Backrooms movie: Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old YouTube sensation, knows what we’re all scared about

Kane Parsons is 20 years old. He’s not going to be able to escape that narrative.

The Californian’s youthfulness is part of what makes him interesting as someone who can’t yet legally drink in the US, but was put in charge of his own feature film, Backrooms, by A24, the acclaimed indie studio behind films such as Uncut Gems, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Hereditary and Marty Supreme.

The other part is that his film, Backrooms, was born out of an internet trend which originated in a space that many dare not tread, 4chan, and popularised on YouTube as a short film and then a series by Parsons, starting when he was 16. Those videos, which he created using software, have a collective 216 million views.

The YouTube to cinema feature has become a talking point in recent months thanks to the releases of two movies – Obsession and Iron Lung – from internet creators, but neither of those have the pedigree of Backrooms.

There’s the A24-ness of it, obviously, and the fact its leads are two Oscar nominees in Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, the latter of whom starred in Sentimental Value and whose other new film, Fjord, just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

It also boasts a veritable who’s who of big name producers including James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring), Osgood Perkins (Longlegs), Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) and Peter Chernin (Planet of the Apes).

Even with all those more experienced hands, Parsons was generally left alone to do his thing.

“One of the things I’ve appreciated about this process is just how hands-off people have been,” Parsons told The Nightly.

He had a good working relationship with everyone, but particularly Perkins, because they were in the same place physically, and worked with a lot of the same crew that Perkins has dealt with previously.

“He was very much a helpful ally in recognising what worked with the YouTube series, and holding off the notes and basically defending the essence of what was there,” Parsons added. “He played very good creative defence and he’s also just fun to hang out with.

“I kept feeling like I was getting away with something a little bit working on this. Because it was like, ‘Why aren’t they stopping me?’.”

Perhaps the long-leash is a recognition that while Parsons may be young, no one else understands this odd universe like he does. After the 2022 short film, Parsons created another 23 episodes of the web series. He knows what’s around the corner of every disorienting corridor.

The premise is deceptively simple. Clark (Ejiofor) owns a furniture store in a warehouse in a non-descript American town. He’s divorced and lonely and sees a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve).

One night, while investigating yet another mysterious power outage in the basement, he chances upon a portal in the wall. Pushing through it, he finds himself in a labyrinthine backroom with a series of never-ending corridors and doors.

What appears at first to be mundane – the butter yellow wallpaper, the overheard ceiling tiles and fluorescent lighting, that dreary carpeting – morphs into something strange. It’s all a bit off, and there are remnants of familiar items from the world above.

Parsons was cognisant that in adapting his web series to the big screen, he needed to strip it back to the beginning. The online following may be able to spot things or engage with Backrooms more deeply, but it needed to work for a new audience.

“A lot of projects that grow up online and has an obsessive audience who is so detail-oriented, can make the mistake of catering too much (to that fandom) and get this lore bloat that’s too self-referential,” he explained.

He has an example in mind, but won’t name names because “that has an audience that would go after me if I said anything”.

“What has been helpful is returning to the simplicity of the original Backrooms post, the original short, all the points in which people responded to the simplicity of the idea.”

What is that idea? The original backrooms post was a photo of a toy and hobby shop under construction, a slight off-centre image which captured a space with physical markers that is largely what you see in the film.

For the film, the production built a practical set that spanned almost 3000 square metres, and sometimes crew got themselves lost.

It’s what those spaces represent, the feeling that something isn’t quite right with the reality you find yourself in, that brings the horror - and it’s all in your head, which, of course, is the scariest place you can live.

“It harkens back to this feeling that these photos reach into your subconsciousness and is showing you a memory that you forgot you had,” Parsons elaborated, and added that the aesthetic of it, the digicam textures, tricks your brain into connecting it to your childhood, at least for those who grew up in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

“It creates the feeling of a sort of constructed reality that is unreal in a way, where it’s almost like a regurgitated inner life becoming real and tangible again, the feeling of having a dream about a location, but in that dream, that place is done incorrectly and it’s not quite right.”

That’s the intimate, personal aspect to it. But the fear also has a broader grounding, which taps into that feeling we as a humanity, are a bit lost and compass-less.

“Just imagine you leave your world, your leave your life behind, and you’re in this place with no context, no human interaction, forever. You can probably wander until you starve and die, and you would wander in a direction, aimlessly, forever.

“It’s very atomising. That’s obviously addressing some of the anxieties a lot of us collectively have about our species having trouble staying away from where we’re pushing ourselves in terms of broader systemic atomising features of economic and industrial trends.”

What’s freakier than getting lost in the physical manifestation of those collective anxieties.

Backrooms is in cinemas on May 28