In 2019, a mysterious post took off on 4chan, that ever-churning morass of anonymous commentary and internet peculiarities. In response to a yellowed picture of an empty, carpeted room (actually in a vacant HobbyTown store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), a user wrote, “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” To “noclip” is to walk through solid surfaces in a video game, and the idea of blipping out of reality and into some odd, mundane parallel universe sparked instant intrigue—including for one 13-year-old named Kane Parsons.
Parsons was already deeply enmeshed in imagining, and visualizing, strange new worlds online. “It’s nothing,” Parsons told me recently, speaking of what drew him to the empty place shown in that particular viral photo. “But it’s also kind of giving us everything.”
Within seven years, he would expand the simple notion of “the Backrooms” into a complex saga. He developed the concept into a string of YouTube videos, which have attracted hundreds of millions of views since he began uploading them in 2022. Now he has adapted the endeavor, which he began for fun in high school, into something much bigger: a feature film, coming to theaters before his 21st birthday.
Parsons, who grew up in the Northern California countryside of Sonoma County, was given a hand-me-down laptop before he started middle school, and the internet quickly became what he describes as a third parent. (“That sounds really bad, but, you know,” he added ruefully.) He was inspired to create not by movies or television, but by YouTube, where he was drawn to DIY visual-effects demos; he was astounded that seemingly anyone could teach themselves how to make inventive videos using easily accessible software. “When I was in school, the only thing I would think about all day was a random little explosion effect I wanted to achieve,” he said. His eventual goal was to “make iPhone videos of things that didn’t actually happen, and have a fictional story that doesn’t describe itself as fictional.”
[Read: The eerie comfort of liminal spaces]
Toying with the space between real and false memories is the artistic juice of projects such as Backrooms. Born from internet folk tales known as “creepypastas,” these stories tend to be user-generated and build upon themselves, as amateur creators contribute to a backstory for one strange image. The notorious “Slenderman” myth—about a mysterious, tall monster who lurks in the background of photos—originated on a popular message board in 2009, leading to a found-footage-style YouTube show, feature films, and a real-life moral panic. The Syfy-channel TV show Channel Zero uses some of the best known of these fables as fodder for serialized storytelling. Parsons’s Backrooms is perhaps the most high-profile entry yet in the creepypasta canon; it’s an A24 movie starring highly regarded, Oscar-nominated actors (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve) and it is receiving a wide release in late May, a peak time of year for moviegoing. It’s already predicted to make back more than double its almost $10 million budget.
Backrooms follows Clark (played by Ejiofor), who owns a cavernous furniture store that has fallen on hard financial times. He stumbles across a portal to another dimension in the basement, filled with empty hallways and harsh fluorescent lighting; furniture and decorations are embedded in the walls and floors; bizarre, threatening creatures roam freely. His therapist, Mary Kline (Reinsve), is eventually drawn into the space too, as are his hapless store employees. Much of the film’s success, however, derives not from the twists and turns of plot but from simply situating the viewer in the disquieting vibe of this bizarre place.
The movie’s story requires zero initiation for new viewers, but it has deep ties to the narrative that Parsons built out with his YouTube shorts, including a subplot about research scientists; A24 seems hopeful about tapping those young online viewers to create a sleeper summer hit. Backrooms is far less visceral, however, than many of the studio’s past horror-movie success stories, such as the director Ari Aster’s haunting Hereditary and Midsommar. Parsons’s film is headier; he’s more comfortable letting the viewer tingle with fear as they watch characters get lost in the hallways of an inexplicable maze—using, at times, terrifying footage that comes from the first-person perspective of a shaky camcorder.
In conversation, Parsons comes off as serious and thoughtful; this is perhaps unsurprising, given that, as irrational as Hollywood can be, nobody’s going to hand millions of dollars to any 20-year-old just because he or she has a lot of YouTube subscribers. Parsons seems less like a plucky boy wonder than a committed technician, someone who has ground out a skill set using tools that are still relatively new: the ability to conjure realistic environments using only your home computer. As he taught himself how to use free, open-source 3-D-animation software, he tried imagining proper stories for the graphics he was creating.
His work first gained traction on YouTube in 2021, when he was posting videos inspired by the anime series Attack on Titan. Parsons also found viral fame with animations inspired by the video game Portal, which features an immersive and beautifully designed domain that is almost a sleeker version of Backrooms’ setting; it mostly unfolds in a sequence of austere laboratories from which there’s seemingly no exit. As a teen, Parsons spent much of his time on his computer, both because of the coronavirus pandemic and because he had arthritis that made walking around difficult (he said he’s now on medication for the condition, which helped make the film production doable). Working at a standing desk, he started tinkering with the look and feel of what’s known as liminal horror—the expansive genre suggested by that one 4chan post that has since filtered into the mainstream.
Liminal horror, although hard to define, blends the surreal and the prosaic, conceiving of spaces that look familiar in their blandness but have something indefinably “off” about them. “I latched on to it in the same way that most people did,” Parsons said of the original post and the work it has inspired. (Examples include the TV show Severance, much of which is set in a purgatory-like workplace, and the video game turned film Exit 8, about a subway station whose layout subtly changes with every turn.) “That feeling of walking through a misremembered space from a dream, like your home, but it’s not your own home, because your brain is synthesizing information weirdly.” He compared the concept to wandering through “a Walmart, but your brain is saying it’s your childhood home.”
The aesthetic feels inextricably tied to the late 1990s and early 2000s—harshly lit office buildings with drop ceilings, vacant malls, the kinds of blank rooms tucked away in a complex that would host a kid’s birthday party in the suburbs. That specific time period is key for Parsons, as are its aesthetic markers: “family media from our childhoods,” such as “the color of digicam photos, the white balance being off, general graininess.” The overall effect is, he mentioned, “a feeling of found media.”
Liminal horror evokes “a past that no longer exists,” Parsons explained. “These things no one talks about anymore, abandoned in the past, decaying or rotting away back there.” The genre also, somewhat accidentally, coincided with the rise of generative-AI art. Image-creation models such as DALL-E started to gain a public foothold in 2021, summoning initially rudimentary pictures from simple text prompts; something is always “off” about them too, no matter how hard the technology works to imitate human creativity. “At the time, there was a lot of artistic intrigue for me from earlier generative-AI systems, when it was just a completely hallucinated hellscape,” Parsons said, referring to his own experience with text-to-image models.
[Read: Artists are losing the war against AI]
But the movie he’s made is not some anti-AI commentary, he stresses; it’s speaking to the same feeling of disconnection from reality that AI has prompted. Both the endless sweep of the Backrooms and the limitless field of AI can represent “this big vomit pile of all the information we spit out as a species,” as Parsons put it—composed of all the memories a person can conjure and fantasies they can express. In the film, the protagonists become wanderers in a landscape that seems to exist on its own space-time continuum, which appears to pull from the collective unconsciousness of everyone who explores it; the Backrooms somehow will their half-remembered dreams into being. The result is a grotesque, open-ended manifestation of its travelers’ imaginations.
That sense of discomfort is the real horror of Backrooms, and why its curious atmosphere feels like a fresh take on ambient-inspired scares. It also might explain the original photo’s allure: The internet makes it possible to bring the most ludicrous thought to life, to an almost overwhelming extent. Becoming trapped in a generic, seemingly empty world offers the opposite experience—frightening and yet, at the same time, maybe strangely appealing.
The post The 20-Year-Old Director Who Found Hell in Empty Hallways appeared first on The Atlantic.
