Here’s the wild story of how an anonymous internet comment led to Backrooms, the highly anticipated horror film directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons.
‘Backroom’ turns anonymous comments into viral horror movie
Backroom, the buzzy horror movie starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsuv, is based on a web series based on internet comments.
Are you ready to feel old? The creator of this summer’s most talked-about horror movie was born in 2005 and can’t legally drink alcohol.
Backrooms (released May 29) is directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Cain Parsons, who adapted his own wildly popular web series into a film, making him the youngest director in A24’s history. He was a teenager when he got the job, and on the day he pitched his film to an indie studio, his college application deadline was approaching.
“Everything ended up being great and really fun and easy,” he says of the filmmaking process. “But at first you’re like, ‘This can’t happen, this can’t happen, there’s nothing to compare this to. This is very strange. … Everyone would say, ‘This is a child, this is a toddler!'”
What is “Backroom”? How an anonymous comment created one of the summer’s most anticipated movies
“Backroom” stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark. Clark is a lonely, bitter man living in the furniture store he owns after a messy divorce. One night, he makes a mysterious discovery in the basement. It was a doorway into an endless maze of mostly empty rooms with unexplained contents. There’s a stop sign in the middle of the room, a hole filled with chairs, etc., and it feels like the environment is randomly generated. Clark becomes obsessed with exploring this alternate dimension known as the Back Room, and when Clark doesn’t return, therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) goes inside to look for him.
The film is based on Parsons’ YouTube series of the same name, which has a combined total of about 200 million views, but the core idea was not Parsons’s. This comes, of all things, from the anonymous image board 4chan, where in 2019 a user posted a photo of an empty room with yellow wallpaper and carpet as an example of a disturbing image that some people find “disturbing.” In the comments, some people imagined that the photo might depict an area they named the back room.
“If you’re not careful and clip from reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the backroom,” the person wrote, referring to players glitching their video game environments. The comment went viral, becoming popular as creepypasta, and the creepy story spread online.
Parsons saw the original 4chan thread and was intrigued by how it gave everyone the same eerie feeling.
“I thought it was very compelling that so many people feel strongly that there are issues that cannot be articulated well, and that means there are strings that need to be pulled,” he says.
‘Backrooms’ director Kane Parsons ‘paranoid’ about Hollywood interest
So in January 2022, Parsons uploaded a nine-minute, found-footage-style short to YouTube in which a person wanders through a back room and encounters a mysterious creature. Although this bone-chilling video appears to have been filmed in a real environment, Parsons created it on a hand-me-down laptop using the free graphics software Blender.
At that point, Parsons had been making shorts as a hobby for years. He started taking it more seriously in middle school after illegally downloading visual effects software and teaching himself how to use it.
“I just started spending 100% of my time outside of school making shorts,” he recalls. Although he found success with some of his previous YouTube videos, Parsons’ first backroom short stories hit on a whole other level. It has been viewed an astonishing 78 million times. This led him to create more than 20 additional videos that built up an elaborate mythology.
Producers started reaching out within a month of the original video being completed. Parsons, a 16-year-old high school senior, was intrigued but skeptical and “very paranoid” about Hollywood’s involvement in his work.
“I didn’t want this to get away from me,” he says. “I didn’t want the project I was so excited to keep making to be suffocated by a suit with a chainsaw.”
Being squeezed into a meeting with big names may sound like a lot to a teenager. But Parsons wasn’t awed by the magic of Hollywood. Part of the reason is that he didn’t “adore or observe the industry” too much. He cites two video games, not movies, as his main creative touchstones.
“My biggest assets growing up were ‘Half-Life’ and ‘Portal,'” he says. “They formed a lot of my sensibilities when I was a kid, and they trickle down into everything I’ve ever done.”
In the end, Parsons scrapped his plans to attend film school in order to go “all in” on “Backrooms,” and was able to make a film that largely followed the web series and its lore, but with a more traditional narrative and a physical set (30,000 square feet). And when he started directing, his fears of being seen as a child turned out to be unfounded.
“That never happened,” he says.
Parsons is a prime example of how YouTube has made information about filmmaking available to everyone, and he originally found inspiration by watching other online creators. “All of these YouTubers were really focused on how accessible these tools were, so I was really encouraged to try them out myself,” he says. “…any questions I had were answered on YouTube or other online tutorials.”
‘Backrooms’ is poised to be a hit, according to early box office tracking. According to Variety, the release budget is expected to exceed $40 million, four times the film’s reported budget of about $10 million.
This level of success could usher in an era of movies based on IP that is more relevant to younger audiences, content that originates online, rather than comic books or 1980s cartoons. It is also certain to establish another major talent in Parsons. Without abandoning the weirdness of his debut, Parsons is aiming for “more dynamic and complex set pieces” in whatever his next film is.
“I don’t like to cast a wide net to appeal to as many people as possible,” Parsons says. “I like to have a very specific thread to follow, and if sometimes it takes me somewhere a little more esoteric, that’s okay.”
Just like Backrooms, his future is full of endless possibilities.
