It’s hard to think of many people currently living a more interesting life than Kane Parsons. With the release of “Backrooms” this weekend, the YouTuber-turned-filmmaker might be on pace to have directed one of the highest-grossing A24 movies of all time before he can legally drink.
The indie studio tapped Parsons to adapt his viral YouTube series of the same name (itself based on a viral creepypasta about liminal spaces) when he was just 17 years old. The young filmmaker was mentored by the likes of James Wan and Osgood Perkins as he figured out how to fit a sprawling, open-source online IP into the confines of a major theatrical film.
The end result was “Backrooms,” a remarkable work of craftsmanship starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, featuring some of the most compelling set pieces the horror world has seen in recent memory. The film exists at the intersection of online liminal horror and Hollywood polish, delivering the expected level of spectacle without sacrificing the DIY mystery Parsons captured in the original videos.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about how Parsons represents the new model for a breakthrough filmmaker. Rather than spend his time hawking shorts at film festivals, he made something that built an actual audience online before Hollywood gatekeepers beat a path to his doorstep. And while there’s certainly some truth to that narrative, it’s a major oversimplification.
Talking to Parsons makes it clear that he didn’t simply make his “Backrooms” videos as a proof of concept for an indie horror movie. The young filmmaker is a lifelong creature of the internet, who grew up watching YouTube videos and has no intention of abandoning them now that he’s broken into Hollywood.
By his own admission, Parsons views filmmaking as engineering as much as art, relishing the problem-solving that goes into crafting every shot. “Backrooms” reflects both his online upbringing and his methodical approach to filmmaking, signaling the arrival of a bold new voice in the genre film space.
“I’ve been a very online person most of my life,” Parsons said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “I was born the same year as YouTube, so I didn’t get proper internet access until maybe eight or nine, but even then, it was a pretty consistent ramp into watching a lot of independent short films on YouTube, a lot of YouTubers who would leverage VFX. I started getting into VFX-driven channels that would help me realize it’s accessible and something that I could go do. I started with the resources I had, like a laptop, I would pirate VFX software and stuff when I was 11 or so and started learning After Effects.”
‘Backrooms’Courtesy Everett Collection
Parsons got his start by making “Attack on Titan” animations, but it wasn’t long before he saw the original 2019 “Backrooms” 4Chan thread, which depicted eerie basements filled with glaring yellow light and floor plans that never seemed to end. The images went viral for their ability to capture the unsettling idea of “liminal spaces” in a single image. While Parsons did not come up with them, he took the ball and ran with it, creating a series of YouTube videos that introduced their own “Backrooms” mythology. That eventually led to his Hollywood breakthrough, but he insists that his intentions were far more innocent.
“I feel like I very much went into making the first short and that first little section of the YouTube series where I had no interaction with the industry ever,” he said. “I had no perspective on it. I had no immediate plan to make a short film that would propel me to anything. “That was not the intention.”
But despite his best efforts, the videos propelled him to some very exciting opportunities. When Hollywood started calling him, he was just relieved to have an excuse to delay making decisions about college.
“Putting it out for the first time and experiencing that was very much throwing a wrench, but I think it was a welcome wrench in what I was going through at the time,” he said. Because it was junior year in high school. Like a lot of people, I was going through the very normal experience of just trying to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with the next two years and what college is going to be and what that’s going to look like. I was looking at these options into the film industry by way of academia through school, it felt so bogged down with all these things that didn’t feel practical. And they work for plenty of people, but they felt very at odds with the way that I operated. And so, I was pretty bummed out about that.”
The offer that Parsons ended up taking was far from the only one he received. He spent his senior year of high school fielding inquiries from the entertainment industry while still applying to colleges. And after A24 came on board, he decided to forgo higher education in favor of trying to make his movie.
‘Backrooms’Courtesy Everett Collection
“It very much felt like, boom, suddenly there’s a new avenue that is still risky. It’s not stable at all. And I was assuming this will come and this will go, this will be over quickly. This is just what happens, and this is neat, but I’m going to try not to get too caught up in it because I see that happen to people all the time, and it usually turns into nothing,” he said. “I was cautious of that. And I was still applying to colleges and whatnot. And it wasn’t until we were actually pitching the thing to studios in fall of 2022 that I was making my decision about school. And I decided to pick that I was going to really hold on. It was after we went with A24 and they optioned the thing.”
“Backrooms” appears poised to be a major summer hit, and Parsons stressed that there are plenty more stories to tell in this liminal horror universe for which he has become the torchbearer. The filmmaker said he deliberately chose not to reveal too much about what he views as the “Backrooms” mythology — but he has plenty of lore ready to go when the time comes.
“I have a 70-page document,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t like drowning people in lore and mythology. I think it’s an irresponsible creative choice. It happens a ton online when an independent artist gets to the spotlight, so to speak, for a little bit where they make a single indie game, like a beta testing of a game or something. And then there’s all this traction. And then YouTube channels begin picking up art and covering it as though it’s a finalized creative item with a deep hidden lore and stuff. And then it leans way too hard into the lore aspect. And you just get this weird bloat where it becomes very alien to people who aren’t approaching, who aren’t avid fans of this thing and are approaching it for the first time. They’re suddenly coming into it, and it’s made inherently for YouTube channel dissection.”
He continued, “And I sometimes make stuff with the desire to have people take a look at it and pick it apart, and that’s part of the experience. But I think when it comes to this kind of thing, and especially trying to transfer it to a feature film, you can easily trip up and try to jam five years of information into a single 90-minute window… My thought process was, if we can avoid that pitfall and do this right, I think it raises our chances of opening the door to being able to continue this in a more well-paced, well-mannered way.”
Parsons’ career could go just about anywhere from here. He’s understandably taking things one step at a time, though he said that his priorities are telling more “Backrooms” stories in either an episodic series or more films while continuing to release YouTube projects. There will presumably be time for all kinds of projects in his career, though our conversation suggested that he plans to keep straddling the lines between Hollywood and the weirdest corners of the internet. The filmmaker still refuses to take full credit for the “Backrooms” universe, stressing that a variety of artists released their own take on those images online, and he just happened to catch on.
“Mine’s just a ‘Backrooms’ story, certainly not the official one,” he said. “There’s no official one.”
It’s a unique mentality to bring into Hollywood, but it should only make us more excited to see what Kane Parsons does next.
An A24 release, “Backrooms” opens in theaters on Friday, May 29.
