Parsons has gone from YouTube creator to A24’s youngest-ever director
Credit: A24
NEED TO KNOW
- Kane Parsons is the director of A24’s Backrooms, starring Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mark Duplass
- The film is a feature-length adaptation of Parsons’ viral video series The Backrooms (Found Footage), inspired by eerie liminal spaces shared on the internet
- The 20-year-old Parsons was in high school when he accepted the offer to direct his feature-length debut rather than go to college
Indie horror film Backrooms is poised to become one of this summer's biggest hits upon its May 29 release. Who is the 20-year-old filmmaker behind it?
Kane Parsons, the youngest-ever director to helm a film from producer-distributor A24, made a name for himself as a DIY filmmaker on YouTube. From January 2022 to February 2025, he went viral for creating The Backrooms (Found Footage). The series was inspired by a meme created on 4chan in 2019 which has seen internet users uploading images of eerie liminal spaces.
Parsons' haunting videos, filmed and shared to the internet in the so-called creepypasta tradition, centered on a fictional 1990s research institute discovering the Backrooms and attempting to document the vacant, jaundiced spaces. Like 1999 indie horror hit The Blair Witch Project before it, the series often used a found-footage perspective, engrossing viewers in the mystery.
Credit: A24
“I've been a very online person most of my life,” Parsons recently told IndieWire of the original project's origins, noting he “was born the same year as YouTube.”
“I started getting into VFX-driven channels that would help me realize it's accessible and something that I could go do,” he said. “I started with the resources I had, like a laptop, I would pirate VFX software and stuff when I was 11 or so and started learning After Effects.”
Per IndieWire, the young filmmaker spent his senior year of high school fielding offers from Hollywood bigwigs for a feature-length Backrooms while applying to colleges. He ultimately decided to delay pursuing higher education and take the deal from A24 and several production companies wanting to partner with Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik.
“It very much felt like, boom, suddenly there's a new avenue that is still risky,” he said of choosing Hollywood over college. “It's not stable at all. And I was assuming this will come and this will go, this will be over quickly. This is just what happens, and this is neat, but I'm going to try not to get too caught up in it.”
Credit: LISA O’CONNOR / AFP via Getty
Starring Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia, Backrooms includes in its producing team horror maestros James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins. Its logline is simple: “A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”
In a recent interview with GQ, Parsons cited some of the influences that fueled his viral videos and the new film: the series Utopia and Mr. Robot, open-world video games and ambient music.
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And yes, the movie is coming out before his 21st birthday. Parsons is “a little fatigued” by the persistent conversation about his age, he told The Independent. “Personally I have found some of the most talented people online… people who are five times more technically competent than I could ever hope to be… they're 13 years old.”
After some internet users suggested Parsons did not actually serve as Backrooms' director throughout its production, Duplass took to social media on May 26 to clarify. “Hmmm, with all due respect I don't remember seeing you on set,” the filmmaker-star, 49, wrote to one X user. When I was there, Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”
Backrooms is in theaters as of May 29.
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