The Kid Who Built the 'Backrooms' — Meet A24's Youngest Director, Kane Parsons

Spoilers for those have yet to see the film.

There's something eerie about the mere thought of a 30,000-square-foot set built to feel like nowhere — winding halls, pale yellow wallpaper, secret doors, and fluorescent lighting telling you to abandon all hope. This sound stage, all of it tucked into an unassuming office park in Vancouver, contains something like the end of the world. Or the beginning of one, depending on who you ask.

For director Kane Parsons, also known on the internet as Kane Pixels, this was a digital vision brought to life. Literally. One early evening in Los Angeles, the 21-year-old filmmaker (he's officially A24's youngest director) talks, with the mild exhaustion of someone who has explained his ceiling tiles one too many times this press cycle, about the night they almost had to redo an entire stage. "We were going to use wood board, speckled with black paint to simulate the ceiling tiles. But right before we were about to begin shooting, they had all started to warp upward. You could see through the ceiling," he shares. To avoid this crisis, they called in the construction team at the last minute to replace all of them with actual tiles. "We almost had sort of fake pseudo-tiles, but I'm glad we ended up having real ones," he continues. "But anyway, it was surreal, very strange, and I mourned its loss when we had to tear it down at the very end."

This is how he operates: with a methodical calm rooted in his ability to stress-test all outcomes and arrived, finally, at peace. Parsons was only 16 years old when he created the YouTube series that would become the foundation of Backrooms. He built the liminal dread of an empty carpeted void in Blender, then passed the files to the film's art department so they could reconstruct it at the scale of 30,000 square feet across four sound stages. It was almost entirely practical with no blue screens or plugs, walking around was possible, and all the lights were controlled. When he stepped onto set, he was already pretty familiar with it. "I have an immense connection with that set," he says. "I could probably navigate it with my eyes closed."

Backrooms is the opposite of what an early 2000s horror film looks like, despite it hinging on the Y2K aesthetic. The lack of background music, which becomes more evident when you watch the film in a screening room alone, delivers the same power as violin stabs. Gore is unnecessary. In place of it is stillness, an unrecognizable space where even the air smells like something and nothing all at the same time. "My brain usually goes at it from horror stuff that's not fictional at all, which is obviously grim, or from moments in pieces that don't even categorize themselves as horror projects. So the intuition always leans science fiction and neutral," he says, then pauses. "I like treating these things with a bit of awkwardness. That's kind of my favorite way to underplay them. I play them in a clunky manner that feels nuanced. What would it actually feel like to just be standing in a room when this happened?" It's a deceptively simple instinct that the film earns over and over. The humming of the Backrooms under the fluorescents, and waiting for the next poor soul to realize they've lost their way, is how it best performs.

Parsons felt the pressure to approach the film differently. After all, any internet phenomenon that gets translated into a studio feature always comes with a certain set of assumptions. But Parsons pushed back, quietly and completely. "I think there was maybe an overestimation of the amount of change that has to go into that concept," he reveals. "But in my view the general engine and tone sensibilities were working, so we found a way to maintain that. I'm very glad we did."

"You could stand at so many points on the set, do full 360s, walk around...it's not just VFX doing the heavy lifting — it's pretty much entirely practical."

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of the film's leads and its emotional core, doesn't find the Backrooms so much as get confirmed by it. He chooses to stay in the Backrooms, giving up his life in the outside world in exchange for a space with nothing but dread. There are two ways to look at this: Clark could be hiding from a life filled with guilt, shame, and incompetence, or he could be starting a new life where nothing is expected of him. I ask the director for the answer, and it comes to him quickly: both.

"I think those are part of the same thought process," he states. Although it's not explicitly mentioned in the film, Parsons, Ejiofor, and the rest of the crew have examined Clark's psyche, digging into his desire to be an architect, the source of his distrust. The filmmaker objectively points out that while Clark has faced discrimination and difficulty, he had already given up on people before the Backrooms even found him. "That view was only affirmed by a place that was completely devoid of people."

"If he's biased toward being one with the buildings, I think he's finally gone home. He's gone to the root of all architecture, so to speak, and he doesn't even need an architecture degree," Parsons explains. "Why would he? He's home, he's made it to family." These are all justifications for Clark, who eventually loses most of his fear of the Backrooms. For Parsons though, he sees them more as indicators of someone who's out of touch with the rest of the world, "I wouldn't say it's healthy to think in that way."

"The Backrooms has taken reality, put it through a blender, and lost anything and everything that would stand in the way of Clark's ego. It's very much a path of least resistance that provides him with a version of life, but not one that actually provides a whole lot to his nervous system. It doesn't give him social stimulation, but he finds a comfort there," he continues.

Parsons doesn't defend or romanticize his lead. Instead, he treats him like a childhood friend — the type whose logic you understand completely, even as you watch it corrode their life from the inside out. There's tragedy in Clark's disappearance into himself, but at the same time, on some level, he got exactly what he wanted. Backrooms asks you to understand that both things can be true at once.

"[Clark's] gone to the root of all architecture, so to speak, and he doesn't even need an architecture degree. Why would he? He's home, he's made it to family."

At the end of each shoot day, Parsons would stay behind. He'd go back into the empty stages and sit inside the Backrooms he'd created, alone, trying to feel what this space was supposed to mean. "It's silly," he admits, "But I wondered — will I get anything creative out of just standing here? Can I get my brain to go with the flow and imagine this is actually where I am?" He's not entirely sure how much this helped, since the concept work was done before the 30,000-square-foot sound stage existed, but he kept doing it anyway. He built a world out of isolation, and sat in it every night to reflect.

Four years, 78 million YouTube views, and one feature debut later, Parsons considers his original series as concurrent. The episodes' VFX sloppiness from when he was 16 years old, and the dialogue he personally doesn't love all exist in the present day. His ability to execute better as a 21-year-old is irrelevant; he only wants to build around it, strengthen it, and continue a story that fits into a consistent timeline. "The internet is more the place I feel at home than anywhere else," he says. The series and film are the same project, both still in progress.

That is a simple way to understand where Kane Parsons is right now: he's a filmmaker who's five years deep into a single creative obsession. He's learned the skill of letting each version of his work inform the next instead of cancelling it. At 21, he's already built more of this world than most filmmakers get to build in a career.

What we see next from him will probably be weirder. It's exciting to look forward to.

Backrooms opens May 29.

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