A24 built thirty thousand square feet of yellow wallpaper, hummed fluorescent lights, and damp carpet on a soundstage so a twenty-year-old could finish his YouTube short. That short is now a movie called Backrooms, it lands in theaters May 29, and the kid who started it in his bedroom with Blender is officially the youngest feature director in A24 history.
His name is Kane Parsons. He was sixteen in January 2022 when he uploaded a four-minute clip called The Backrooms (Found Footage). It was a 3D animation of a kid falling through the floor of reality into an infinite hallway of office carpet. By January 2026 it had pulled around seventy-one million views on YouTube. Now he has Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, and a budget large enough to construct what is reportedly one of the largest practical horror sets ever built.
From a found image to seventy-one million views
The story Parsons tells is almost insultingly simple. He was a teenager between Attack on Titan fan animations, scrolling through old files in Blender, and he found a saved render of a yellow hallway with no end. The original image came from 4chan in 2019, an anonymous post titled “the backrooms” that turned into one of the most successful pieces of crowdsourced creepypasta on the internet.
He thought it would be cool to put a chair in that room and throw it at a wall. He uploaded the test, expected nothing, and a few days later the algorithm decided his life was about to change. The Hollywood Reporter and Screen Rant both confirm the timeline at CCXP this month: viral by the end of January 2022, agent calls within weeks, A24 deal in 2023, and a feature greenlit by his eighteenth birthday.
Cinema does this rarely. The last time someone this young walked into a major studio with a YouTube short and walked out with a feature deal, it was a different industry. The history of film keeps trying to absorb the internet, and most of the time it gets it wrong, all the way back to the first robot ever put on screen in 1897, which sat lost in a potato farmer’s trunk for 128 years before anyone realized it existed. Cinema forgets things. The internet forgets nothing. Parsons is the bridge.
Why A24 built a real maze instead of rendering one
This is the part that should not work. The whole appeal of the Backrooms is that they are computer-generated emptiness, a place that feels real because it could only exist on a graphics card. Putting them in physical space risks turning a digital nightmare into a hotel lobby.
A24 went the other way. They built thirty thousand square feet of corridors, water-damaged ceilings, fluorescent buzzers, and what Parsons calls “the loneliest set I have ever stood in.” The plot follows Clark, a furniture store owner played by Ejiofor, who finds the basement of his shop opens onto a dimension that does not end. Reinsve plays a therapist who has to find a missing patient inside it. The trailer dropped in March, and it looks less like the YouTube series and more like Stalker filmed in a real estate listing.
Producers include James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins, which is a triangle of horror, blockbuster, and arthouse you do not usually see on the same call sheet. The script comes from Will Soodik. The whole package costs a number A24 has not disclosed, but a 30,000 square foot practical set with this cast does not happen for indie money.
Liminal horror is having a moment because the world is
The Backrooms work as a story because of a feeling everyone recognizes and almost nobody can name. You walk into a hotel lobby at three in the morning, the music is wrong, the lighting is wrong, and for a second you cannot remember what year it is. That feeling has a name now. It is called liminal space, and it is the dominant aesthetic of internet horror in 2026.
It is not the only one. We covered the Bigfoot renaissance a couple of days ago, and the through-line is the same. People want stories that feel handmade, slightly off, drained of polish. They want the camcorder, the analog hum, the empty mall food court. They want analog ghosts because the actual world has gone too clean. Liminal horror, cryptid TikTok, the resurgence of camcorder grain, all of it is a response to a culture that has been shrink-wrapped and over-rendered.
Parsons understood this before most studios did. His YouTube series leaned on the lo-fi grain, the bad audio, the sense that you were watching something that was not supposed to be public. The same instinct lives in the USB sticks people cement into walls around the world for strangers to find. Both feel like artifacts. Both feel like they are not for you. That is the genre.
The risk of putting an internet monster in a movie theater
There is a real chance this does not work. Crowdsourced internet horror lives on the second screen, the dark bedroom, the YouTube tab next to the homework. A two-hour theatrical with Oscar-nominee leads is a different format. The Slender Man movie tried this in 2018. It made about thirty million dollars and is mostly remembered as a punchline.
The defense, if you ask the production team, is the practical set. The reason the YouTube videos worked is that they felt like documentation, not animation. By building the place in real plywood and acoustic ceiling tile, A24 is betting they can keep that documentary anxiety even on a theater screen. Whether that bet pays off depends on Parsons. He is twenty years old, he has never directed a feature, and he is now responsible for the most expensive expansion of internet folklore Hollywood has ever attempted.
The cat sleeps through this entire conversation, of course. Cats already live in the Backrooms half the time. They walk into rooms, stare at corners, refuse to explain themselves, and leave. The yellow hallway is just the carpet under the bed. We have been writing about that dimension for years. Parsons just finally got someone to finance it.
Backrooms hits theaters May 29, 2026. We will review it.
🐾 Visit the Pudgy Cat Shop for prints and cat-approved goodies, or find our illustrated books on Amazon.
Leave a Reply