By Anna Menta

If you’re blown away by the fact that the buzzy, upcoming A24 horror flick Backrooms was directed by a then-19-year-old kid—the youngest director in A24 history—don’t worry, it gets worse: That kid, Kane Parsons, was already a hit horror director by the time he was 16. And after you watch his Backrooms (Found Footage) short film and Backrooms web series on YouTube, you’ll understand why.

Parsons first uploaded a 9-minute short, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube on January 7, 2022. The video is all from the point of view of a cameraman, who starts off filming a low-budget horror flick and ends up in a real-life horror movie when he falls down a hole and wakes up in a surreal, impossible room. Bathed in eerie yellow light, the room resembles an empty, windowless office, invoking chills of corporate horror. (How does a 16-year-old know about terror of being trapped in a bland room with sickly fluorescent lighting?)

The further the camera man explores, the more impossible it seems. A staircase melts into the floor. Strange graffiti on the wall advises him to stay still. His labored breaths mingle with the always-present buzz of the lights above as he slowly rounds corner after corner. Each time, we expect a jump scare, and sometimes, we get it, in the form of a Slenderman-esque monster, which appears in flashes. The only label on the YouTube caption? “September 23, 1996.”

The video was created entirely by Parsons. Though you’ll be convinced Parson must have found some abandoned building to film in (my first thought), in fact, the entire thing is computer-generated animation, which Parsons created via an open-source 3D software called Blender. By setting the film in the ’90s, Parsons helped sell the authenticity with a grainy, camcorder-quality, analogue appearance.

The idea of creepy “backrooms” predates Parsons’ short. Most credit an anonymous 4chan user for coining and defining the term, after they left a comment on an image of a yellow, window-less, empty office building, posted in a thread requesting “disquieting images that just feel ‘off.'”

“If you’re not careful and you noclip [a gaming term that describes a mode where users can pass through solid objects] out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the anonymous user wrote, “Where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

This comment became a “creepypasta,” a horror spin on “copypasta,” that was repeated and passed around different corners of the internet. Parsons turned the creepypasta into a CGI reality in his 2022 short film. Though it was originally intended as a standalone, the video was a hit. (As today, it has over 78 million views on YouTube.) Over the next two years, Parsons created 21 more short films in the “Backrooms” universe. Most of the series follows a fictional research institute, the Async Research Institute, as they attempt to better understand the Backrooms. More and more people go missing, lost forever to the labyrinth of the Backrooms. And the episodes titled “Found Footage” are from the point of view of the missing—civilians who stumbled upon the Backrooms of their own. They can noclip anytime they like, but they can never leave.

Again, despite the “found footage” label, the videos are animations created by Parsons. The young director has an eye for surrealism that evokes Salvador Dali or M.C. Escher. An old car sinks into the floor. Stairs lead to nowhere. Floors level up to a platform in the middle of the room, for no discernible reason.

And now, that aesthetic is coming to the big screen. In 2023, Parsons signed a deal with A24 to direct the Backrooms feature film. The screenplay was written by Will Soodik, and produced by horror movie powerhouses James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as the film’s lead, a furniture store owner who goes missing into the Backrooms; and Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve co-stars as his therapists who goes in after him.

Even after his big movie deal, Parsons kept expanding the “Backrooms” universe with more and more YouTube videos. The most recent video, posted one year ago, is titled “Static Dead End,” and is captioned “05/29/1990.” (As one commenter pointed out, May 29 is also the release date of the feature film.)

The video hints that at least some of the scientists who were assigned to work on this project didn’t know what they were getting into, and are just as scared of the Backrooms as we are. Parsons told Dazed in a 2024 profile piece that the feature film “goes to places with characters that we haven’t seen before and explores things that I haven’t really touched on yet.”

Earlier this month, on the red carpet for his film, Parsons hinted to ScreenRant there was still more to come. “Backrooms, I would have a very hard time saying it’s done. I guess that’s what I can say, but I expect to be seeing a little bit more in the not-so-distant future.”

In the same profile for Dazed, the then-18-year-old was even more grandiose in his future plans for the series, saying, “I certainly have no interest in letting this story die, and I don’t care how many decades it takes. I’ll do a ten-episode series to tell the story the way I want to.”