Before Kane Parsons had a Hollywood deal, he had a cheap laptop in his bedroom, a consumer-grade camera, and a grainy image from a 4chan forum.
Now 20, the filmmaker known online as Kane Pixels has gone from posting lo-fi horror videos on YouTube as a teenager to directing a film with the popular studio A24.
Backrooms will open in cinemas on May 29. Its producer credits include filmmaker Shawn Levy and horror maven James Wan, and stars Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
Far from a lucky break, Parsons’ trajectory demonstrates a significant shift in where the screen industry is looking for its future big ideas – particularly in the realm of horror.
From creepypasta to creepy cinema
The story of The Backrooms began on a 4Chan message board. In May 2019, an anonymous user on the site’s paranormal board posted a photograph of a yellow-walled hallway in response to a thread inviting people to share images that felt disquieting.
4chan (screenshot)
Another anonymous user replied with a short piece of lore:
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.
“Noclipping”, a term borrowed from video games, refers to when players pass through normally impenetrable objects such as walls, ceilings and floors. In the Backrooms context, noclipping leads to being trapped inside a seemingly infinite pale-yellow maze of empty rooms.
This anonymous reply became the seed of a broader mythology. It is a classic example of what internet culture calls a “creepypasta”: a piece of short horror fiction or folklore, usually anonymous, that spreads across online platforms and invites others to expand on it.
What made the Backrooms unusually potent was the origin image. It became one of the most well-known examples of the “liminal spaces” internet aesthetic. This trend is built on photographs of transitional or in-between places that evoke a strange, unsettling sense of both familiarity and unease.
Parsons’ overnight YouTube hit
Kane Parsons grew up Petaluma, Northern California. He was 14 when he first encountered the original Backrooms image. He recalled the experience in a recent interview with Esquire:
I started seeing it constantly for a couple of weeks. I think it carried, and still does carry, this archetype of doom.
Parsons was already making films by then; he started uploading YouTube videos from age 10, and entering his work into local festivals.
A24
His love for video led him to learning how to animate and create visual effects using free online tools.
With the Backrooms lore and imagery driving his creative impulse, Parsons used the Blender and Adobe After Effects software to create his first Backrooms video. It took a month to complete.
Parsons uploaded the video in January 2022, intending it as a standalone work and not expecting much reaction. But the 9-minute video went from one million to seven million views within 48 hours.
The wider web series has accumulated almost 200 million views across its episodes.
A never-ending nightmare
What separated Parsons’ version from other approaches to the mythology was a rigorous internal logic.
He describes Backrooms as preying on our instinctive desire to map and understand spaces. Part of the horror lies in the way it foregrounds the disorientation and dread produced by an environment that seemingly never ends.
After his first video went viral, studios came calling. The film was officially greenlit by A24 in 2025 – making Parsons the youngest director in the studio’s history.
His film is faithful to the established logic of his existing web series, while building a traditional narrative around it.
Set in 1990, Backrooms stars Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner who discovers an otherworldly portal in his basement and recruits employees to explore it with him. When Clark disappears during one of these visits, his therapist (Reinsve) goes in to rescue him.
A24
The internet-to-Hollywood pipeline
The Backrooms is not the first internet-native content to reach a cinema screen.
However, it may be the clearest example yet of a direct pipeline, wherein the creator of the property is retained and the concept remains intact. The established mythology is treated as the asset, rather than merely a marketing hook, which maintains the elements that attracted the original audience.
The horror genre has become one of the most significant areas of overlap between internet creator culture and Hollywood, in part because YouTube is a space where horror filmmakers can develop their technical skills, voice and audience.
The Phillipou brothers, who had tremendous success with Talk To Me (2022) and Bring Her Back (2025), built their audience on YouTube. Comedian and filmmaker Curry Barker, whose film Obsession (2026) was recently released to strong critical reviews and box office, followed a similar trajectory.
We don’t yet know if or how this growing trend will influence the traditional filmmaker pathway. But it appears that, at least for the horror genre, YouTube can be seen as an open-access development slate that studios monitor to find new voices.
Parsons, for his part, appears to have discovered his own version of “noclipping”. He has slipped past the traditional gatekeepers who may have balked at the notion of 20-year-old director helming a Hollywood film.
The success of Backrooms at the box office will be a fascinating test of this pipeline.
Read more:
‘Analog uncanny’: how this weird and experimental side of TikTok is forging the future of horror
