If you've spent any meaningful time in the darker corners of the internet (no judgment), you know the Backrooms. Endless yellow-carpeted office rooms, flickering fluorescent lights, a profound sense of wrongness. It's one of the most effective pieces of internet mythology ever cooked up, and it has absolutely no business becoming a major motion picture.
And yet here we are. Kane Parsons, who is 19 years old - let that sink in - has been tapped by A24 to direct a feature-length Backrooms film. According to Vanity Fair, it was his viral YouTube videos that caught the studio's attention and earned him the gig. Not film school. Not industry connections. Just a teenager making genuinely unsettling content in a way that resonated with millions of people who apparently all share the same deep fear of liminal spaces and humming vending machines.
From meme to mythology to movie deal
The Backrooms started as a single creepypasta image in 2019 - a grainy photo of an empty room that felt deeply, inexplicably wrong. It spread fast because it tapped into something universal: that specific dread of places that exist outside of normal human purpose. Parsons understood that instinctively, and his short films expanded the lore with a lo-fi found-footage style that felt authentic rather than polished-to-death.
That authenticity is probably exactly what A24 is betting on. The studio has built its brand on elevated horror that respects its audience's intelligence - think Hereditary, Midsommar, The Witch. The Backrooms, done right, fits that template almost perfectly. Done wrong, it's a YouTube fan film with a bigger budget and worse vibes.
Why this actually matters
The Parsons story is interesting beyond the obvious 'teen prodigy gets movie deal' angle. It says something real about how creative gatekeeping has collapsed. A24 didn't discover him through a talent agency or a festival circuit submission. They watched his videos like everyone else and thought, yeah, this person understands what makes this scary.
The internet has been generating genuinely talented horror creators for years - people who understand pacing, atmosphere and the specific texture of online dread better than most working professionals. Parsons just happens to be the one who caught the right studio's eye at the right moment.
Whether the film can translate the Backrooms' eerie, low-stakes, deeply personal horror into a theatrical experience is a genuinely open question. The whole point of the meme is that it feels like something that happened to you specifically. Scaling that up is the challenge. But if anyone's going to try it, the person who already proved they get it on a $0 budget is probably a decent bet.
Check out the full Vanity Fair interview for Parsons' own take on how he built the lore and what he's bringing to the feature.
