On January 7, 2022, Kane Parsons posted a nine-minute short film to YouTube titled The Backrooms (Found Footage). It depicts a young filmmaker who falls into an unsettling dimension consisting of—seemingly—unoccupied office space.
Four years and more than 79 million views later, Parsons is taking his viral hit from social media to the big screen with Backrooms. The liminal horror movie arrives in theaters Friday, May 29, and features an A-list cast including Golden Globe nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and Academy Award nominee Renate Reinsve.
Parsons, only 20, is the latest director to progress through the YouTube-to-feature-film pipeline, building off the success of Curry Barker (behind this summer’s first horror smash, Obsession), Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me, Bring Her Back), and others.
“When I was younger, there was this feeling that projects I looked up to were in the stratosphere … like they come from above,” Parsons told Esquire. “[But] realizing that most people I treated as being in that above space are now casually aware of the thing that I did, it doesn’t feel any different than normal life. It was very calming.”
Here’s everything you need to know about Parsons, his inspirations for Backrooms, and his career aspirations.
Parsons grew up with YouTube—literally
Appropriate given YouTube’s role in his growing fame, Parsons was born on June 18, 2005, the same year the video-sharing site debuted. He grew up in Petaluma, California.
Parsons was around 8 or 9 years old when he received a used laptop as a gift—sparking his interest in all things macabre. “I got it infested with viruses trying to download Minecraft mods,” Parsons told Flaunt. “That’s when the door opened, I could control my own internet access, and regardless of whether I was supposed to be on it, I’d stay up until four in the morning under the covers on YouTube watching things like Top 10 Scariest Short Films. I definitely had a proclivity for darker horror material, which I think is fairly common for a lot of adolescents.”
Naturally, Parsons was inspired to make his own creations. In an A24 interview, Parsons recalled he made a lot of art growing up. He drew a lot of pictures and eventually picked up an old digital camera, creating stop-motion animation with Legos.
He has a passion for urban exploration
Parsons had a particular fascination with unoccupied spaces, watching GoPro clips of people walking through abandoned historical sites. He then started his own urban exploration adventures.
When he was 13, Parsons traveled to Los Angeles with friends to compete in a film festival and stayed at an old hotel called the Millennium Biltmore. The group broke into an abandoned area of the hotel, exploring stairways and floors that became progressively creepier. “So much so, that by the time we reached the ground level, the space had transformed into a nightmarish area out of Silent Hill or one of my own films,” he told Dazed.
One hallway had an “overwhelmingly yellow tone” very similar to the horrific liminal spaces he used to bring The Backrooms to life.
Parsons’s Backrooms videos have generated more than 197 million views on YouTube
Originally based on a series of internet urban legends collectively termed creepypasta, typically short-form horror content presented as true stories meant to be widely shared, The Backrooms concept caught Parsons’s attention in a 2019 4chan post.
The Backrooms are Parsons’s vision of what would happen if people experienced the video game phenomenon of “no-clipping,” or a character accidentally breaking through the physical map into an unbuilt alternate area.
“It’s kind of like a very benign version of like a sort of purgatory or hell myth, but without any kind of damnation aspect,” Parsons told IGN. “It’s inherently a force of nature that you can’t negotiate with. It doesn’t pull you in because you did something wrong, it’s because reality broke.”
After his first liminal horror-based video quickly went viral in 2022, Parsons made around two dozen videos expanding on the lore of the Backrooms. Together, they have amassed more than 197 million views on YouTube.
He worked with a pair of horror giants to make the Backrooms movie
Parsons had been in talks with distributors, including A24—behind recent Best Picture nominee Marty Supreme and horror movies including The Witch (2015) and Midsommar (2019)—about a Backrooms movie since he was 16, he told Deadline.
While going from short films to directing a full feature might seem like a daunting task, Parsons had an all-star crew to help him. Credited producers for the movie include Osgood Perkins, the son of Psycho actor Anthony Perkins and director of recent movies such as Longlegs (2024) and The Monkey (2025), and James Wan, the creator of The Conjuring franchise.
Wan, part of 21 Laps Entertainment, was excited to work with Parsons from the beginning and even compared his personal vision as a filmmaker to that of legends Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton. “They’re able to play in that commercial world, but yet every movie is super, super personal to them,” Wan told Parsons in their conversation for A24. “And that is how I approach all my movies. And I think that’s who you are as well. I feel like whatever movies you make here onwards, everything would be highly important for you.”
Parsons spoke about some of his primary artistic inspirations for the movie with Letterboxd. They include the Portal video game franchise, the TV drama Mr. Robot starring Rami Malek, and the 2002 thriller One Hour Photo starring Robin Williams.
Parsons is also a co-composer for Backrooms
While Parsons was happy to lean on producers Perkins and Wan for advice, there was one element of the movie he wanted to keep uniquely his own: the music.
Parsons, a trained pianist, is a co-composer for Backrooms and previously composed the music for the YouTube series. “That’s been foundational from the very beginning. It’s my favorite part of the creative process, I think. I love composing,” Parsons told Flaunt.
The young auteur has his own Spotify and SoundCloud accounts with various themes and musical samples from the series.
Parsons skipped college to make the movie
Parsons was a junior in high school thinking about his future—including college applications—when his Backrooms videos first went viral. However, once he and A24 committed to making the movie during his senior year, he chose to immediately pursue his filmmaking passion.
“Like a lot of people, I was going through the very normal experience of just trying to figure out what the f—k I’m going to do with the next two years and what college is going to be and what that’s going to look like,” Parsons told IndieWire. “I was looking at these options into the film industry by way of academia through school, it felt so bogged down with all these things that didn’t feel practical.”
Parsons has plenty of material to stay busy; he claims he has a 70-page document of additional Backrooms lore. He also is eyeing an episodic series and more movies to continue the liminal horror phenomenon.
He was careful to avoid overfilling this year’s release with Easter eggs for that very reason. “My thought process was, if we can avoid that pitfall and do this right, I think it raises our chances of opening the door to being able to continue this in a more well-paced, well-mannered way,” Parsons said.
See Backrooms in Theaters Now
See how Parsons’s directorial and musical skills come together when Backrooms hits theaters on Friday, May 29. The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass.
Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.
