Kane Parsons’ – A 20-year-old filmmaker, Kane Parsons, has gone from a nine-minute viral YouTube short to directing his feature debut—A24’s youngest director to date—at the center of a huge online horror obsession. The movie expands a sinister 4chan “Backrooms” meme into a fu
He’s barely had time to catch his breath, let alone figure out what his sudden success means.
The 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons tells WIRED that it’s been “go. go. go. ” adding that even “the tiniest bit of a break” would help him step back from how fast everything has changed over the past few years. For now. he’s leaning into the attention—while also insisting it will be at least another month before he has room to reflect on what he calls his big break.
That break arrives with “Backrooms,” a moody horror feature that stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. It’s also an unusually fast leap for Parsons: the film marks his debut as A24’s youngest director to date. at the helm of a movie long anticipated by a massive and hungry internet fan base. It’s set up perfectly for the kind of momentum that typically builds toward summer blockbuster season.
But Parsons doesn’t describe his rise as a carefully planned career move. “I never went into making that first short or making the series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that is viable for a film,’” he says.
The origin point is telling: his first “Backrooms” video was built from the kind of corner of the internet that moves faster than any gatekeeper. The original nine-minute video—titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”—was uploaded by Parsons in 2022. It drew inspiration from a sinister 4chan meme that had already started to grow into a collaborative mythology.
In 2019. a post on the notorious image board’s /x/ forum included a disquieting photo of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. In the description that followed. an anonymous user wrote about being transported into “the Backrooms. where it’s nothing but the stink of old. moist carpet. the madness of mono-yellow. the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz. and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”.
The same post came with a warning that became part of the myth itself: “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
Others took the concept and expanded it across social platforms, generating spinoff imagery and stories. Parsons encountered that material—alongside then-popular memes about surreal liminal spaces—and said he was intrigued by what it stirred up. even if he felt the idea hadn’t been fully explored. “It was clearly scratching something that I didn’t really see much other media scratching,” he says. “I think there was an element of like, I wish there was more for me to engage with here.”.
So he tried to build his own version of the experience. Parsons set out to see whether he could conjure an immersive “Backrooms” vision using Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. The result—a first video in which a person is chased through the Backrooms by a malevolent life-form—went massively viral. Viewers praised Parsons’ technical skill and the chilling suspense he managed to create. and speculation about the larger mythology took off even faster. feeding excitement for a full-length movie.
Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes for a feature.
Even then. he sounded wary—less like a kid chasing a dream and more like someone who understands how quickly internet-born momentum can curdle. Although he was still a teenager. Parsons says he was “very distrustful of pretty much everything that was happening. ” because he’d seen how often these moments turn into disappointment. “Or you end up with less than nothing,” he says.
What he ultimately got is the outcome young filmmakers chase: the ability to pursue his vision, with top talent beside him. The feature film has a script by Homeland and Westworld writer Will Soodik. Its producers include horror maestros Osgood Perkins and James Wan.
For Parsons, the story isn’t really about Hollywood “discovering” an idea—it’s about an internet myth reaching the point where it could sustain a bigger form. He just hasn’t had the time, yet, to process what it took to get there.
Backrooms Kane Parsons A24 Chiwetel Ejiofor Renate Reinsve 4chan /x/ forum liminal spaces Blender 3D Adobe After Effects horror film Will Soodik James Wan Osgood Perkins