big if, depending on how far you are in the quiz.

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