Filmmaker Kane Parsons is ready to take Backrooms from YouTube to the big screen.
The 20-year-old Parsons, who will become A24‘s youngest feature director when the studio releases his horror movie in theaters on May 29, took the stage at CCXP Mexico on Saturday to share insight into his process. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell star in the film that counts James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins as producers and has a script from Will Soodik.
Backrooms adapts the YouTube series that Parsons began uploading to YouTube as a teen in early 2022. Taking its origins from urban legend and various web posts, the videos centered on an infinite maze of rooms with humming fluorescent lights and yellow wallpaper. In the A24 film, Reinsve plays a therapist who must track down a missing patient in a bizarre dimension.
Parsons explained that the movie uses the existing series and lore as a jumping-off point to examine its characters. “It does take more of a specific approach, where you’re seeing it through the lens of these specific characters — these individuals living these atomized, lonely lives,” he said. “In the film, there is rarely a moment where there’s more than one or two characters on screen at a given time. It’s a pretty lonely film.”
The filmmaker recounted teaching himself to use the free, open-source 3D graphics software Blender to create the world of his YouTube videos, which he continued to utilize for the feature. He and the team, including cinematographer Jeremy Cox, were careful to maintain continuity with the web series.
“I was working in Blender, modeling the sets, and then we would literally go and build them in real time,” Parsons said of making the movie. “We did a lot of tests there to make sure we were getting the general tone that people expected [from] Backrooms. We did 50 wallpaper tests to get the right shape of yellow.”
Parsons shared behind-the-scenes footage of the massive set getting built and recalled that he eventually had to step away from guiding the set construction to start filming exterior scenes. When he came back two weeks later to see the finished set, it was “the strangest, coolest moment on this project for me.”
He added, “The set was huge. We built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms that we could walk around in. Actually, some people were getting lost. It felt like being there, which was really weird.”
Throughout the making of the film, Parsons was careful to maintain his initial logic for this world: “I always try to stay away from the idea that the backrooms is somehow a dreamy headspace thing where, if you turn around, the room could have changed. It preys on the human brain’s ability to map spaces and understand them. The hard part for that is, if you go back the way you came, you will go back the way you came, but it just keeps going and going and going. That’s where the confusion and the convolution goes. So eventually, you just have to give up trying to map it, whereas if it were constantly changing, you would be giving up a lot faster.”
For Parsons, who described first posting videos to YouTube at age 9 or 10, the Backrooms series struck a chord with audiences because of a “collective anxiety around the system — economic, industrial or otherwise — that has been building for the past few centuries.”
After praising his film’s cast, the director went on to explain, “The backrooms, to me, has felt aligned with what happens when someone goes through sensory deprivation on the individual level — and you go out in an empty room — and the body, the nervous system needs stimulation so badly [when] it’s deprived of it. It starts to find noise and information in the pattern of the walls and starts to take that noise more seriously than it normally would. It opens its threshold of what it’s willing to accept.”
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