Here's the wild story of how an anonymous internet comment spawned "Backrooms," the highly anticipated horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old YouTuber.Show Caption
Ready to feel old? The filmmaker behind the summer's hottest horror movie was born in 2005 and can't legally drink.Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old YouTuber who has turned his hugely popular web series into a movie, "Backrooms" (in theaters May 29), is the youngest director in A24 history. He was still a teen when he got the gig, and the day he pitched the movie to the indie studio, his college applications were due."It all ended up being great, and really fun and easy," he says of the filmmaking process. "But initially, I was just like, 'This doesn't happen. This has not happened. There's not really a thing to compare this to. This is very strange. … Everyone's going to be like, 'This is a child. This is an infant!' "What is 'Backrooms'? How an anonymous comment spawned one of summer's most anticipated films"Backrooms" stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, an isolated, bitter man living in the furniture store he owns after a messy divorce. One night, he makes a baffling discovery in the basement: A doorway that leads to an infinite maze of mostly empty rooms with inexplicable contents. There's a stop sign in the middle of a room, a hole filled with chairs, and so forth, as if the environment was randomly generated. Clark becomes obsessed with exploring this other dimension, known as the Backrooms, and when he doesn't come back out, his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) heads inside to search for him.While the movie is based on Parsons' YouTube series of the same name, which has collectively drawn about 200 million views, the core idea didn't originate with him. It came from, of all places, the anonymous imageboard 4chan, where a user in 2019 posted a photo of an empty room with yellow wallpaper and carpeting as an example of a disquieting image that just feels "off." In a comment, someone else imagined that this photo depicted a realm they dubbed the Backrooms."If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms," the person wrote, with "no clipping" referring to a player glitching through the environment in a video game. The comment took off and became a popular creepypasta, or a spooky story spread online.Enter Parsons, who saw the original 4chan thread and was intrigued by how it gave everyone the same eerie feeling."I found it very compelling that so many people felt so strongly that there was this thing that they could not quite articulate, and so that meant that there was a string to pull on," he says.'Backrooms' director Kane Parsons was 'paranoid' about Hollywood's interestSo in January 2022, Parsons uploaded a nine-minute, found-footage style short to YouTube, in which a person wanders through the Backrooms and encounters a mysterious creature. The bone-chilling video looks like it's being shot in an actual environment, but Parsons created it with his hand-me-down laptop using Blender, a free graphics software.By that point, Parsons had been making shorts as a hobby for years. He began taking it more seriously in middle school after illegally downloading visual effects software and teaching himself how to use it."I just started spending 100% of my time that was not in school" making the shorts, he recalls. While he had success with some earlier YouTube videos, Parsons' first Backrooms short was a hit on a whole other level; it has amassed a staggering 78 million views. This led him to create more than 20 additional videos building out an elaborate mythology.Producers began reaching out within a month of the original video. Still a 16-year-old high school junior, Parsons was intrigued, but skeptical and "very paranoid" about getting Hollywood involved in his creation."I didn't want this thing to get away from me," he says. "I didn't want the project that I was very excited to continue building to get stifled by suits with a chainsaw."Being thrust into meetings with big shots might sound like a lot for a teenager. But Parsons wasn't awed by the Hollywood magic, partly because he "didn't worship or observe the industry" too heavily growing up. He cites a pair of video games, rather than movies, as his main creative touchstones."My biggest properties growing up were 'Half-Life' and 'Portal,' " he says. "Those formed much of my sensibilities when I was a kid, and they've trickled down to everything I've done."In the end, Parsons, who scrapped plans to attend film school so he could go "all in" on "Backrooms," was able to make a movie very much in keeping with his web series and its lore, but with a more traditional narrative and physical sets − 30,000 square feet of them. And when he started directing, his fear of being looked at as a child turned out to be unfounded."It didn't happen once," he says.Parsons is a prime example of how YouTube has made information about filmmaking available to all, and he was originally inspired by watching other online creators. "All these YouTubers were very much putting an emphasis on how accessible these tools are, and so it [felt] very encouraging to go try it out myself," he says. "...Any questions I had were all answered by YouTube" or other online tutorials.Based on early box-office tracking, "Backrooms" is poised to be a hit. It looks set to open north of $40 million, four times the film's reported budget of around $10 million, according to Variety.That level of success could usher in an age of movies based not on comic books or 1980s cartoons, but on IP more relevant to a younger audience: content that originated online. It's also sure to establish a major new talent in Parsons, who is eying "more dynamic, complex set pieces" for whatever his next film might be, without abandoning the weirdness of his debut."I don't love casting a wide net to appeal to as many people as possible," Parsons says. "I like having a very specific thread to follow, and sometimes, if that takes me to a slightly more esoteric place, I'm fine with that."Like the Backrooms, his future is full of infinite possibilities.
