A24 and Joya Bottle the ‘Backrooms’ Liminal-Space Dread Into a Handmade Candle
The internet’s most unsettling horror phenomenon gets translated into a six-note scent and a wallpaper-print vessel.
Summary
A24 has partnered with New York candle studio Joya to turn the Backrooms into a home-goods object built around its eerie visual identity
The yellow soy wax candle sits in a glass vessel printed with the property's signature damp wallpaper motif
A conceptual scent maps the Backrooms atmosphere through notes like metallic hiss, ash, humidity, and signal deformation
A24 is extending the Backrooms into your living room with the Joya x Backrooms Candle, a handmade collaboration that translates the horror property’s clammy, fluorescent-lit dread into a scented object. Rather than a straightforward branded candle, the release leans on the source material’s most recognizable trait, its atmosphere, pouring that unease into wax and printed glass.
To understand why a candle makes sense here, it helps to know what the Backrooms actually is. The concept began as an internet phenomenon rooted in liminal spaces, the empty, uncanny environments (endless office carpets, buzzing fluorescent lights, and damp yellow wallpaper) that feel disturbingly familiar and wrong at once. It spread through image boards and short films before evolving into a full-blown horror franchise, with A24 developing a feature film adaptation that pushed the once-niche idea into the mainstream. That backstory is the entire reason a mood-driven product like this lands.
The design leans hard into that established iconography. The candle’s glass vessel carries the Backrooms’ signature wallpaper print, the sickly yellow surface that has become shorthand for the whole aesthetic, while the yellow soy wax inside mirrors the palette. It reads less like merchandise and more like an artifact pulled out of one of those endless rooms, which is precisely the effect the collaboration is chasing.
Where the piece gets genuinely inventive is the scent, built as a conceptual portrait rather than a conventional fragrance. The notes are listed as metallic hiss, ash, humidity, sweetness, electrical overload, and signal deformation, a sequence that reads more like a description of a haunted server room than anything you would expect from a candle. Handmade in New York by Joya, a studio known for treating fragrance as a design medium, the candle turns abstract sensations into something you can actually burn across its roughly 50-hour life. A companion Scent Kit expands the world further for anyone who wants to sit with the concept in more detail.
The Joya x Backrooms Candle is available now via A24.
