Backrooms is a runaway hit — a horror phenomenon that went from a YouTube series to a smashing debut from 20-year-old director Kane Parsons that just had a $118 million opening weekend.
That’s the kind of box office you expect from a Marvel blockbuster, not a film made on a modest $10 million budget by a first-time feature director. Parsons scored the biggest opening weekend ever for A24, the studio behind Moonlight, Hereditary, Marty Supreme and other success stories.
What’s most striking about Backrooms is that it proves out a whole new model for the struggling studio system, if it can match the scrappiness of A24.
Rather than banking on big studio IP, Backrooms evolved from Parson’s YouTube series, which built up a passionate audience on a low budget, accruing curiosity and a sense of ownership from its fan base. They led the hype for the film, helping it break big with mainstream audiences.
But the film also benefitted from striking visuals — notably the unsettling yellow rooms at the center of the film. The production design is the star of Backrooms, as much as actual stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. Production designer Danny Vermette and art director Alan Derksen deserve special shoutouts for bringing Parsons’ vision to the big screen.
The 4Chan Creepypasta That Led to Kane Parsons’ Backrooms
But the vision didn’t start with Parsons — it began with 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where users post images that often become memes. So it was with Backrooms.
In 2019, the board’s /x/ forum featured an unnerving photo of an empty hallway in a jaundiced shade of yellow. An anonymous user described it as “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.”
It became a classic example of “creepypasta” — the for user-generated horror that becomes urban legend as it is memefied across the internet.
Here is the image:
Parsons took that concept and ran with it, debuting his YouTube series The Backrooms in 2022. Presented his stories as found footage, he released a series of short, glitchy VHS-esque segments with titles like “Backrooms — First Contact,” “Backrooms — Motion Detected” and “Backrooms — Autopsy Report.”
He did it by building on the initial image to create vast worlds with the free 3D software Blender. He said in a Toronto International Film Festival interview that he started using Blender at the age of 14 , inspired by a desire to imitate the visuals of video games like Half-Life, a first-person shooter known for exploration and puzzles. His exploration or Blender was inspired in part by the impending 2020 release of a Half-Life sequel focused on the character Alyx Vance.
“I got into Blender, I suppose, not immediately for film production,” he explained. “I think it walks the line between film production, image production, game design, miscellaneous, just art direction. … I was making art in preparation for Half Life: Alyx coming out, and wanted to just try to, you know, and then when Alyx came out, I started trying to figure out how I could rip the assets from that, and and make little scenes.”
He was also inspired by the YouTube tutorials of VFX expert and filmmaker Ian Hubert, who gained a wide following for his user-friendly “lazy tutorials.”
“For those who don’t know, he has a sort of tutorial gimmick style that did very well on YouTube, sort of like these lazy tutorials that were he would just like spend a minute rapid fire going through how to make something, and it just made it feel so approachable and fun, because you know he’s fun and approachable,” Parsons said.
Kane noted in the interview that finding such tutorials is part of “growing up on YouTube.” Now that Backrooms has earned $118 million worldwide — $81.5 million of it domestically — you can bet that Hollywood will be looking for the next visionary raised on YouTube.
Main image: Kane Parsons, left, and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of Backrooms. A24