From Creepypasta to A24: Kane Parsons on the Future of 'Backrooms'

Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director behind A24's new psychological horror film Backrooms, is already looking ahead to expanding the unsettling world he's built on screen. In an interview with Rolling Stone UK, Parsons made clear that the film marks just one chapter in what he envisions as an ongoing creative project, stating plainly that the Backrooms universe is far from finished and that he intends to keep developing it going forward.

The film itself draws heavily on a sense of architectural unease that Parsons connects to real-world spaces he finds similarly disorienting, including Tbilisi's Holy Trinity Cathedral and Montreal's unusual Habitat 67 housing complex, the latter of which even appears as a photograph within the movie itself. That fascination with strange, disjointed spaces sits at the core of Backrooms, which follows Chiwetel Ejiofor's character Clark, a furniture store owner edging toward a mental breakdown, who finds himself transported into another dimension that seems to mirror the inner workings of his own mind. Inside that dimension, Clark wanders through an endless, spatially illogical maze of yellow-tinted rooms filled with distorted fragments of his memories, while Renate Reinsve plays his therapist, Mary, who eventually follows him into that same disorienting world.

The story behind how Backrooms came to exist is almost as unusual as the film's premise. It traces back to an eerie 2002 photograph of a fluorescent-lit furniture store that first circulated on a renovation blog the following year, then resurfaced on 4chan in 2019 as part of a thread asking users to share images that simply felt unsettling or "off." From there, the concept spread rapidly across Reddit, YouTube, and other corners of the internet, evolving into one of the more widely recognized pieces of collaborative internet horror, often referred to as creepypasta. Parsons became part of that sprawling, crowd-sourced mythology at age 16, when he created a found-footage web series based on the concept that eventually caught the attention of A24 in 2023. The resulting film was written by Will Soodik, expanding on the world Parsons had originally introduced through his series.

Despite his central role in popularizing the concept, Parsons is adamant that he doesn't consider himself the creator of Backrooms, insisting instead that the story belongs to everyone who has contributed to it. He emphasized that his film represents simply one interpretation among countless others, and that the open nature of the mythology allows anyone to build upon it in their own way.

Much of Parsons' conversation centered on the psychological underpinnings of the film, particularly his interest in exploring the inherent messiness of human cognition. He explained that he finds comfort in understanding behavior through an evolutionary or cognitive lens, viewing the mind's imperfections as natural byproducts of biological systems that weren't designed for clarity, but for survival. He described memory as a fleeting imprint shaped more by future utility than accuracy, and suggested that psychological distress can emerge when these underlying systems misfire or get stuck, much like a mechanical glitch repeating itself endlessly.

Parsons also addressed his decision to center the story on middle-aged characters rather than the younger protagonists typically favored within horror. He explained that he's more drawn to depicting people who have already committed to long-held belief systems and ways of living, finding more genuine dramatic tension in characters confronting institutions or patterns they've lived with for years, rather than younger characters who remain more adaptable by nature.

Asked about his future plans, Parsons confirmed his enthusiasm for continued world-building, noting that constructing immersive fictional worlds has been a lifelong passion. He indicated that Backrooms represents an extension of work he has already been doing for years, and reaffirmed his intention to continue building out the universe well beyond this first film.