‘Back Rooms’ Takes You Deep Inside The Internet’s Scariest Myths

A 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons has risen so high that he doesn’t have enough time to go far.

“It’s gone, gone, gone,” Parsons tells WIRED. He said: “Even a short period of rest would help her see better in the last few years. But for now, she’s starting to look better, and she thinks it will be another month before she can think about her big break.”

Back roomsa horror piece that stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and Parsons’ atmospheric brain development YouTube online series of the same name. This marks his appearance as A24’s youngest director to date, helming a movie that has been eagerly awaited by many internet fans and hungry fans. You couldn’t ask for a better start to the summer blockbuster season.

Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success sound like an accident. “I didn’t set out to make a brief or make a series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this to prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that works for a movie,'” he says.

That original nine-minute videotitled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, it was inspired by — of all things — a villain. 4 ch a meme that spawned a collective myth. A 2019 post on the popular /x/ forum featured a disturbing image of an empty street bathed in ominous light. An anonymous user described being transported to the “Back Rooms, where there is nothing but the stench of old, damp carpet, a maddening yellow, the constant hum of fluorescent lights at a hum-buzz level, and six hundred square miles of empty rooms to be locked in.”

“God bless you if you hear something moving around, because you sure as hell heard it,” the 4chan user added.

Some people have taken this idea, creating images that accompany stories on different platforms. Parsons experienced this, as well as the memes that were popular at the time about surreal liminal spaces – Backrooms being a strange extension of this phenomenon. He was impressed by the findings of the article but felt that it was not fully explored.

“It was obvious I wasn’t watching a lot of other media,” he said. “I think there’s something similar, I wish there was more to do here.”

To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could create an immersive vision of Backrooms with Blender 3D and Adobe After Effects graphics software. The original film, in which a man is banished to the Backrooms and a brutal life, went viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ talent and the suspense he created. Fans happily imagine great tales of strange events. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with the prospect of a feature film.

Although still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be careful about what he was offering. “I couldn’t believe anything that was happening, because I just felt like it was a normal situation for this kind of situation to change,” he says. “Or you stay empty.”

In the end, he got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to follow his vision, in this case with top talent by his side. The film has a script and Home and Westworld Written by Will Soodik, and its producers include horror Osgood Perkins and James Wan.