Kane Parsons was 16 years old when, on January 7, 2022, he published the horror short film Backrooms on YouTube. It took only 48 hours for the 9-minute and 14-second film to surpass 1 million views. With its success came the web series of the same name and, with it, a cultural phenomenon.
What at first seemed like a teenage internet prank quickly caught the attention of studios. From viral video to global blockbuster, Backrooms is a symbol of an ongoing transformation in cinema — an industry increasingly open to discovering new talent and new stories on digital platforms.
At 21, Parsons is now one of the most sought-after names in Hollywood. The turning point came in 2023. Among the various offers he received, the young man signed with A24, one of the most influential and innovative companies in contemporary cinema, making an unusual bet.
Instead of handing the $10 million project over to an experienced director, he entrusted the job to Parsons — then a 17-year-old Californian high school student who still depended on his mother to take him from classes to meetings with studio executives.
A24's choice couldn't have been more perfect. The release of Backrooms in May was a smash hit—and gave Parsons the title of the youngest filmmaker in history to take a film to the top of the global box office.
In its opening weekend, the film grossed $118 million worldwide. It was the best opening for an original horror film, easily surpassing titles like Us and A Quiet Place .
YouTubers who become filmmakers already exist (meet some of them in the photo sequence below) . It's still rare for a work born in the digital environment to achieve large-scale production scale without abandoning its original DNA.
In Backrooms, you'll find the shaky camera, the VHS grain, the background hiss, and the found footage style—where the story is presented as if it were a real recording discovered by a third party.
It worked. So far, the film has grossed nearly US$385 million, according to the latest data from the Box Office Mojo platform. By establishing itself as A24's biggest commercial success, it leaves the studio's record holder far behind — Marty Supreme , with its US$192 million and nine Oscar nominations.
A creepypasta
At the end of June, the company announced the release of Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition , featuring 15 minutes of previously unseen scenes produced by Parsons using computer graphics. Initially, only the American audience would have access to the "director's cut".
What do you mean, only the United States? Faced with fan pressure, A24 rushed to close deals with local distributors to bring the new film to other countries.
In Brazil, the extended version has just arrived in theaters. Without the final cut, the film is available on streaming platforms such as Prime Video.
Since negotiations were not possible in several places, Parsons agreed to make the extra 15 minutes available for free on his YouTube channel, where he is known as Kane Pixels.
All this activity reveals the strength of the community built around Backrooms on the internet. The audience remained engaged even after the theatrical release.
More than half of those who attended the film's American premiere went to the cinema because of Parsons' web series, reports the Deadline website. And the vast majority were under 35 years old — the audience that major studios have fought so hard to win over.
Before reaching Hollywood, backrooms existed as a creepypasta —horror stories collectively created on the internet. On May 12, 2019, someone posted a photograph of an empty office on an anonymous image-sharing forum, with the following message:
“If you’re not careful and cross into reality in the wrong places, you’ll end up in the backrooms , where all that exists is the smell of old, damp carpet, the madness of monochromatic yellow, the endless noise of fluorescent lights buzzing at maximum volume, and approximately 960 million square kilometers of randomly segmented empty rooms in which you will be trapped. If you hear something wandering nearby, God help you: it has certainly heard you before.”
The description draws inspiration from the concept of liminal spaces: hyper-functional environments, such as corridors, lobbies, waiting rooms, schools, hotels, and hospitals, designed for the constant flow of people. When deserted, upon losing their function, they can cause spatial and temporal disorientation.
The internet has transformed this discomfort into terror. A hell "between" an origin and a destination, backrooms form a labyrinth of empty spaces that repeat themselves in such an undefined and indistinct way that memories become confused and the feeling of strangeness intensifies. Everything becomes a "non-place," to use the expression coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé in the 1990s.
deteriorating mental health
Until Parsons created the web series, the legend was just a collection of loose images from liminal spaces with disconnected stories written by internet users. The young man used this universe to create a sci-fi plot.
In the film, the labyrinth serves as a metaphor for the deterioration of mental health. A mirror of the fears, traumas, and frustrations of Clark, played by British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Mary, played by Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve — both nominated for Oscars; he for 12 Years a Slave , and she for Sentimental Value .
“Most of the horrors that people find in there are themselves projecting their own inner world, desperately trying to extract meaning from random voids and noises,” Parsons says in an interview with Variety magazine.
Perhaps that is precisely the strength of Backrooms . The director has transformed the everyday feeling of an entire generation into terror: that of wandering through familiar, hyper-connected, and yet profoundly lonely spaces.
A24 is reportedly negotiating a three-year exclusive contract with the filmmaker—US$65 million for a sequel to Backrooms and a new original feature film, according to the Puck News platform. Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, and Sony Pictures have also reportedly approached Parsons.
The competition for the young filmmaker is happening at a time when Hollywood is seeking to reinvent how it finds its next big hits. Pressed by streaming competition and the difficulty of turning original stories into box office hits, studios are increasingly betting on already established intellectual properties to reduce financial risks and attract viewers, especially younger ones.
Backrooms offers just that. Parsons brought more than just the idea for a film to A24. He brought a phenomenon in motion — and millions of followers along with it.
