- The director of A24's Backrooms movie has had his say on why some film adaptations fail
- Kane Parsons thinks some studios ignore the "actual DNA" of franchises that made them popular to begin with
- Backrooms' filmmaker is also the creator behind a viral YouTube series that was inspired by this film's source material
The director of A24's Backrooms movie has had his say on why some film and TV adaptations fail — and how his first big-budget project will attempt to avoid similar pitfalls.
Speaking exclusively to TechRadar, Kane Parsons suggested that the reason some adaptations don't succeed is because studios and/or a production's chief creative team don't fully understand why fans latched onto them in the first place.
For the uninitiated: Backrooms is a feature film retelling of The Backrooms. A creepypasta (read: an internet-created horror folktale) that's only existed since 2019, The Backrooms is described as an impossibly large, interdimensional space filled with a seemingly never-ending number of rooms and corridors, and populated by monstrous entities.
Since its conception, The Backrooms has not only become one of the internet's most popular analog horrors but also spawned a wave of indie horror videogames and served as the inspiration for an American Horror Stories episode.
Additionally, a viral YouTube series, which began in 2022, has amassed hundreds of millions of views and further helped to shape The Backrooms' extensive lore. The individual behind said YouTube phenomenon? A then-16-year-old Parsons, who was hired to direct A24's movie adaptation just over a year after his first video metaphorically caught fire.
Given his prominent role in popularizing The Backrooms and fleshing out its mythos through his short films, Parsons appears to be the ideal candidate to helm Backrooms. It's a decision that, despite Parsons' tender age — he's still only 20 — should also pay off, especially with Backrooms set to attract long-time fans of its source material and Parsons' work to see if its big-screen adaptation is as faithful as Backrooms' trailer makes it out to be.
Other studios might want to take that expert-first leaf out of the A24 playbook, too, especially from the perspective of live-action reimaginings of other forms of media. Indeed, from Netflix's Cowboy Bebop TV show and Paramount's The Last Airbender film, to the Resident Evil movies and more besides, Parsons believes that studio interference and/or hiring the wrong people to oversee such adaptations are the root cause of their downfall.
"I think what happens is there's an overvaluation of the costumes worn by an IP [intellectual property]," Parsons told me when I asked how Backrooms threads the needle of appealing to diehard fans of The Backrooms and general moviegoers alike.
"And that's where most screen adaptations go wrong," he continued. "It's almost as though the skin, specific characters, and other elements of an IP are taken without any of the actual DNA that motivated those creative decisions in the first place. So, I feel like what you need to do — and we did this on our film — is rewind all the way to the beginning, and remind ourselves why people latched onto that initial post [of The Backrooms] and my first short film.
"Fundamentally, for all of the lore and depth, The Backrooms is a story playing in the periphery of a fairly simple concept. Whether people have seen it online or not, I think they can understand it's pretty supernatural in its makeup, so it'll be quite digestible for them.
"And I'd also say the goal isn't to feed into that simplicity in a negative way," Parsons added of one of this year's most exciting new movies. "It's figuring out what was so effective about that very first, almost sensory experience that fans had, and following that thread to build this movie from the ground up."
Backrooms launches in theaters worldwide on Friday, May 29.
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