One of the finest character actors of his generation, Chiwetel Ejiofor has been directed, over the course of his career, by some of the finest directors of theirs. Steven Spielberg instructed him in Amistad, Stephen Frears in Dirty Pretty Things, while he received an Oscar nomination for his role in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. (Richard Curtis has also cried out “Action!” to him. We’ll come to that.)
Now, in Backrooms, he is being directed by a 20-year-old British-American YouTuber known online as Kane “Pixels” (real name Kane Parsons), who has never made a film before. “Yes, but he’s very technically gifted,” Ejiofor says.
Clearly. Backrooms emerged out of a series of horror-adjacent shorts Parsons began filming for the online platform at the age of 14, each revolving around so-called “liminal spaces”. These first started gaining traction, the internet will tell you, “on 4chan as a creepypasta describing an infinite maze of yellow rooms with a distinctive smell and fluorescent hum”.
Excuse me, what now?
“Creepypasta”, it turns out, is a “uniquely internet-native form of horror”. This is Parsons’ happy place. His videos have amassed more than 72 million views. You learn something everyday. Ejiofor certainly did.
