Everything We Know About The Backrooms, A24's New Horror Movie Based On Creepy Viral Shorts
The nightmarish and surreal bit of Internet folklore about a never-ending maze of empty fluorescent hallways known as the Backrooms is getting a proper film adaptation. A collaboration between four different production companies including A24, the film will be the feature-length product of 17-year-old Youtuber Kane Parsons. Roberto Patino, the showrunner of HBO Max's "DMZ" and a writer and executive producer of HBO's "Westworld," will pen the script. Shawn Levy's 21 Laps Entertainment, the production company behind "Stranger Things," as well as James Wan's Atomic Monster, which most recently produced "M3GAN," are also on board to finance the project. In addition, Chernin Entertainment, which has historically produced for 20th Century Fox but is currently working with Netflix on releases like "Fear Street," is signed on.
Known by his channel name "Kane Pixels," Parsons piqued the interest of horror aficionados with his short film "The Backrooms (Found Footage)," which is shot from the point-of-view of a hapless cameraman literally falling out of this reality (referred to as "noclipping" in the proper vocabulary) and into the titular, extradimensional, yellow-stained, carpeted labyrinth. Due to the success of the video, Parsons created an entire series of viral shorts based on the Backrooms, exploring the possible origins and mysteries surrounding the realm.
What is the Backrooms about?
No details have emerged on the exact plot of what the Backrooms film is about, though there's plenty of online lore to speculate on what the story will be. The original creepypasta legend started in May 2019 on the paranormal-themed /x/ board on 4chan, before Kane Parsons' films. A comment posted below the eerie image of the Backrooms explains the concept as such:
"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in 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. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."
Since then, the Backrooms has built up a fanbase that has expanded the idea into a uniquely collaborative, online-based folktale of sorts, akin to the Slender Man. There are several video games centered around exploring the cursed space and encountering the creatures that lurk in them, and the aesthetic has grown popular enough to serve as one of the visual inspirations for the acclaimed television series Severance on AppleTV+. Parsons' take on the Backrooms involves a mysterious organization, known as ASYNC, discovering how to access the realm at will in order to potentially use all the empty, unlimited space for residential, work, and storage purposes. However, strange and disturbing occurrences like a rash of missing persons and an unnatural autopsy report suggest that entering the Backrooms is probably not the best idea.
Who is Kane Parsons?
Kane Parsons is a VFX animator who uses the free, open-source program Blender to create the CGI in his videos. Besides his Backrooms series, he has also uploaded "Attack on Titan" fan films composed in a grainy style meant to evoke historical footage. Parsons isn't the first experimental horror filmmaker on YouTube to have made the move to feature-length productions, either, as Kyle Edward Ball from the channel Bitesized Nightmares has gained recognition for directing "Skinamarink." Aware of the dangers of over-explaining a concept that hinges on the fear of the unknown, Parsons says of his video series:
"I want to make something [that] is telling this story which I believe is meaningful, that I have come up with, while also maintaining that feeling that was present in the original post... So I think it's a balance."
There is one hitch to the production, though. A full-time high school senior, Parsons will work on the Backrooms film after school is over during his summer break.