Which Backrooms Is Canon? Kane Pixels vs the Fan Backrooms vs the A24 Movie

Which Backrooms is canon?

None of them is “the” canon, because the Backrooms has no single owner. It started as an anonymous 4chan thread in May 2019, and three separate stories have grown from it: the fan-written Backrooms, Kane Pixels’ YouTube series, and the 2026 A24 film. Each is consistent inside itself, but they don’t share a story, so a fact from one isn’t true in the others.

Even the fan version doesn’t claim one canon. Its own Canon List says each person’s interpretation decides what’s canon for them, and it hosts several competing sub-canons side by side. Kane Pixels’ series is the opposite: one creator, one story. Wikipedia describes it as “disconnected from the Internet lore”.

Kane Pixels vs the fan Backrooms vs the movie: what’s the difference?

The short version: the fan Backrooms is a huge shared database of levels, Kane Pixels’ Backrooms is a single found-footage story about a research company, and the movie is part of Kane’s story.

	The fan-written Backrooms	Kane Pixels’ series	The A24 film Backrooms
Who writes it	Many fans, on collaborative sites (it calls itself “The Backrooms Database”)	One creator, Kane Parsons	Directed by Kane Parsons, written by Will Soodik
Started	Within days of the May 2019 post	January 7, 2022	Released May 29, 2026
Shape of the place	Numbered levels stacked like floors: 802 level pages as of 17 October 2026	One endless space made of distorted copies of real places, split into “areas”	Same as the series
How you get in	Noclipping: slipping out of reality through the Void	Async’s machine-made doorway, the Threshold, or Null Zones that open by accident	Through a slit in a furniture store’s basement wall
Best-known organisation	Wanderer groups like the M.E.G.	The Async Research Institute, a private lab in San José	Async again
Monsters	Well over a hundred numbered entities: Smilers, Hounds, Skin-Stealers and more	The Lifeform, a tall hunter that mimics human voices	Kane’s own creatures (spoiler note below)
When it’s set	Timeless	Mostly 1988 to 1990, with a few earlier and later episodes	June to July 1990
Our episodes	The pilot and the every-level episode	The Async history episode	Its opening scene only

Does Kane Pixels’ Backrooms have levels, almond water or Smilers?

No. Levels, almond water and Smilers all come from the fan-written Backrooms. Kane’s version is a single dimension, not a stack of levels, and neither almond water nor Smilers appears in his series or the film.

Parsons has said he had “no idea” a fan community already existed when he uploaded his first video, and he was surprised by comments telling him he was “doing the Backrooms wrong” and that there were “supposed to be smilers on level one”.

Thing people ask about	Fan-written Backrooms	Kane Pixels and the film
Numbered levels	Yes, with the Main Nine (Levels 0 to 8) as the core	No. One space, with areas such as a Christmas area and a tiled pool area
Level 0, “The Lobby”	Yes: moist carpet, mono-yellow walls, humming lights	The yellow rooms are there, but they aren’t called a level
Almond water	Yes, the drink that keeps wanderers alive (and can go bad)	No
Smilers	Yes, Entity 3, glowing faces in the dark	No
Noclipping	Yes, the main way in	Never used officially in the episodes; people fall in through Null Zones, which fans call noclipping
Async, the Threshold, Project KV31	No	Yes, the heart of the story
The Poolrooms	Yes, Level 37	Only a similar-looking tiled pool area

For what’s actually in the fan version, see Backrooms levels explained and Backrooms entities explained.

Is the Backrooms movie canon to Kane Pixels’ series?

Yes, it shares the series’ world. The film is based on Parsons’ web series, not on the fan levels, and it uses the same pieces: Async, its hazmat-suited researchers and its Threshold.

It even opens where the series left off. In 1990, Async scientists watch the recovered tape of Naren Warne, the researcher last seen in the series’ latest video, Everything Must Go. From there the film follows Clark, a furniture-store owner, and his therapist Mary Kline into the Backrooms.

Spoiler for the film: its main creatures are Still Lifes, distorted copies of real people, including the giant “Pirate Clark”. They’re Kane’s invention, not entities from the fan list. More in what is Async in the Backrooms.

Did Kane Pixels make the Backrooms?

No, but he made the most famous version. The Backrooms began on May 12, 2019, when an anonymous user on 4chan’s /x/ board asked for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” and posted the photo of empty yellow rooms. Another anonymous reply named it the Backrooms. Fans then invented the levels and entities on Reddit and collaborative fan sites.

Kane Pixels is Kane Parsons, a YouTuber from California. He’d seen the original image online, and his first video, The Backrooms (Found Footage), went viral in January 2022. It grew into a 25-video series and then the A24 film. Where the photo came from is covered in are the Backrooms real?

Why does Level 0 have two names, the Lobby and Threshold?

Because there are two big fan sites, and they’ve drifted apart. On the Fandom-hosted Backrooms, Level 0 is “The Lobby”. On the Backrooms Wikidot, a separate fan project, the same level is called “Threshold”. The Fandom site calls Wikidot its “largest branch-off”. The two sites write their level pages separately, so names and details don’t always match, and Level 0 is the best-known example.

To make it more confusing, “Threshold” means something else again in Kane Pixels’ series: Async’s doorway into the Backrooms. If you’re unsure which one someone means, ask whether they’re talking about a level or a door. Level 0, the Lobby covers the Fandom version.

How can you tell which Backrooms someone means?

Look for the giveaway words. Levels, almond water, the M.E.G., Smilers or “wanderers” mean the fan-written Backrooms. Async, the Threshold, KV31, the Lifeform, 1990 or Clark mean Kane Pixels’ story and the film.

This is also why search results and AI answers often blend them: all three share a name, the yellow wallpaper and the hum of fluorescent lights. On this site, every Backrooms guide says which version a fact comes from. Our first episode, Backrooms Lore Explained: Why It Sucks To Be Lost in Level 0–2, takes place in the fan-written version, from the Lobby down to Level 2.