Leading into the release of Backrooms, rumors circulated that the A24 film’s director, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, possibly didn’t direct this, his feature-length debut. The logic leap is understandable; there is a heavyweight group of producers on the project that includes some of the bigger names in modern horror, including James Wan’s Atomic Monster (M3GAN, The Counjuring franchise), Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps (Stranger Things, Never Let Go), and Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) among them. The thought that there would be so many “chefs” in the Backrooms kitchen that Parsons would be relegated to sous chef cracked me up, as he spent the past four years creating the 22-video ‘Backrooms’ YouTube series that became the backbone of the feature-legnth film. If anything, Parsons was more prepared for delivering this than anything else in his life.
Currently sitting at over 25 million views, Parsons’s Backrooms YouTube series brought the viral 2019 creepypasta to (digital) life. For those who are unfamiliar, a photograph of some renovation work being done to a building from 2002 was posted online, and the architecture and confusing layout of the seemingly exit-less area gave everyone eerie vibes. “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas,” one 4chan user wrote in describing the eerie image, “you’ll end up in the Backrooms, 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.” Fast forward to 2022, and after endless Reddit threads and video games inspired by (and adding on to) The Backrooms, Parsons began working on his own rendition, using the 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects to show you what happens when you noclip from life and things start getting real (in the Backrooms).
That said, even if you think that Wan, Levy, and company had been as obsessed with the Backrooms as Parsons had at that point, Parsons still felt the need to make a guide to help explain what was going on in the film. “I made a pretty comprehensive pitch deck when we first went around with this,” Parsons explained to Complex the week of the Backrooms world premiere, “and all the department heads took a look at it. I spent a good bit of time on that, making sure that at least the overall tone and the reason why we want that tone is clear.” Answers like that, highlighting the foresight to have a Backrooms Bible at the ready, are why Backrooms co-star Mark Duplass felt the need to go on the defensive for Parsons. “When I was there,” Duplass wrote on X, “Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”
Ahead of what could be a reported $75 million opening weekend at the box office for Backrooms, Parsons spoke with Complex about early reactions to the film, artistic inspiration for this film as well as his music production, and thoughts on further developing his other YouTube series.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Have you been getting a lot of people who were just confused about what they had just seen after the world premiere?
I think one of the biggest surprises is, no, not really. I think it worked for a lot of people.
What I've always found as interesting is that The Backrooms…I think maybe it's gotten as pervasive as it has because it's a form of weirdness, but it's kind of like a perfectly marketable, palatable kind of weirdness. Something tells me that it is able to spread because you take some of the strange parts you don't quite get for granted.
Was there anybody within the cast and crew who was already familiar? Did you have to sit down with a whiteboard and say, "OK, here's what we're doing?"
Yeah. I mean, there was some loose familiarity here and there. It varied in levels. Most of the time, I would say it was the case of me sort of giving broad overviews and then getting very specific whenever it came up in conversation.
It started broad; I made a pretty comprehensive pitch deck when we first went around with this, and all the department heads took a look at it. I spent a good bit of time on that, making sure that at least the overall tone and the reason why we want that tone is clear. So I think I always found it helpful, and I feel essential to [not] just say what we're doing, [but to] talk about why we're doing it. Hopefully, anyone I'm talking to can arrive at the same conclusion themself.
Indeed.
I feel like it's been mostly lots of long conversations rather than many quick, short instructions. It's been more of we all kind of understanding the project together comprehensively.
I think I emphasized, and we just explained, and we joked about it quite a lot, like how specific that audience is, and that mentality. I know, because I'm kind of part of that group, I am that way with the media I consume. So it's a bit of a learning curve for sure, but I would say generally everyone, certainly by now, we're all kind of living on the same page.
When you start having those conversations with A24 and James Wan about a Backrooms film, did that impact how you were delivering the rest of the story, or were you still focused on the task you already had at hand?
The YouTube series was always built with the intention that it's one part of a broader tree. I'm not a fan of stories that don't quite stay true to their DNA, and setup mysteries they have no idea how to solve. So, start from the end to go backward is usually how I do it.
There's so much within the series that you've created already on YouTube and I know that it feels like there is a natural connection between those two, but could we get to a point where there's information that's directly in there, especially about Async and how they directly play into...I don't want to talk too crazy, but like a possible potential future Backrooms release. It doesn't feel like this story is over.
I've been maintaining since 2022 that, because the story was sort of planned out in 2022, not that it hasn't changed and evolved, because I was 16 then, and obviously, I'm always going to be trying to remetabolize the work I'm doing, not in ways that contradict itself. As soon as I feel I've put something out and cemented it, that's a fact now, and I can't recon it, so I need to really be beholden to that information. But so far there's been no friction in doing that, and the intention's always been, there's still a decent room to travel in Backrooms, so I expect there to be my narrative creative wish to see a little bit more down the line.
Where do you get your inspiration from? Are there any particular directors or movies that really had an impact on what you were creating?
I think, as for inspiration, I tend to get like the emotional enthusiasm and like drive to engage with this medium, and I'm phrasing this maybe a little pretentiously, but I get that more so from the time not spent in fiction and more so just engaging with the real world. I just like life a lot, and I'm a curious person.
For me, my projects are usually exercises in trying to either test myself on something, or just, I'm feeling it out. I'm going down a rabbit hole, and I'm along for the ride as well, and I find that the curiosity on my part is the single biggest driver to digging into these projects.
But creatively, if I could just name a few, I would say like, Mr. Robot's been a huge influence creatively and structurally on the way I do things, and the British series Utopia. I love a lot of tonal stuff like weird overlap, levels of overlap with like One Hour Photo. That film specifically, just sonically and texturally, and there's some ideological stuff there that's similar. The Portal games, like anything from Valve really majorly was some of the biggest affecting features of my childhood, and just even now I still am like a huge, huge, huge Valve fan, [and] Portal is probably the one I would specify as the one that probably affected my style the most.
Where do you draw inspiration from as a musician? Is that something that came from playing Portal and then discovering more electronic artists there? Because I mean, you were fairly young getting into a lot of this stuff, right?
Yeah. I was into Portal when I was probably like seven or eight, so it's pretty embedded in my brain. I feel like I've always leaned towards most of the music [that] tends to be soundtrack-driven, or at least I've always had a habit of obsessing over soundtracks and scores to things. I think that's led me to a place of appreciating ambient [music], and specifically I've just ended up in more of an electronic ambient pool for most of my life, whether or not I'm familiar with the sources of all of these things. The film's slightly different. The film takes a more specific and delicate approach to these sort of like sweeping chord synth pads.
Mr. Robot, obviously again, I'm going to mention it again just because it did musically impact my stuff so much, more so for the YouTube series. The film is too delicate to go into full techno thriller world.
What was your '90s deep dive like for this project? There's so much in that era, color-wise and shape-wise. Did you have a lot of fun digging around in that decade?
It's hard. I think the '90s one is a little tricky to define as like a single rabbit hole, because of it being a feature of time. There's so many things to dig into there, and I think most of it, that's one I would categorize as more like inspiration through osmosis rather than like a deliberate deep dive.
I grew up in the early 2000s. There's still a lot of peripheral leftovers from the '90s that I had in my childhood. I was late to get on the internet, which is not inherently that meaningful to say, but I think that I at least felt it enough, and my family's got good record keeping, lots of photos and imagery that I'm pretty familiar with, and I just go out of my way to go on image rabbitholes all the time, and I have done for years. So I built up like a good deal of photo libraries, and I think probably just little intuitive references, I suppose.
Now, you have other series that you've been working on as well. Have you ever thought about the possibility of developing them further, like you've developed Backrooms?
Yeah, certainly. I feel like the two that I would like talk about would be “The Oldest View” and “People Still Live Here.” and I feel like “People Still Live Here” has a much stronger chance of having legs.
Have you ever seen any other creepy pastas since you saw The Backrooms imagery and said, "Hey, I could turn this into something?”
It's kind of just been, nothing else has been like that.
I wouldn't categorize myself as someone who's on the hunt for internet IP and these vague Backrooms-like things to go grab. I think that one's a little more incidental, and I feel fair in saying that I grew up with that, and so it was jmore of an experiment when I did it at the time. I followed the engagement that it gave me online because, who wouldn't? I'm sure there's people who wouldn't for whatever reason, I don't like to generalize, but I certainly did, and I felt that that was a valuable way to tell a very specific story.
I think what I'm more interested in is the more pervasive, which Backrooms usually kind of is. It's weird, because it's so specific and authored with this text, but usually there's things kind of like a creepy- or copypasta going around without, but it's more just a general cultural vibe or aesthetic or setting or imagery, something that's tonal rather than specific narratively, and I think maybe identifying some of those artistic trends is more what I'm curious about leaning into.
