A24's shop is taking preorders on a $65 kit that asks you to smell a movie on schedule. The Backrooms x Joya Scent Kit holds five fragrances inspired by environments in Backrooms, each one keyed to an exact timestamp in the film, along with blotters and a scent guide that works less like packaging copy and more like a cue sheet. Backrooms arrived on digital platforms on July 14, which is the whole point. This is an object built for the living room screening, where the air is yours to ruin.
The cues read like a track list. Static hits at six minutes and fifty-five seconds, Yellow at 25:45, Wet at 53:03, Sweetener at 1:07:10, and Drift at 1:27:34. Spray on time and the room drifts along with the film, from electrical char to mono-yellow rot to whatever Sweetener turns out to mean at the worst possible moment. For those who prefer their dread ambient rather than synchronized, a companion Backrooms x Joya Candle runs $48 on the same preorder.
The maker matters here. Joya is the Brooklyn fragrance studio that hand-pours its candles and blends its fragrances in its own facility, and it has been A24's nose for years, going back to the genre candle collection that bottled Horror, Western, Noir, and the rest of the canon. Cinema has tried to reach this sense exactly once at scale, when Smell-O-Vision piped scents into theater seats in 1960 and died after a single film. The kit is that old failure rebuilt correctly: no vents, no hardware, just five vials and a clock, distributed to a thousand couches at once.
No film deserves the treatment more. Backrooms began in January 2022 as a found footage series that Kane Parsons started uploading to YouTube as a teenager, built on an image board legend about slipping through the wrong wall of reality into an infinite maze of damp carpet, humming fluorescent tubes, and wallpaper the color of old mustard. The dread was always environmental. There is no creature design to admire in those early videos, just rooms, and the sickening familiarity of having been somewhere like them. Parsons directed the feature adaptation at twenty, the youngest filmmaker A24 has ever handed a feature, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve leading a story that opens with a strange doorway in the basement of a furniture showroom. It reached theaters on May 29 and became the highest-grossing film in A24's history. Parsons scored it with Edo Van Breemen in hums, buzz, and low-frequency pressure, and the scent kit simply extends that score into the one channel a screen has never carried, the sense wired most directly to memory of place. Everyone who has spent time in the Backrooms already believes they know what it smells like. This is the official answer.
The Backrooms x Joya Scent Kit is $65 and available for preorder now, with the film itself streaming and available to rent or buy through backrooms.mov. Watch it once, clean. The second time, open the vials.
