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."
The Creative Process Behind the Feature
"The hardest thing about writing the script was figuring out what the audience already knew," Parsons explains. "My YouTube audience knows the lore in detail. They know the levels, the entities, the rules. But anyone walking into a theater doesn't know any of that. I had to write something that rewarded the insiders without shutting out anyone else." He pauses. "That took a long time. I threw out three versions before the one in the film."
The solution he landed on was treating the film as a story that could stand alone — a character in a frightening place — while layering in details that longtime fans would recognize as extensions of the mythology rather than contradictions of it. "The people who know the lore will see things that casual viewers won't notice," he says. "That was the goal. Not Easter eggs for the sake of Easter eggs. Things that actually matter."
What Comes Next
A24 has not officially announced a sequel, but Parsons is careful not to rule it out. "I have ideas. The world has more in it than one movie can hold. But I also don't want to get ahead of a story that isn't written yet." He's already been in meetings about future projects — both within and outside the Backrooms universe — and says he's trying to be deliberate about what he attaches his name to next. "The worst thing I could do is just say yes to everything because the opening weekend was good." He smiles for the first time in the interview. "I've seen how that goes for other people."
