Kane Parsons Transforms the Backrooms Meme into a Cinematic Experience | Vanity Fair

Inside a Vancouver soundstage on 30,000 square feet of fluorescent-lit corridor, Kane Parsons—the 20-year-old director of A24’s Backrooms—practically needed a map to get around his own film set.

“People would get lost,” he tells Vanity Fair. “Myself included, a couple times.”

The notion of a film set swallowing its own crew is fitting given the source material.

Backrooms, in theaters May 29, isn’t your average Hollywood screenplay. It’s the product of a rare kind of internet authorship—one that’s unfolded across 4chan, Reddit, YouTube, Discord, video games, and an expansive network of collaborative wikis over the past seven years or so.

And at the center of it all is one single image.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in Backrooms as a furniture store owner who “no-clips” into a seemingly endless dimension beneath his shop.

In the late 2010s, a photo of an empty, office-like interior began circulating across online forums, including on the controversial image board 4chan. The photo itself is unremarkable—a large carpeted room with yellow walls, bathed in fluorescent light, apparently taken during the renovation of a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in the early 2000s. But something about it is ineffably wrong—so much so that in May 2019, someone anonymously posted it to 4chan’s paranormal board, /x/, in a thread asking users to share “disquieting images” that feel “off.”

Another user responded to the thread, describing the space as a parallel dimension accessible through “no-clipping”—a video game cheat code that lets players pass through walls and floors. Stumble through one of those glitches in reality and, the post warns, you’ll find yourself trapped in the endless maze of the Backrooms with no way out.

Parsons, then in middle school, was among the “sci-fi nuts” who scrolled past. “Sometimes you have a meme that is clearly curated in such a way that is…a little more thoughtful than others,” he says. “This is one that had more of a weight to it.”

The concept spread through sub-Reddits, and soon solidified into a creepypasta, the internet’s version of urban legend. But for a few years, it remained largely contained to niche corners of the internet. That was until Parsons, who had been developing a following on YouTube for his Attack on Titan–themed videos, uploaded the nine-minute video The Backrooms (Found Footage) to his page, Kane Pixels.

“I was making all sorts of things without a desire to go in one particular direction,” he tells me on a recent Zoom call. “It was very much just creating for the sake of creating…. I genuinely expected almost nothing [when uploading the video].”

Renate Reinsve plays Ejiofor's therapist in the film.

Found Footage follows a filmmaker who accidentally stumbles into the rooms while shooting a low-budget film. Using the VFX graphics suite Blender, Parsons renders the Backrooms as an endless maze captured through the shaky lens of a handheld camera. The aesthetic stays faithful to the original 4chan image and description—right down to that unsettling fluorescent hum—while conjuring the same looming sense of fear and nostalgia.

People loved it. Within two weeks, Parsons says, it amassed tens of millions of views. Today the video has more than 78 million views.

He continued the series, releasing a total of 22 videos that introduced a plot including a set of disappearances and a fictional organization called the Async Research Institute, which is accessing and mapping the rooms.

Almost immediately, Parsons, who was 16 when he uploaded the first Backrooms video, received a slew of studio interest in the concept. “It was a big shock to be suddenly plunged into that space,” he says. “I was very paranoid and cautious because I had no point of contact with the industry. And I had to miss a bunch of school for it.”

At the time, Parsons was still living in Petaluma, California, in the same house he’d spent most of his life in with his mom and brother. Like most teenagers his age, he fully expected to go to college—specifically film school—and even as Hollywood interest in The Backrooms intensified, he operated under the assumption that it could all disappear at any moment. In fact, Parsons pitched A24 the same week his college applications were due.

Instead, the project that once felt precarious became his future. Three years later, Parsons signed with A24, becoming, at 19, the youngest director in the studio’s history. Produced, in part, by horror titan James Wan and Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy, the Backrooms film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner who “no-clips” into a seemingly endless dimension beneath his shop, prompting his therapist (Renate Reinsve) to investigate.

“His work is so singular and evocative,” says Kori Adelson, producer at Chernin Entertainment who helped bring Parsons and Backrooms to A24. “And in terms of his technical skill set? It was more advanced than most experienced filmmakers.” Adelson said that after Parsons was introduced to Renate and Chiwetel, “they immediately called [me] saying he’s an absolute genius.”

“He is a really special talent, and I know he has a lot of other stories to tell, both in the Backrooms world and otherwise,” Adelson says. “We will be in the Kane business as long as he allows it.”

Kane Parsons became the youngest director in A24's history when he signed with the studio at 19 years old.

To build the world of Backrooms, Parsons packed up his life in California and moved to Vancouver—where, for the better part of a year, he did what he’d always done: modeled every environment in Blender. But this time he handed the files to an art department, which built them into a 30,000-square-foot maze of a movie set.

“Before we even were greenlit, I had conceptualized the whole environment for the pitch deck…[which was] inherently one of the biggest selling points of The Backrooms as a project,” he explains.

If there were any edits in the set-design process, Parsons “didn’t have to put pen to paper at all. I could go spend 15 minutes [in Blender] and have an actual tangible thing to…give actionable directions for.”

The bigger challenge for Parsons, it turned out, was the script, and “finding an engine that was viable for people who don’t quite understand this world I’ve been creating for a while and where my audience is at.” He and screenwriter Will Soodik landed on a plot centered around psychology, which to Parsons is “one of the most obvious conversations that comes up in regard to the Backrooms.”

That balancing act became central to Parsons’s approach.

“The film is just an episode of the YouTube series,” he says. “It is one hundred percent congruent…. I sort of have made a contract with the audience, and I like to do everything I possibly can to hold myself accountable to that…regardless if we’re medium hopping.”

Turning an internet-born idea into a feature film isn’t exactly new. Many creepypastas have made their way into film and television before, particularly within horror; Slender Man and Channel Zero are prime examples. But unlike many internet-horror adaptations, Backrooms isn’t built around a villain so much as a feeling.

At its core, Parsons says, the film asks audiences, “What is our relationship with the spaces we inhabit?” The answer unfolds across 105 minutes of mounting anticipation—intimate and disorienting in equal measure, less concerned with jump scares than with the particular horror of a space that never ends.

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