A 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons has risen to the top so fast that he hasn’t had time to analyze how he got there.
“It’s been go, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. “Even the smallest break,” he says, would give him a better perspective on everything that has happened in the past few years. But for now, he’s gaining popularity—and he thinks it’ll be at least another month before he gets a chance to reflect on his big break.
Back roomsA classic horror piece that stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it’s a cerebral extension of Parsons’ atmosphere. YouTube web series of the same name. It marks his first involvement as A24’s youngest director to date, at the helm of a long-awaited film by many hungry internet fans. You couldn’t ask for a better kick start to the summer season.
Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success sound like something of an accident. “I never made the short film or made the series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this to prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that can be used for film,'” he says.
That nine-minute original videocalled “Backyards (Found Photos)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, it was inspired by – of all things – a bad guy. 4 chan a meme that spawned a collective legend. A 2019 post on the popular photoboard forum /x/ included a disturbing photo of an empty hallway bathed in harsh lighting. An anonymous user described being transported to the “Back Rooms, where there’s nothing but the smell of old, damp carpet, crazy yellow-mono, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights on high, and about six hundred million square miles of randomly divided empty rooms to be trapped in.”
“God save you if you hear something moving around, because it sure as hell heard you,” the 4chan user added.
Other people took the concept, and created a series of images and stories on various social platforms. Parsons encountered these, with then-popular memes about high-street spaces—backyards being a natural extension of this phenomenon. He was interested in what this material raised but felt it had not been fully explored.
“Obviously it was scratching something that I didn’t see other media scratching,” he says. “I think there was an element of like, I wish there was more of me involved here.”
To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could bring the inner vision of Backrooms with Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. The original video, in which a man is banished to the Back Room and a sort of depraved life, went viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ technical prowess and the terrifying suspense he could create. Fans happily speculated on the larger stories of the mysterious setting. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons in hopes of a full-length film.
Although still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be wary of such offers. “I was in disbelief with everything that was happening, just because I feel like it’s a normal occurrence for that kind of event to turn into something,” he says. “Or you end up with nothing.”
Eventually, however, he got what every young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to follow his vision, in this case with top talent by his side. The feature film has a script for Country and Westworld writer Will Soodik, and its producers include horror maestro Osgood Perkins and James Wan.
