Picture it: you’re alone in a windowless room. The floor is carpeted – a couple shades darker than the walls. You can’t quite tell if everything is yellow or if it only looks that way because of the jaundiced glare coming from the fluorescent lights overhead. In the corner of your eye, you see an open doorway; this room leads to another room, which, even though you can’t see it for yourself, you strongly suspect leads to another room and another after that. There is nothing explicitly wrong with where you are, but something is just off. It’s this setting, or rather the feeling it invokes, that forms the nucleus of this year’s most talked-about horror movie Backrooms – starring Oscar-nominated actors Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and named after a concept that originated in the late 2010s. It was then that a photo of the above scene began circulating on the internet, taking root on the image board 4chan. Thousands riffed on what it was that made the image so eerie, sharing more examples of similarly spooky-adjacent spaces. Others, in turn, wrote short stories about them, then made videos. Sixteen-year-old sci-fi enthusiast Kane Parsons was one of those people, spending hours after school making VFX videos at the kitchen table of his family home in Northern California. “I have arthritis so I would stack all the furniture to create a sort of makeshift standing desk,” says Parsons, who is still only 20, his elderly affliction a somewhat uncanny indicator of his precociousness. Within weeks, his first backroom-inspired video – of an amateur filmmaker nervously exploring the labyrinth, as seen through the shaky lens of a handheld camera – amassed tens of millions of views. Today, it has 78 million. Parsons made 23 more clips after that, each building on the lore of the backrooms, teasing out the strands of its DNA in strange ways that felt at once true to that original photo and also undeniably Parsons’ own sensibilities. And so naturally, when A24 – the not-so-indie-anymore production company behind horror hits like Hereditary and Talk to Me – decided to make a backrooms film, they tapped Parsons to direct. Nevermind the fact he was still in school; nevermind the fact he’d never stepped foot on a film set; and definitely nevermind the fact that he would be their youngest ever director by a long shot. “You should really talk to the producers who thought it was a good idea to give me this opportunity,” laughs Parsons, who took that opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. I wanted it to be a collaborative thing. I didn’t go in claiming to know everything there is to know about directingA24 wasn’t the only production company sniffing around; by then, almost immediately after the success of his first video, Parsons had management and legal counsel. “I was very paranoid going into choosing who to partner with,” says Parsons, adding that he retained a certain amount of “scepticism” leading all the way up to production. “I think a big part of why I can now say things went really smoothly and really positively – and why I was able to retain a massive amount of creative control and leverage – is due to the specific people I worked with.” These included Longlegs’ Osgood Perkins, who has become a sort of mentor to Parsons. He is “a little fatigued” by the conversation around his age. Parsons was 19 by the time he moved to Vancouver to begin shooting, and is now still only 20 – which, he insists, isn’t even that young. “Personally I have found some of the most talented people online… people who are five times more technically competent than I could ever hope to be… they’re 13 years old.” He’s practically geriatric by comparison. This fascination with his age, he says, is really more of a fascination with technology. “We haven’t had a lot of time to process what has happened with [tech]. We’re just now seeing these people who grew up taking it for granted, and who are now using it as a sort of third external muscle.” Parsons’ age has brought allegations from some corners of the internet that he couldn’t possibly have actually directed Backrooms. That he would have been hand-held through the process by someone older and with more experience. In the weeks after our interview, one of the movie’s stars, actor and filmmaker Mark Duplass, speaks out to defend him: “Kane was 100 per cent in control. More so than many directors three times his age.” Admittedly, on first impressions it’s tough to imagine this genial, moppy-haired teen seizing control on a reported $10 million film set – but after only moments speaking to him, it’s a reality that becomes much easier to envision. Parsons is meticulous in the way he speaks, every answer long and searching, groping around in his mind for what it is that he wants to say, for what he means. He attributes some of this to jetlag (“course correct me, please”) but later gives another reason for his conversational meandering that feels truer to him: “My strategy of speaking is usually just to talk until I find my favourite version of the answer.” Refreshingly, he isn’t media trained. Renate Reinsve in 'Backrooms' (Courtesy of A24)Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.So what’s a teenage boy to do when he’s confronted with an unknown situation, thrown onto a film set with a whole cast and crew at his beck and call, or into a boardroom with a throng of suits decades older than him? Look on the internet. “I do a fair bit of personal research. It’s not glamorous or compelling but I go online and try to see what other people say.” Every day before he walked on set, he would “overprepare for a lot of eventualities”. Every day before he walked off, he would ask people what he could do better tomorrow. “I wanted it to be a collaborative thing. I didn’t go in claiming to know everything there is to know about directing. I got this job. I make this thing online that we’ve talked about a bunch, and I know what this film needs to be, but you know, let’s have an open dialogue.” It helped that Parsons already possessed the sort of scrupulous diligence that a lot of directors build their films around. “My world on YouTube, the whole landscape that I’ve grown up with, has necessitated an extreme attention to detail since the beginning,” he says. Even before his backrooms video went viral, Parsons had already amassed a huge following on YouTube with his “fanfic” videos that expanded lovingly and painstakingly on the universe of his favourite game: Attack on Titan. “People, including me, appreciate that deep level of subtext – and I think that inherently forces a real strictness with what we need to be doing creatively.” For what it’s worth, Parsons has no plans to abandon YouTube for the perceived greener pastures of filmmaking. Kane Parsons and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of ‘Backrooms’ (Asterios Moutsokapas)Hearing Parsons speak about the games he grew up with, it’s a wonder he didn’t go down the gaming route. The son of a computer programmer and a therapist, he was a grade A student despite the fact he “didn’t love school”. He cut his teeth on games like Minecraft, leaning into their world-building elements. “When I grew up a little more and started using VFX software, I would stay in at lunch just so I could finish my school work as as fast as possible so that as soon as I got home, I could spend every minute working on whatever film I was doing that week, usually a dumb little skit,” he says. “I was very obsessively trying to get my head around it.” Choosing filmmaking was simply a matter of logistics, he says. His laptop wasn’t the right model to run the necessary software. Thinking about it some more, though, he ventures deeper. “I think it’s because I wanted something a little faster and easier in some ways,” he says. “With a game, there is so much underlying work that needs to be done before you can focus on the visuals. I’d have to focus so much on functionality before I could actually get to anything aesthetically compelling and the narrative work in a game is much more [intensive].” That said, he’d still like to do something game-related in the future. He is, after all, not even 21. Unlike others his age, Parsons will not be heading to college this autumn. “The same week that the A24 deal [went through], that was the same week that most of my college applications were due,” he says. “How insane is that?”‘Backrooms’ is in cinemas from 29 May