{"id":914753,"date":"2026-06-22T20:17:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T01:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/22\/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-is-horrors-next-great-storyteller\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T20:17:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T01:17:20","slug":"backrooms-director-kane-parsons-is-horrors-next-great-storyteller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/22\/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-is-horrors-next-great-storyteller\/","title":{"rendered":"Backrooms<\/em> Director Kane Parsons Is Horror\u2019s Next Great Storyteller"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"kane<\/p>

Asterios Moutsokapas<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n
\n

\"Estimated8 min read<\/span><\/p>\n

Last winter, Kane Parsons felt like his heart was ripped out of his body. It happened during a visit back home in Petaluma, California, a scenic Bay Area suburb in Sonoma County. It\u2019s the kind of place you imagine raising a family: ocean-blue skies, verdant landscapes, an abundance of farms\u2014\u201cIt smells like cows all the time,\u201d Parsons says\u2014and a walkable riverside downtown that typifies Main Street, U.S.A. The rolling hills of \u201cBliss,\u201d the default desktop wallpaper for Windows XP, are just a 15-minute drive from Parsons\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

But when he returned, Parsons found that his mother had broken down and removed their rotting backyard gazebo. He loved that gazebo, and he mourned it. \u201cI have a strong attachment to inanimate buildings and structures,\u201d Parsons tells me over Zoom. He thinks deeply\u2014very deeply\u2014about manmade structures. But not all buildings are so innocent. \u201cYou could look at buildings as a parasitic organism,\u201d he says. People build them just to exist, like bees building a beehive. \u201cNow the planet\u2019s covered in structures that are gonna live longer than people,\u201d he says. \u201cThe buildings are winning.\u201d<\/p>\n

How fitting, then, that Parsons\u2019s first film as a Hollywood director centers on a hostile abyss of plaster and wallpaper. Backrooms,<\/em> the buzzy new horror thriller from A24 set for theaters on May 29, is chiefly set inside a metamorphosing maze housing unspeakable nightmares. Adapted from Internet folklore and Parsons\u2019s own DIY YouTube series that he made as a teenager, Backrooms<\/em> is one of the most highly anticipated horror films of the year. It\u2019s also an unprecedented task for its young creator.<\/p>\n

\n

\"kane<\/p>\n

Sela Shiloni<\/span><\/figcaption>

\u201cI got access to the Internet around eight or nine,\u201d Parsons tells Esquire, \u201cand I was constantly consuming.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Parsons, who is all of 20 years old, enters Hollywood like a glitch in the system. He\u2019s an outsider\u2014raised on a diet of video games, anime, and YouTube. In conversation, Parsons squeezes his origins down to \u201ca subtle drip of many things since I was two.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI got access to the Internet around eight or nine,\u201d Parsons says. \u201cI would watch short films and be curious about the people who made the films. It was a lot of independent people who put an emphasis on the behind-the-scenes of what they do and how they do it, and I was constantly consuming that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Driven by a need to make fan art of his favorite games\u2014namely Portal<\/em> and Half-Life\u2014<\/em>Parsons learned how to put together visual effects using free software tools online. He completely credits, and blames, the decorated video game studio Valve with shaping his imagination. \u201cValve had the biggest grip on all of my creative preferences as a kid and have dictated where I\u2019ve gone creatively over the years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His imagination shaped some nightmares too. In one of his recurring dreams, he\u2019s alone, exploring Aperture Science, the sinister laboratory in Portal<\/em>. Parsons was only six when he learned to fear liminal spaces and entities that may not be present\u2014the character Doug Rattmann especially. \u201cThe schizophrenic guy who would write on the walls\u2014and was very cryptically hidden in the games\u2014freaked me the fuck out,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s this wall where you can hear his voice. You don\u2019t know if he\u2019s dead or alive. He\u2019s a faint Easter egg. That sound file would send me into a cold sweat if I heard it. I couldn\u2019t be in a room alone because I got freaked out.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world took up bread making and other now-forgotten hobbies, Parsons played with the 3D creation software Blender. Even just through working on a \u201cshitty laptop,\u201d he soon found that his aspirations could go far beyond video game fan art. \u201cI can make borderline photoreal stuff in an afternoon,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like magic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2017, he uploaded his first short film: Sandwich<\/em>. It\u2019s a bizarre (intentionally so) 30-second video featuring Parsons, hunched like Gollum, swiping a \u201creal sandwich\u201d (a napkin labeled in Sharpie) from a classmate. Two years later, he uploaded Corpus Schizophrenic<\/em>, a cryptic dive into the world of Portal<\/em> from Doug Rattmann\u2019s paranoid and fractured perspective. Then Parsons caught wind of something called the \u201cBackrooms\u201d online. Originating as a 2002 photograph of a Wisconsin hobby store amid renovations, the Internet latched on to its menacing vibes: the warm piss-yellow tint, the sparse decor, the uncanny valley where desolation and isolation meet incompleteness. After years of floating around Internet message boards as a joke, it was canonized into the Backrooms by an anonymous poster on 4chan.<\/p>\n

\u201cCreepypastas,\u201d a fundamental feature of Internet folklore, are the Backrooms\u2019 open-source DNA. No one owns the idea, and everyone contributes to it. The story evolves in blocks of text, photo captions, fake Wikis, and, yes, short films on YouTube. The Backrooms\u2019 lore piqued Parsons\u2019s interest. There was just something about its seemingly endless space of ever-changing rooms and hallways, accessible only by phasing through the walls like a glitching video game character.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been the week it was a meme,\u201d the director says as he tries to recall when he first learned about the Backrooms. As much as the Internet can hard-code posts and messages to the minute, discovering a meme in the wild is still like glimpsing a ghost. \u201cI started seeing it constantly for a couple of weeks,\u201d he says. \u201cI think it carried, and still does carry, this archetype of doom. Some form of annihilation that befalls people in a funny way. It\u2019s kind of a comedically bleak death.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Renate<\/p>\n

A24<\/span><\/figcaption>

Renate Reinsve stars in A24\u2019s Backrooms <\/em>as a therapist who searches the mysterious maze for her lost patient.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Over our hour-long conversation, Parsons zigzags through thoughts and topics as if the floors and walls really were shifting to the naked eye. Questions like \u201cWhere did you grow up?\u201d and \u201cWhat is liminal horror?\u201d prompt him down rabbit holes. He is only 20, but he maintains the aura of somebody a decade older and wisened about the world. A strong jaw, a deep voice, a mop of curly nutmeg-brown hair all look at me through Zoom; if I saw Kane Parsons at my gym, he would not look out of place with all the other 20-somethings. Nor would he stick out in a university lecture hall, going long and being thoughtful on subjects he knows all too well in three, maybe four dimensions.<\/p>\n

After Parsons proposes that humans are not hardwired to perceive reality beyond surviving and procreating\u2014\u201cWe\u2019re sitting in a sea of noise, and our brains only pick up a small sliver of what\u2019s there,\u201d he says\u2014I feel sheepish trying to cover more ground. I ask him what school was like. \u201cSchool was fine,\u201d he says politely before kicking off a tangent about the insufficiencies of results-based learning in the American education system. A county-funded arts program in neighboring Novato High essentially gave Parsons a semester\u2019s worth of hands-on filmmaking, which complemented his very-online sensibilities. It\u2019s now paying off.<\/p>\n

When Kane Parsons began uploading his Backrooms <\/em>shorts in 2022, he didn\u2019t think it would attract attention. At all. By then, YouTube at large was entrenched in the new algorithm-driven paradigm. It was no longer the place for aspiring artists\u2014it was a marketplace for content, vlogs, dance tutorials, gaming clips, and outrage podcasts. The short films that Parsons filmed at school with his buddies were not the kind of media that the algorithms rewarded. Not that he expected much for it either. \u201cIt was not serious in the sense that I had a desire and plan,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t think all the things I was putting out would stick. I assumed it would flop on YouTube.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he wanted to make something, engagement be damned. He crafted most of what would be the first Backrooms<\/em> episode using Blender, obscuring visual shortcomings with the noisy grain of a VHS filter. (The technique effectively set the 1990s as the default period in all of Parsons\u2019s Backrooms<\/em> work, including the film.) One afternoon, he gathered classmates during lunch to help him lay the finishing touches. The footage featured a student phasing into the Backrooms through the ground. \u201cI animated the whole thing, but I didn\u2019t know how it was gonna start,\u201d he tells me now. \u201cI don\u2019t think I even told them. I was just like, \u2018Okay, I\u2019m gonna back up and film.\u2019 I gave basic directions. It was free-flowing. Then I slammed the phone to the ground. I still have it on my camera roll.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"backrooms<\/p>\n

A24<\/span><\/figcaption>

\u201cI assumed it would flop,\u201d Parsons says of his first Backrooms<\/em> videos on YouTube. Now he\u2019s directing a film adaption for A24.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As quickly and violently as one enters the Backrooms, the Internet miraculously caught on to Parsons\u2019s short. He expanded it into a web series, and it did gangbusters. YouTube essayists who Parsons was a fan of began dissecting his<\/em> work. It enlightened him about a simple but unfathomable fact of life as an artist: It doesn\u2019t take all that much to make art that people want to see. Beyond resources and time, \u201cthere\u2019s technically nothing stopping you,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was younger, there was this feeling that projects I looked up to were in the stratosphere \u2026 like they come from above,\u201d says Parsons. \u201c[But] realizing that most people I treated as being in that above space are now casually aware of the thing that I<\/em> did, it doesn\u2019t feel any different than normal life. It was very calming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the time between Parsons goofing off at school and making his first film for a bona fide Hollywood studio happened in the blink of an eye. As the young director recalls, the popularity of the shorts drew the attention of James Wan\u2019s Atomic Monster and A24. A year after Parsons uploaded his first Backrooms video, a deal was in place for Parsons to helm the feature. It was a major adjustment. For so long, Parsons had been making videos by himself, entirely on free software. Suddenly he was on a physical set\u2014in a disorienting space where some crew members reportedly got lost while trying to navigate it\u2014giving directions to Oscar-caliber stars like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.<\/p>\n

But what made Parsons sweat the most was still how the Internet would respond. \u201cI\u2019m used to storytelling that is so online, where people are particular about details,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s always an underlying theory, or we connect the dots and find the hidden elements. That convinced me, subconsciously, that that\u2019s just what you had to do to be taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cWith every decision [we made] in the film, you weigh against this bible of information that will be checked by Reddit and Discord. If it doesn\u2019t hold up, they\u2019ll smell that and something will break and you can\u2019t fix it. So I try to avoid anything accidental.\u201d At the same time, he doesn\u2019t believe in respecting any sort of limits either. \u201cPeople accept whatever level you set yourself at,\u201d he says. \u201cI happened to just set myself at such a level where you know everything I\u2019m putting on YouTube has built-in deeper levels to it. Like far, far<\/em> deeper.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"kane<\/p>\n

Asterios Moutsokapas<\/span><\/figcaption>

Kane Parsons (left) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (right) on the set of Backrooms. <\/em>\u201cThere\u2019s a lot more with Backrooms that I\u2019m very optimistic we\u2019ll get to explore,\u201d Parsons tells Esquire. \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely more in the chamber, and that\u2019s always been the plan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s still much more to explore with Backrooms\u2014even after the movie. Parsons is forgoing a formal college experience to keep making films, which he hopes will include more Backrooms. As far as he\u2019s concerned, making movies is his higher education. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more with Backrooms that I\u2019m very optimistic we\u2019ll get to explore. There\u2019s absolutely more in the chamber, and that\u2019s always been the plan. This film\u2019s a good foot in the door with general audiences,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But of course, he\u2019s still learning. At his age, Parsons is still coming to terms with what it means to make and break, to create and destroy. At the end of principal photography on Backrooms<\/em>, during which he spent months inside a space he first birthed in Blender and then raised with various department heads, actors, and director of photography Jeremy Cox, it was an emotional experience tearing his own building down. He thought back to his childhood gazebo. \u201cIt was like looking at my child, and it was very sentimental,\u201d the director admits.<\/p>\n

On the final day of production, Parsons solemnly walked among the corpses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what wires are crossed wrong in my brain, but they feel like people,\u201d Parsons says. They feel alive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asterios Moutsokapas 8 min read Last winter, Kane Parsons felt like his heart was ripped out of his body. It happened during a visit back home in Petaluma, California, a scenic Bay Area suburb in Sonoma County. It\u2019s the kind of place you imagine raising a family: ocean-blue skies, verdant landscapes, an abundance of farms\u2014\u201cIt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":914754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110312,891,104640],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-914753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-backrooms","category-director","category-youtube-videos"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}