The 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons reached the top so quickly that he had no time to understand how far he had come.
“It’s been go, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. “Even the smallest break,” he says, would give him a better perspective on everything that’s happened over the past few years. But for now, he’s in the spotlight and thinks it will be at least another month before he has the space to reflect on his big break.
Behind the scenesa brooding horror piece starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is a cerebral extension of Parsons’ atmospheric setting. YouTube web series of the same name. This is his first feature film as A24’s youngest director to date, helming a film long awaited by a huge and hungry internet fanbase. We couldn’t have asked for a better start to the summer blockbuster season.
Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success seem like an accident. “I never went into making that first short or making the series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is a viable engine for a movie,'” he says.
That original nine-minute videotitled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and posted online by Parsons in 2022, was inspired by – among other things – a disaster 4chan meme that spawned a collaborative mythology. The 2019 post on the popular image forum’s /x/ included a disturbing photo of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. An anonymous user described being transported to “the Backrooms, where there is nothing but the stench of old damp carpets, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum buzz, and about six hundred million square kilometers of randomly segmented empty rooms in which to be trapped.” »
“God save you if you hear something wandering nearby because he definitely heard you,” the 4chan user added.
Other people have taken up the concept, creating images and spin-off stories on various social platforms. Parsons encountered them, as well as then-popular memes about surreal liminal spaces – Backrooms being a paranormal extension of this phenomenon. He was intrigued by what this material evoked but felt it had not been fully explored.
“It was definitely about erasing something that I hadn’t really seen other media erasing,” he says. “I think there was a genre element, I wish there was more to engage with here.”
To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could create an immersive vision of the Backrooms with graphics software Blender 3D and Adobe After Effects. This first video, in which a person is chased through the Backrooms by a malevolent life form, went massively viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ technical skills and the chilling suspense he had created. Fans have excitedly speculated about the broader mythology of this strange setting. Within a month, studios approached Parsons in hopes of a feature film.
Although still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be wary of offers. “I was very suspicious of everything that was happening, just because I feel like it’s a very common experience that this kind of event turns into nothing,” he says. “Or you end up with less than nothing.”
But in the end, he got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the opportunity to pursue his vision, in this case with top talent at his side. The feature film has a storyline of Country And Western world writer Will Soodik, and its producers include horror maestros Osgood Perkins and James Wan.
Behind the scenes is sharp, confident and richly imbued with fluorescent dread. Ejiofor plays Clark, an alcoholic divorcee who lives in his failing furniture store in San Jose, California, harboring a sense of victimization that masks volcanic anger. In sessions with his therapist Mary (Reinsve), he tries to understand the behavioral patterns that have stuck him in life – the wrong turns that led to the end of his marriage and thwarted his dreams of becoming an architect. Clark doesn’t know it, but Mary is also trapped in his memories. When she was a child, her agoraphobic mother kept her locked indoors, with yellowed newspapers taped to the windows.
Late at night, with the lights in Clark’s store down as usual, he goes down to his showroom to investigate the faulty circuit breaker. That’s when he notices a luminous seam in the wall that defies rational explanation. To his amazement, he discovers that it marks a place where he can pass through the plaster and enter another, even more cathartic world: a maze of endless rooms, many of which contain objects and structural elements that seem familiar at first glance, but are somehow disabled. Mesmerized, he returns regularly, trying to map the endless expanse and find any sign of life. (Suffice it to say, he’s not alone in this.)
Parsons’ big challenge was to make a film that could both satisfy obsessive fans and draw newcomers into the paradox at the heart of its ongoing narrative. “Online, there’s often a very passionate community — and you know mine is like that — but I feel like you have to be careful not to lean into it too much,” he says, noting that these “problem-solvers” and “puzzle-oriented people” construct huge theories that can end up weighing down an idea.
This is probably why Behind the scenes withholds any big answer and leaves you with a baffling mystery. The action takes place in the 1990s, which also means Clark can’t go to Google to ask his questions, or upload videos of the plays to YouTube and solicit opinions on what he’s experiencing. (“And he can’t fly a drone there,” Parsons adds.) The absence of the Internet as we know it in a story collectively discussed on social media is a curious and clever reversal.
Diehards will still have plenty to chew on, including Clark’s own bizarre hypothesis about these confusing passages. In their impossible geometry, the Backrooms owe something to the Overlook Hotel of The shinykeeping viewers locked inside long after the film ends, searching for a hidden meaning.
Most importantly, of course, Behind the scenes is really scary. As I left my screening and walked to my car in a quiet underground parking lot, I realized that I was reflexively looking over my shoulder, expecting the echo of footsteps somewhere behind me.
The film is gearing up for a massive opening weekend (which break A24’s current box office record), which some are calling a defining moment for Hollywood, where studios are increasingly looking to YouTube for upcoming horror authors. But another reason for all this buzz could be that Behind the scenes is that disappearing cinematic rarity: an entirely original film.
Parsons believes that growing up online, in intersecting communities of creators and commenters, helped him understand what was missing in the artistic landscape. “What people are looking for, it usually feels like they’re ignored or overlooked,” he says. “I think there’s definitely power in feeling connected to this conversation and having a conversation with everyone.”