Kane Parsons was 16 when he posted the first Backrooms video. He's 19 now, sitting in a press junket room at a hotel in Los Angeles, trying to process the fact that the film he wrote and directed just opened at number one with $88 million. He looks like someone who has been awake for 72 hours and is running on the specific adrenaline of a thing that actually worked.
"I genuinely don't know how to explain this week," he says. "I keep waiting for someone to tell me it's not real." He laughs — the kind of laugh that's equal parts joy and disbelief.
From Bedroom to A24
The path from YouTube to A24 was not a straight line. Parsons describes a two-year development process that began with a cold email his parents helped him send to "basically everyone in the industry who might care about found-footage horror." Most responses were form rejections. A24 was the exception.
"They got it immediately. They understood what made the Backrooms unsettling wasn't the monsters or the jump scares — it was the feeling of being somewhere that shouldn't exist. They wanted to protect that." He pauses. "They also gave me final cut. Which is insane for a first-time director, let alone a teenager."
What's Next
Parsons is careful not to commit to a sequel conversation in the press junket context — "that feels like counting chickens" — but he does acknowledge there is more story to tell in the Backrooms universe. Whether that comes as film, as YouTube content, or as something else entirely is a question he seems genuinely undecided on. "I just want to make more things that scare people in interesting ways," he says. "That's the whole job."
