“I was born the same year as YouTube,” says Kane Parsons, the precocious filmmaker about to upgrade from online-only fame to big-screen recognition.
That year — brace yourself — is 2005.
Back in 2022, Parsons, then a 16-year-old living in Petaluma, uploaded an enigmatic video titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” He crafted it at home primarily using Blender, a free 3D-animation software application.
In the nine-minute short, a young cameraman falls into what appears to be an empty furniture store with an eerie atmosphere: a seemingly endless series of rooms covered in yellow wallpaper and buzzing fluorescent lights.
With 77 million views and close to two dozen videos so far, that project served as the viral seed that has now bloomed into Parsons’ first feature, “Backrooms,” out May 29 from A24.
Devoid of facial hair but sporting golden curls, the cherubic Parsons meets me at a Hollywood hotel’s courtyard restaurant in April just a few days after putting the final touches on his movie. Though serious, Parsons’ handsomeness prevents him from looking stereotypically nerdy. He could be in front of the camera if he chose. A plain blue-gray sweater gives him a tech-casual air. Parsons comes across as a hyperintelligent, mature soul, one who happens to be doing press for a potential summer blockbuster.
“I forget about my age constantly because I think everyone forgets about their age,” he says. “When I spend every waking minute thinking about the project, the concept of me having an age feels irrelevant.”
When he talks, Parsons seems to be unraveling his thoughts as he verbalizes them. He shows his work in sentences, as if he were solving a mental equation. To say he is not your average 20-year-old would be an understatement.
At 13, Parsons made a conscious effort to read about brain development. He was trying to maximize his learning abilities in order to make better film projects. “And it worked in some ways,” he says, without a trace of arrogance.
“My brain’s not 25 yet — it’s not fully developed,” he says. “I feel it works OK right now. I always wish it would work better. Something about the YouTube series worked for people and my brain somehow caused that YouTube series to exist. If I can use that same part of my brain like a human emotional machine resulting in something that works for people with this film, then that means I’m doing my job correctly.”
He waits for an avocado toast. “I ramble,” he adds, self-aware. “I also haven’t eaten, so I’m probably in a more rambling mode.” Parsons showed up half an hour late because he’d been in a long meeting that morning.
“Backrooms” is not an original idea of his. Like millions of others, Parsons fell under the spell of the viral phenomenon and its so-called “liminal spaces” in 2019, when, in middle school, he came across the first image that appeared on 4chan, the imageboard website.
For him, the experience was similar to the feeling of waking up from a dream and wanting to go back so you can prowl around a little longer.
“Like, I want to walk down this space,” he says. “It was as simple as that in the beginning.”
Why do so many people want to roam these hallways? Parsons has thoughts, describing the pull as “a present that is weaponizing the past, using nostalgia as a trap or a lure.” And that, he says, speaks to people of his generation.
“A lot of the photos from when we were a child — the digital media that our family has, like family photos — look exactly the same,” he offers. “It kind of feels like the same way the ’50s are black-and-white in a lot of people’s heads.”
He likes ruminating on these spooky, half-remembered spaces.
“The idea of the world getting smaller and smaller,” he adds. “You spend more and more time in fewer places, more interior places. This has produced a world where a lot of people are now voicing an anxiety about feeling as though they are lacking a purpose or lacking a feeling of connectedness to their neighbors and to nature.”
Since going viral, Parsons’ videos have come under scrutiny by obsessive fans — and detractors, too, who suggest he’s trying to have singular ownership over the concept.
“People love to manufacture the drama of pretending that I’m claiming it,” Parsons says. “I would never in a million years do something like that.”
Parsons’ movie version is definitely his own: an expansion of the original videos with the connective tissue of a storyline, starring a pair of Oscar nominees in Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”) and Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”).
Set in 1990 — or at least that’s what early found footage leads us to believe — “Backrooms” follows Clark (Ejiofor), a frustrated furniture store owner who is in crisis after separating from his wife. When he discovers an otherworldly portal through the wall of his basement office, he enlists his younger employees to help him explore the strange rooms with a rope tied around their waist, à la “Poltergeist.” Later, his therapist, Mary (Reinsve), struggling with a troubled past of her own, goes to look for him.
“Kane never struck me as super young,” says Ejiofor by video call. “I didn’t really think about it that much, to be honest. Very quickly I was just taken with his vision.”
Reinsve recalls Parsons’ ability to engage with larger existential questions from their first Zoom.
“He started building this world when he was 14,” she says, still a little awed by his confidence. “I could’ve never done that. I was not as cool when I was 19.”
Both of them remember a collaborator who made up for his inexperience with a calm sense of sureness. Reinsve recalls that, at the end of every day, Parsons would ask what he could do better, taking the feedback to heart.
“When we started talking, Kane didn’t have a lot of film references because he didn’t really watch that many films,” she says, “but he very quickly learned what film is and how it works from his curiosity. He’s so humble coming from the outside and going in.”
For his own part, Parsons wants to rush ahead and talk process, not prodigy. The subject of his age doesn’t please him much. “It makes me a little uncomfortable,” he says. “I don’t love when hierarchies of appreciation form.”
Instead, he’d rather discuss what went into his development. Video games like “Half-Life,” “Portal” and “Minecraft” were foundational influences for Parsons, who first started filming videos as a child using his parents’ tablets and cellphones. In middle school, he pirated software, including Adobe After Effects, a major breakthrough for this self-taught child of the internet.
“It got to a place where, by high school, I had a pretty strong understanding of the basics of VFX compositing,” he says. He kept adding tools funded by ad revenues from YouTube: a new laptop, a camera, lessons in cinematography and music. (Parsons also co-composed the synthy “Backrooms” score with Canadian musician Edo Van Breemen.)
“It was a pretty natural ramp,” he remembers. “But it does have a ceiling to it. Even at its best, it does not grant the resources that this film offered.”
Within a month of Parsons releasing his first video in 2022, the film industry started reaching out. “I was very poised to be skeptical of any company wanting to touch such an internet-friendly IP, something that is by the people of the internet and open-source,” he says. “When companies come in, they clearly see dollar signs in their eyes.”
That Parsons had never stepped foot on a professional movie set didn’t faze A24. Its stance is that those skills can be taught (another recent example is Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby,” which had a long development curve). Parsons, who was a teenager when he first met with interested production companies, showed up to his Zoom with A24 accompanied by his parents.
Would it be film school? He was considering Chapman University or USC. Or would he cut to the chase? Parsons was connected with Chris Ferguson, a producer at Oddfellows, the company behind “Longlegs” based in Vancouver, where “Backrooms” would ultimately be filmed. Ferguson was someone who could make a kind of informal education happen.
“Chris has got a good head about the world and I think he can appreciate the context in which the Backrooms has arisen beyond just ‘a new fresh IP to touch on,’” Parsons says.
Prior to getting “Backrooms” greenlighted, Parsons and the team at Oddfellows did a test shoot, which allowed an untested virtuoso the opportunity to familiarize himself with how a professional crew works. A24 and its producing partners also introduced Parsons to screenwriters (he ultimately worked with Will Soodik), a casting director and an infrastructure previously foreign to him as a completely independent online artist. A24 came on board “Backrooms” in February 2023 and production kicked off in May 2025.
Parsons admits he initially overthought the process of directing a production of this scale.
“I had nerves in the back of my brain questioning, ‘Am I doing this right?’ or ‘Are people looking at me weird because of my age?’ or ‘Am I fundamentally missing something about this?’” he says. “It took a few days to clarify that this is going how it’s supposed to go. I’m getting what I want so what do I have to be stressed about?”
Beneath the wunderkind tag he’s earned, he’s still a young man figuring himself out. From his father, a programmer for video games whom he calls eccentric, Parsons inherited a love of sci-fi and “weird storytelling.” His mother is a therapist, like Reinsve’s character. (His parents divorced when he was 7.) However, his younger brother, 18, has no interest in following in his steps. “He’s a very outdoorsy, sports-centric person,” he says.
Right now, Parsons craves some of that normalcy.
“I haven’t really seen my friends much in the past few years,” he tells me. “There are isolating elements of this as well, but those do not outweigh how positive of an experience it has been.”
Though he often finds himself explaining to the uninitiated what those mystery rooms may represent for people, it’s even harder for him to wrap his head around those online audiences to whom he owes his fame and how they’ll react when “Backrooms” opens in theaters. Parsons tries to not dwell on it.
“I don’t really care about the immediate release,” he says. “Will I be proud of it in 10 years? That’s usually what I try to ask myself.”
Now, Parsons wants to take a beat and do some watching of his own. He needs a break.
“I don’t give myself a lot of consuming-time,” he acknowledges sheepishly. “In June, I’d like to do a bunch of reading, watch some things and catch up on all the thinking that I haven’t done in the past two years.”
He is both the 20-year-old sponge we all know — and were — and someone decidedly different.
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