Born in 2005, the year YouTube launched, Backrooms director Kane Parsons has “always taken that for granted,” having the platform at his disposal.
“YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do,” he explains while discussing his “weird dream come true” debut as A24‘s youngest ever director, at just 20 years old.
Parsons (aka Kane Pixels) was 16 when he created his web series, The Backrooms: Found Footage, in 2022, itself inspired by a 2019 creepypasta photo on 4chan of what appears to be never-ending vacant office space. With many creative takes on the unsettling imagery popping up around the internet, Parsons’ series was a well-produced found footage adaptation that centered on the fictional Async Research Institute’s work studying the Backrooms (aka The Complex) as missing persons cases continue to escalate around the discovery.
A24 soon came calling, with development beginning on the feature adaptation, starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve, filming last summer in Vancouver, Canada.
As part of a new cohort of directors that came up on YouTube before making their feature debuts, Parsons hasn’t noticed any stigma around that trajectory in his own journey to the big screen.
“I’m only really here for the work that I do, and I am kind of oblivious to some of what goes outside of that, by choice” says Parsons. “I’m just doing, in my mind, the same thing I’ve been doing on YouTube, but somehow this snowballed in such a way that I have been given the ability to be a part of and work with such a large group of people on what is essentially just a very long video.”
I recently spoke to Parsons over Zoom from the editing bay as he puts the final touches on the film, for which he and his VFX team are using Blender, the same free CGI tool he learned on “a fairly crummy laptop” in middle school, with the help of some YouTube tutorials and other software he obtained “through means that I won’t say out loud,” to eventually bring his web series to life.
“It’s feasible, and even on a pretty shitty machine, you can still get the ball rolling,” he insists of the self-taught process to fellow creatives with the hunger to get their own ideas off the ground.
Scaling his vision for a big screen feature over the past four years has been “a very bizarre dream that it’s also been as seamless as it has been,” noting there have “really not been many barriers to creative control” amid his collaboration with the behemoth indie banner.
Cool and collected for a young man with the world (or at least indie Hollywood) on his shoulders, Parsons is “very satisfied with what we did” on the horror film, premiering May 29 in theaters.
“If there’s anything to be taken from this, I think the brain is the main thing you need to find a way to create,” he adds. “I would just encourage optimism around that.”
Read on about Kane Parsons’ directorial debut with A24’s Backrooms.
DEADLINE: Congratulations on Backrooms. It’s so cool to see this coming to fruition from its internet origins. What was it like teaming up with a 24 for your directorial debut on this project?
KANE PARSONS: It’s been really, really great, obviously. What I’m used to online has been doing everything so low, so this has been my one and only really first foray into a broader collaborative experience like this. And in a lot of ways, it feels sort of like a weird dream come true, where there’s really not been many barriers to creative control along the way. I think I was pretty specific about my pipeline when we first started talking, and it’s obviously evolved a little bit over the years, cause when this first started gaining traction and when I first met with them, I was 16. So, things have changed over time a little bit on my end, but generally, I think it’s been a process of just scaling what I’ve already been doing to a larger group of people and sort of just applying my approaches that way, which again, it feels like a very bizarre dream that it’s also been as seamless as it has been. But I think generally, they’ve just been really strong creative partners who have understood what was working about the original idea for people, like what brought them in Backrooms, and then where my specific interpretation of it lies as a distinct version of that idea. They very much respected and appreciated how much to just lean into this one version, instead of just being aware of, culturally, what the Backrooms actually is, because in all the conversations I’ve had over a number of years, it’s something that gets a little murky sometimes for pretty obvious reasons, I think.
DEADLINE: Tell me about some of the challenges of translating your web series to a bigger budget movie, especially when it comes to bringing your 3D designs to life on such a large scale.
PARSONS: It’s overall not been that challenging, just due to a testament to the people involved. I feel like, generally speaking, we’ve in most regards been able to stay 1-to-1 to the YouTube series in a lot of ways. As seen in the trailer, the film’s a combination of traditional cinematic live=action with found footage work that blends in and out, like my exact pipeline that I use for the YouTube stuff. So, a lot of the film is stuff that was built in Blender by myself and the VFX team. Going between that and live-action, I think obviously, the big thing that people have been apprehensive about, or at least, since the trailer’s been out, it’s been massively positive. But the thing that people have been curious about, myself included, before we mastered a full plan for this, was how this thing is built upon and people buy into it via the found footage, sort of murky, grainy analog, access point, and how easy is it to damage or lose that tone and just forget what the whole thing was, if you subvert that or just take it in a different direction? And what I found is, I think calculating exactly the risks we wanted to take there and the exact approach we wanted to take, in sort of a roundabout way, to achieve the same feeling. I think I’m personally very, very satisfied with what we did. Without saying too much, you can see it in what we’ve released with the trailer so far. It’s definitely reliance on lots of wide angle lenses, a lot of it’s on 12 and 15 for most of the film inside the Backrooms, having distinctions of like being inside the Backrooms versus outside. Sound design is obviously a huge part of maintaining that feeling. Technically, speaking in terms of getting all this off the ground, I think there’s a struggle and a hard part in sort of scaling what is a very, very precise creative universe and set of methodologies that are sort of expected by a lot of people online. There’s a lot of expectations around specificity of whether it be accurate specificities taking place in 1990, even down to the month. My core audience, I come from a place where people are—like the day the trailer came out, they were able to identify every prop from every prop shop used, every CG asset, every texture, everything, because that’s just where I’ve sort of come from online, like the ARG (alternate reality game) web series sort of nonfiction world where information is just something to play with, and it’s engaging. But very specific with The Backrooms as a series and then finding a way to maintain that specificity when we’re on an accelerated timeline with a lot of people and where there are more places for things to either be strengthened massively or there can be ways in which certain things in the background can butt against each other, so it’s been just sort of coming up with a master plan and making sure that everyone, all the creative parties involved, are looped in on that and are just sort of aware of the level of specificity we need to be beholden to. And I feel really satisfied with where it all ended up. We’re in a place where it’s like 1-to-1 continuity with the YouTube series and the timeline, and it’s that kind of IP, so I feel really great there. The world building is something I’m very satisfied with here.
DEADLINE: That’s awesome. Just from your web series and The Backrooms‘ internet roots, I feel like there’s a symbolism of dread in corporate America or industrial America. Is that something that spoke to you at all?
PARSONS: For me, it’s one of the sources of this. Without going into a super long version of this, I think generally, The Backrooms caught on … it became a thing for people in the first place, really caught on back in 2019 so strongly, I think just because it is such an epitome of an anti-space, a very impersonal mass-produced, not quite sterile, not like abandoned, but it’s definitely neglected. It’s a place you would have a hard time imagining anyone being sentimental about, so in a way it feels like the place itself is sort of lonely and just kind of an abused component of a massive, sprawling system that is kind of a runaway train, like a headless chicken in a way. And obviously, these are stylistic things I’ve leaned into, like I overemphasize the visual motif of the drop ceiling and the wall-to-wall carpeting, and the wallpaper is a bit of a weird one where it’s kind of baked into the original idea. And I think there’s a lot of symbolism and ideas that have come out of that since working on this project, and it’s maybe a little self-referential inside that universe, what the meaning of the wallpaper is there, but I think it’s a good visual landmark that’s usually what it’s good for. It’s like anchoring, just because in my version of the rooms, there’s such a specificity on when and how places are being repeated or duplicated and how they blend into each other. It’s just a really nice pattern. That’s the technical reason for it, I’d say. It’s a good grounding mechanism, but beyond that, generally speaking, Backrooms has always kind of just spoken to me and seemed kind of obvious as a manifestation—not to sound pretentious—but a manifestation of our collective, of the people who are online engaging with this, our collective anxiety and the building pressure that is coming from being at the stage we’re at with an industrial society that’s continuing in a direction, and it’s not headed by any one person or any one group of people. It’s kind of just, again, a headless chicken. It’s like we’re all building a system that no one in particular has the ability to drive, so it’s lots of small little micro movements, sort of just nudging us in a particular direction … Sorry, we’re at the tail end of production on this, so if I’m a little loopy, that’s why. I’m right at the finish line. But really, it feels to me like this is what happens when a society, a collective becomes atomized in some way, like when purpose and context is stripped away. The same way you would see a person who’s thrown in a solitary confinement cell or is trapped, basically in a sensory deprivation scenario, they will pull meaningful information out of nothing, just because their threshold and desire to pull in valuable information, so they’ll take in more noise from what is essentially a blank wall, and they’ll derive pretty profound meaning from that. And it’s my understanding that the same thing tends to happen on a larger scale. It’s not one-for-one, it’s not the exact biological mechanism, but on a larger scale, you obviously will see that the more atomized a society becomes, the less purpose they have, the more they drift in the direction we’re drifting in right now. You see a rise in conspiratorial thinking and these sort of activities that are sort of self-referential and don’t benefit anything directly in a material way. It’s like, activities that just are there to appease the nervous system, or say there’s something to be done, when really it’s just harder and harder to place what they’re actually doing for the the human body. So, that’s a big grand way of looking at it, but for me, the Backrooms is really just the external idea of this noise that we are hallucinating that is coming to us, societally, as we sort of lose—not a grip on our place in the natural order of things—but sort of just us staring our desire for industrialism in the face and trying to figure out, is it beautiful or is it going to melt our faces off?
DEADLINE: I’ve seen a few horror movies recently dip into the whole creepypasta trend and all of these internet stories, and I’m curious, what do you think is so appealing about those and what makes them a good inspiration for horror films?
PARSONS: I think it’s hard for me to speak to this one potentially, or maybe it’s easy, but my perspective on it is one where, I grew up with the internet largely. I was born in 2005, the same year as YouTube, and I have always taken that for granted. And so, by the time I was allowed access to the internet when I was younger, probably like like 8, 9, 10, the term creepypasta felt like a thing that already predated me, and so it felt like just a thing that, I guess I have a hard time seeing it as a distinct category, I suppose, where it feels more like it’s kind of just boiled down to, today it’s only meaningful to consider it as sort of a label for an internet-born IP that—I wouldn’t say that has no author, because there’s a handful that do have authors, and even the ones that are considered author-less do technically have authors. The internet has a habit of stripping that from people and becoming a decentralized thing, which depends on the situation. Backrooms is obviously weird because that one originates from a 4chan post referring to another 4chan post that is just.not easily traceable, actually, as far as to say just not traceable at all. There’s no movement and there’s no real ability to ever determine, as far as I know, unless we somehow find a way to build a quantum computer that can see into the past and figure this all out. There’s not really a way to determine where it originally came from, who originally wrote that initial text with image from the Rohrer’s Furniture Store reconstruction, which is what that that photo was, the original Backrooms photo. Tt’s from this, now a hobby shop, in Wisconsin. It took the people until 2024 to find what they were looking for ages. But I think they’re just urban legends really, they’re just in a different medium. I think there’s elements that appeal. I think it’s just the same thing that’s we’ve always been doing as a species, little folk tales, except now the medium just happens to be a little more reliant on digital or analog devices as a way to fuel the story, just because it’s convenient and it’s more mysterious. You’re able to add a separation between the author and the product if it’s like a strange digital artifact left on a computer or there’s this veneer of impersonality to it when it’s just this author-less floating piece of text or a compressed JPEG or something, to me, those are the hallmarks of when people say creepypasta, those kind of tonal ideas come to mind. But I think maybe I just don’t have the tightest handle on what it means at this point. I think it’s become fairly abstract, honestly. I think it’s best described as just a piece of text that gets copied all over the place, and it just happens to be about a creepy story. It’s copy pasta, a creepy copy pasta. It’s just a memetic little short story that spreads, the same sort of thing that’s been going on with myths for forever.
DEADLINE: We’ve seen several first-time filmmakers recently, who’ve come up on YouTube and have really been successful, with Talk to Me, Shelby Oaks, Iron Lung, all that kind of stuff. Since you’ve taken on this directorial debut yourself, have you experienced any kind of stigma around that pipeline of YouTubers breaking into the industry?
PARSONS: No, I haven’t felt that at all. Maybe I am not in the right places, but I haven’t experienced that at all. I’m only really here for the work that I do, and I am kind of oblivious to some of what goes on outside of that, by choice. I entirely spend my time either just in an office space working on this computer, this laptop, or I’m sleeping for five hours. That’s all I do, and there’s not really a whole lot outside of that, cause it’s just what I enjoy doing. Or I’ll go for a hike in the woods. But I’m just doing, in my mind, the same thing I’ve been doing on YouTube, but somehow this snowballed in such a way that I have been given the ability to work with such a large group of people on this specific—what is essentially just a very long video, at the end of the day. I’m more in the ballpark of like phrasing the stuff I do on YouTube as filmmaking rather than saying, this is content. I don’t ever want to be framed as … I don’t see myself in the YouTube space, being that kind of person either, but I enjoy constructing media, I enjoy art, I like making music, I like doing sound design. I like doing the visual effects of as much as I can. I just enjoy the craft of it. The job is being able to go down rabbit holes and just explore ideas, research things just for personal curiosity. That’s such an insanely borderline out-of-touch, but a very ideal scenario, creatively, so I don’t think I have anything to complain about. I’m content with this, and I don’t know what the stigmas could be, other than just friction with change.
DEADLINE: I definitely I feel like these days, to be a filmmaker, you kind of have to get your start on YouTube or something like that, in order to just show your craft in an industry that’s almost impossible to break into. So, I really respect what you’ve done, especially at such a young age.
PARSONS: Yeah, I appreciate it. I think, again, just growing up with the internet, I feel like my home in a lot of ways is that world of like ARGs and web series. A piece of art is, you might spend forever creating a fake web page or a fake social media profile with like 500 sock accounts, all pretending to be real people and it’s like, there’s an art to that, in constructing an experience for people online. To me, I enjoy that equally, and so, that’s kind of the place that I feel at home at, and I like to just think of what I’m doing now and lots of other things like anything else I go and do. There’s not a direct trajectory, I suppose, it’s sort of the freedom to pick between. To me, I want to kind of dispel the idea that YouTube was a stepping stone to do this, and so now, I’m never going back to YouTube. I get immense creative satisfaction from YouTube, and it pays the bills. Why wouldn’t I? I can totally go back to that. I think that’s just inherently sort of a cultural place that I feel pretty used to, and I am in the current state of just figuring out if this is scalable, or how it goes. So far, my answer is yes, I have really, really enjoyed working in this way, and the creative partners I’ve worked with on this film are now just my really good friends. I think there’s a lot of sense in doing some more of this in the near future, but I don’t ever wanna put one on the pedestal above the other. I think they’re just separate, little mountains in the same range.
DEADLINE: That’s pretty much all I have, but is there anything else you wanted to add about this whole journey?
PARSONS: This goes back to what I was just saying a moment ago, but YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been like how I know how to do any of the stuff I do. I had a fairly crummy laptop back in middle school, and I just watched a lot of tutorials and was able to get some software through means that I won’t say out loud, when I was like 11, and I was able to use YouTube to just—it’s a classic story of anything you would want to try to accomplish there, it’s feasible. And even on a a pretty shitty machine, you can still get the ball rolling. I was lucky enough to be able to do some Attack on Titan short films back in in 2021, and those started making a return on YouTube, so I was able to start upgrading my equipment, but even today, my setup is composed of one laptop, a standing desk, and some some cloud-based services and the software that I use, which is not a lot. It’s pretty minimal. I use Blender, which is free, for my CGI. But you can use so many different softwares for compositing and Whatnot. So , if there’s anything to be taken from this, I think If there’s anything to be taken from this, I think the brain is the main thing you need to find a way to create, stress through if you can. And this is a big thing, this is probably the hardest thing, if you can find a way to create, form a habit just kind of for fun in the background with whatever else you’re doing in life, figuring out how to just get comfortable with some of these tools like Blender and Whatnot, if that’s what you wish. I think definitely, the means to technically scale it are fairly accessible and achievable right now, so I would just encourage optimism around that. And it’s a great community. It’s a lot of fun.
English (US) ·