A 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons rose to the top so quickly that he didn’t have time to process how far he had come.
“It’s been go, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. He says, “Even a very short break would give him a better idea of everything that’s happened in the past few years. But for now, he’s in the spotlight—and he thinks it’ll be at least another month before he has the space to think about his big break.”
Back roomsis a heartfelt horror piece starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, a cerebral extension of Parsons’ atmospheric YouTube web series of the same name. It marks his first feature as A24’s youngest director to date, helming a long-awaited film by many hungry internet fans. You couldn’t ask for a better start to a blockbuster season.
Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success sound like something of an accident. “I never made the first one short or made a series with the intention of saying, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that works in a movie,'” he says.
That original nine-minute video, titled “Back Rooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, was inspired by—of all things—a nasty 4chan meme that spawned a collaborative myth. A 2019 post on the infamous photo board forum /x/ included a disturbing image of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. An anonymous user described being transported to “Backyards, where there’s nothing but the smell of old, damp carpet, crazy yellow paint, the constant background noise of flashing lights when it’s too hot, and nearly six hundred million square miles of periodically separated rooms to be trapped in.”
“God save you if you hear something wandering around, because you sure as hell heard it,” added a 4chan user.
Some people have taken this idea, making the best photos and stories on different social media. Parsons encountered these, along with popular memes at the time about surreal liminal spaces—Backrooms is an unusual extension of this phenomenon. He was impressed by what the material revealed but felt that it had not been fully explored.
“It was clear that I was scratching something that other media sources did not see much,” he said. “I think there was something like it, I wish there was more to talk about here.”
To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could put together the focused vision of Backrooms with Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. That first video, in which a man is chased into Backrooms by a brutal life situation, went viral, with viewers in awe of Parsons’ technical prowess and the poignant suspense he created. Fans are eagerly anticipating the epic tale of the unusual setting. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes of a full-length film.
Although he was still young at the time, Parsons knew enough to be aware of what was on offer. “I didn’t really trust everything that was happening, because I feel like it’s normal for that event to turn into nothing,” he said. “Or you end up with nothing.”
However, he finally got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to pursue his vision, this time with top talent by his side. The feature film has the text His country again Westworld writer Will Soodik, and its producers include horror maestros Osgood Perkins and James Wan.
