{"id":608083,"date":"2026-05-28T07:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T07:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608083\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T07:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T07:42:13","slug":"kane-parsons-interview-meet-the-20-year-old-behind-backrooms-this-years-scariest-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/608083\/","title":{"rendered":"Kane Parsons interview: Meet the 20-year-old behind Backrooms, this year\u2019s scariest movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Picture it: you\u2019re alone in a windowless room. The floor is carpeted \u2013 a couple shades darker than the walls. You can\u2019t quite tell if everything is yellow or if it only looks that way because of the jaundiced glare coming from the fluorescent lights overhead. In the corner of your eye, you see an open doorway; this room leads to another room, which, even though you can\u2019t see it for yourself, you strongly suspect leads to another room and another after that. There is nothing explicitly wrong with where you are, but something is just off. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s this setting, or rather the feeling it invokes, that forms the nucleus of this year\u2019s most talked-about horror movie Backrooms \u2013 starring Oscar-nominated actors Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and named after a concept that originated in the late 2010s<\/a>. It was then that a photo of the above scene began circulating on the internet, taking root on the image board 4chan. Thousands riffed on what it was that made the image so eerie, sharing more examples of similarly spooky-adjacent spaces. Others, in turn, wrote short stories about them, then made videos. <\/p>\n

Sixteen-year-old sci-fi enthusiast Kane Parsons was one of those people, spending hours after school making VFX videos at the kitchen table of his family home in Northern California. \u201cI have arthritis so I would stack all the furniture to create a sort of makeshift standing desk,\u201d says Parsons, who is still only 20, his elderly affliction a somewhat uncanny indicator of his precociousness. Within weeks, his first backroom-inspired video \u2013 of an amateur filmmaker nervously exploring the labyrinth, as seen through the shaky lens of a handheld camera \u2013 amassed tens of millions of views. Today, it has 78 million. Parsons made 23 more clips after that, each building on the lore of the backrooms, teasing out the strands of its DNA in strange ways that felt at once true to that original photo and also undeniably Parsons\u2019 own sensibilities. <\/p>\n

And so naturally, when A24 \u2013 the not-so-indie-anymore production company behind horror hits like Hereditary and Talk to Me<\/a> \u2013 decided to make a backrooms film, they tapped Parsons to direct. Nevermind the fact he was still in school; nevermind the fact he\u2019d never stepped foot on a film set; and definitely nevermind the fact that he would be their youngest ever director by a long shot. \u201cYou should really talk to the producers who thought it was a good idea to give me this opportunity,\u201d laughs Parsons, who took that opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Don\u2019t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. <\/p>\n

I wanted it to be a collaborative thing. I didn\u2019t go in claiming to know everything there is to know about directing<\/p>\n

A24 wasn\u2019t the only production company sniffing around; by then, almost immediately after the success of his first video, Parsons had management and legal counsel. \u201cI was very paranoid going into choosing who to partner with,\u201d says Parsons, adding that he retained a certain amount of \u201cscepticism\u201d leading all the way up to production. \u201cI think a big part of why I can now say things went really smoothly and really positively \u2013 and why I was able to retain a massive amount of creative control and leverage \u2013 is due to the specific people I worked with.\u201d These included Longlegs\u2019 Osgood Perkins, who has become a sort of mentor to Parsons. <\/p>\n

He is \u201ca little fatigued\u201d by the conversation around his age. Parsons was 19 by the time he moved to Vancouver to begin shooting, and is now still only 20 \u2013 which, he insists, isn\u2019t even that young. \u201cPersonally I have found some of the most talented people online\u2026 people who are five times more technically competent than I could ever hope to be\u2026 they\u2019re 13 years old.\u201d He\u2019s practically geriatric by comparison. This fascination with his age, he says, is really more of a fascination with technology. \u201cWe haven\u2019t had a lot of time to process what has happened with [tech]. We\u2019re just now seeing these people who grew up taking it for granted, and who are now using it as a sort of third external muscle.\u201d <\/p>\n

Parsons\u2019 age has brought allegations from some corners of the internet that he couldn\u2019t possibly have actually directed Backrooms. That he would have been hand-held through the process by someone older and with more experience. In the weeks after our interview, one of the movie\u2019s stars, actor and filmmaker Mark Duplass, speaks out to defend him<\/a>: \u201cKane was 100 per cent in control. More so than many directors three times his age.\u201d <\/p>\n

Admittedly, on first impressions it\u2019s tough to imagine this genial, moppy-haired teen seizing control on a reported $10 million film set \u2013 but after only moments speaking to him, it\u2019s a reality that becomes much easier to envision. Parsons is meticulous in the way he speaks, every answer long and searching, groping around in his mind for what it is that he wants to say, for what he means. He attributes some of this to jetlag (\u201ccourse correct me, please\u201d) but later gives another reason for his conversational meandering that feels truer to him: \u201cMy strategy of speaking is usually just to talk until I find my favourite version of the answer.\u201d Refreshingly, he isn\u2019t media trained. <\/p>\n

\"RenateRenate Reinsve in ‘Backrooms’ (Courtesy of A24)<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s a teenage boy to do when he\u2019s confronted with an unknown situation, thrown onto a film set with a whole cast and crew at his beck and call, or into a boardroom with a throng of suits decades older than him? Look on the internet. \u201cI do a fair bit of personal research. It\u2019s not glamorous or compelling but I go online and try to see what other people say.\u201d Every day before he walked on set, he would \u201coverprepare for a lot of eventualities\u201d. Every day before he walked off, he would ask people what he could do better tomorrow. \u201cI wanted it to be a collaborative thing. I didn\u2019t go in claiming to know everything there is to know about directing. I got this job. I make this thing online that we\u2019ve talked about a bunch, and I know what this film needs to be, but you know, let\u2019s have an open dialogue.\u201d <\/p>\n

It helped that Parsons already possessed the sort of scrupulous diligence that a lot of directors build their films around. \u201cMy world on YouTube, the whole landscape that I\u2019ve grown up with, has necessitated an extreme attention to detail since the beginning,\u201d he says. Even before his backrooms video went viral, Parsons had already amassed a huge following on YouTube with his \u201cfanfic\u201d videos that expanded lovingly and painstakingly on the universe of his favourite game: Attack on Titan. \u201cPeople, including me, appreciate that deep level of subtext \u2013 and I think that inherently forces a real strictness with what we need to be doing creatively.\u201d For what it\u2019s worth, Parsons has no plans to abandon YouTube for the perceived greener pastures of filmmaking. <\/p>\n

\"KaneKane Parsons and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of \u2018Backrooms\u2019 (Asterios Moutsokapas)<\/p>\n

Hearing Parsons speak about the games he grew up with, it\u2019s a wonder he didn\u2019t go down the gaming route. The son of a computer programmer and a therapist, he was a grade A student despite the fact he \u201cdidn\u2019t love school\u201d. He cut his teeth on games like Minecraft, leaning into their world-building elements. \u201cWhen I grew up a little more and started using VFX software, I would stay in at lunch just so I could finish my school work as as fast as possible so that as soon as I got home, I could spend every minute working on whatever film I was doing that week, usually a dumb little skit,\u201d he says. \u201cI was very obsessively trying to get my head around it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Choosing filmmaking was simply a matter of logistics, he says. His laptop wasn\u2019t the right model to run the necessary software. Thinking about it some more, though, he ventures deeper. \u201cI think it\u2019s because I wanted something a little faster and easier in some ways,\u201d he says. \u201cWith a game, there is so much underlying work that needs to be done before you can focus on the visuals. I\u2019d have to focus so much on functionality before I could actually get to anything aesthetically compelling and the narrative work in a game is much more [intensive].\u201d That said, he\u2019d still like to do something game-related in the future. He is, after all, not even 21. <\/p>\n

Unlike others his age, Parsons will not be heading to college this autumn. \u201cThe same week that the A24 deal [went through], that was the same week that most of my college applications were due,\u201d he says. \u201cHow insane is that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Backrooms\u2019 is in cinemas from 29 May<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-608083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}