Inside the Aero Theatre on a cold evening in early May, A24 is about to screen the world premiere of Backrooms, the highly anticipated horror film from the studio’s youngest-ever director, 20-year-old Kane Parsons. A cluster of just-out-of-high-school-looking kids are sitting, stage left, nervously bouncing their knees up and down and shaking the whole aisle of seats while doing so. “Do you think he’ll say hi?” one poses to the rest of the group, as they seem to simultaneously turn to look toward a figure entering the back of the theater, “or do you think he’s fake as fuck?” It becomes clear he’s joking only when Parsons appears, descending the steps behind his cast of Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mark Duplass, to greet his group of friends who have come to support him in the showing of his debut film.

In 2022, Parsons uploaded the first of a series of horror short films on his YouTube channel, a found-footage style video titled The Backrooms, where a guy finds himself in an endless maze of rooms that go on forever. At first they are all the same: yellow carpets and walls, a constant quiet hum of fluorescent overhead lights, vast empty spaces, no windows. Enter a square-shaped corridor placed in the middle of a wall, accessible only with a ladder (placed by whom?) and you might enter a similar maze, but this time it’s styled slightly differently. Parsons designed these liminal spaces using the 3D animation software Blender, his depiction of moments and places suspended in reality allowing him to become the poster child for an off-kilter realism. Even Severance creator Dan Erickson has cited The Backrooms as inspiration for his Emmy-winning series.

When Parsons speaks about what draws people to liminal aesthetics, he considers dream logic, or as he puts it, “the misappropriation of semantic details onto arbitrary physical memories and whatnot.” It’s phenomenal in its artistic potential in the way that the best kind of story, or memory, or concept is one that relates to the masses but engages with members of that mass on a deeply individual level. “One of the defining features of what gets determined as a liminal space online is that it’s a medium that’s inherently insecure about itself, or lacks any kind of artistic forthcoming confidence…you can note the millions of times you’ve observed a certain type of archway in a house, but have never actually seen someone take the time to foreground it in a meaningful, photographic way. It feels like it’s speaking to your memories. It’s like, ‘Remember when the light hit that archway in your late aunt’s home back in 2002? Well, here’s something speaking to that exact same feeling.’ I think it makes people feel seen in that regard—it highlights things we take for granted and never feel the need to discuss.”

The underlying concept of The Backrooms the series lies in a 4chan post from 2019, in which an anonymous user shared a photo of a space (that we now understand is a Hobbytown under renovation) with a brief creepypasta-style storyline, referring to it as “the Backrooms.” The existence of this series, and therefore of this movie, is thanks to certain online communities, particularly on YouTube, that popularized short-form horror stories. Parsons was 8 or 9 years old when he first got access to the internet, after being gifted an old hand-me-down laptop. “I got it infested with viruses trying to download Minecraft mods,” he says. “That’s when the door opened, I could control my own internet access, and regardless of whether I was supposed to be on it, I’d stay up until four in the morning under the covers on YouTube watching things like ‘Top 10 Scariest Short Films.’ I definitely had a proclivity for darker horror material, which I think is fairly common for a lot of adolescents.” Parsons credits David Firth (creator of Salad Fingers) as one of the early influences on his creations, as well as watching hours of MatPat’s Film Theory.

When Backrooms releases across the nation on May 29, Parsons will have made the directorial leap from sharing his work on the decentralized, open-source annals of the internet to articulating it within the mechanics of Hollywood; from dictating horror as it’s defined on laptops and phones, to producing a scary story for audiences in theaters. “I like defying, as much as I can, things that are considered more customs of convenience in Hollywood and in broader sit-down-in-the-theater filmmaking,” he says of his horror tastes. “People on their devices obviously have the ability—and are abusing the ability—to skip, fast-forward, and jump around. I’m very much open to debating whether that should be a feature in platforms and whether we should be encouraging it…I don’t like leaning into the things that are destroying people’s psychology and attention spans. But accounting for the way people are realistically going to engage with media today, if you want to make an effectively scary project for people in that camp, that’s what I do. Hollywood is a different container, though…you could have the same file playing in a theater and on YouTube at night on your phone, and I actually think there are scenarios where you could have a more effective, scarier experience on the phone than in the theater. You have to engineer the experience knowing where people are going to be viewing it, how they’ll be viewing it, and what sort of control they have over the media,” he says.

Parsons has been delicate and diligent in bringing Backrooms to fruition. He’s hyper-aware of the unique ways that digitally-oriented IP’s can change shape once they are taken from their natural habitats and into writers’ rooms, (“It feels like the complete norm,” he says, “not the exception, that almost every digital-IP film ever made feels like it was made by people who know nothing about the source material and have no care for it”) so he’s conscious of finding the medium between avoiding what he calls “lore bloat” (the colossal amount of narrative information and detailing that exists within the Backrooms community online) and still giving longtime Backrooms fans what they want, all the while appealing to an entirely new audience. “I was very paranoid, especially in the early days of working on this film, that we’d run into issues with things being forcibly conformed into a box…had I not been directing, I don’t think there would have been any awareness of the desires of all the people who want certain things from a Backrooms film…There wasn’t really a secondary advocate or voice in the group on that front. I found that surprising but understandable. I want to be clear, it’s not inherently negative, because while there may not be a cultural understanding of very specific elements—that’s a lot to ask of people who aren’t chronically online, the same age as me, growing up with the same things—you can obviously still make a great film out of that.” Nonetheless, despite any early anxieties, “It was actually a smooth process making the film,” he says, “It was nice."

He’s kept his controls in the transition of this project, at once entirely his own, to then shared amongst a brand new cast and crew: as he composed the music for the YouTube series, he is co-composer on its movie, which was a must in the agreement of its creation: “That’s been foundational from the very beginning,” he says. “It’s my favorite part of the creative process, I think. I love composing.” And the Backrooms plot extends gracefully from the ASYNC core that exists in the YouTube series, leaving Parsons’ audiences, both new and OG, at the merciless talent of Reinsve and Ejiofor. Together under the direction of Parsons, Backrooms leaves one with something true, something horrific, and something that haunts the mind well after one leaves the theater.

Photographed by Cole Ferguson

Styled by Angelina Vitto at Honey Artists

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Groomer: Livio Angileri at Honey Artists

Lighting Director: Austin Deats

Styling Assistant: Flannery Silva

Production Assistant: Charlie Alexander

Location: Martinsound

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