How Backrooms Director Kane Parsons Turned Spatial Anxiety Into a Hollywood Hit
The 21-year-old behind A24’s record-breaking horror talks the power of yellow, his fascination with dead malls, and the superstition that kept the film’s shoot on track.
Backrooms, your anxiety-inducing horror film about a man trapped in an endless world of portals leading to disturbing environments, earned a staggering $118 million globally on its opening weekend. You are 21 now, and were a teenager in 2022 when you started the project as a series on YouTube; after it went viral, A24 signed you to develop it into a feature film. You’re the youngest director ever hired at A24, and Backrooms is the biggest hit in the company’s history. And yet you’re back at home in your childhood bedroom in Petaluma, California. Do you still have posters on the wall?
No posters. My childhood bedroom looks like a CIA agent lives here—there’s film equipment everywhere in an empty white room.
You made your first film in eighth grade, and it won an award.
It was called Late for School, and it was kind of sci-fi. It won the Five Minute Film Festival award here in Petaluma. I later extended the film to 30 minutes— I wanted to increase the quality.
Backrooms has the feeling of found footage, like The Blair Witch Project. Were you influenced by that film?
I watched Blair Witch only one time. I was more influenced by body-cam footage on YouTube. You can find video content of dynamic situations in people’s lives. As creepy as that sounds, there’s nonfiction footage of emotional moments; environmental footage where people are alone in a room. I would watch 30 minutes of people walking in dead malls or empty parking lots. Spatial anxiety fascinates me.
Although your bedroom walls are white, you seem to be intrigued by the color yellow—Backrooms is suffused with that shade.
When I was growing up, my walls were yellow. The yellow in the film was influenced by the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. [“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a horror fiction story from 1892, about a woman confined to a room; obsessed with the yellow wallpaper, she descends into madness.] I spent a lot of time fixating on creating a sickly, suffocating, gross yellow. Interestingly, when we’d post thumbnails on YouTube of “Backrooms” videos, if they didn’t have yellow in the background, they would get much less traffic. There’s an efficacy in yellow.
Parsons wears a Giorgio Armani jacket, shirt, and pants; stylist’s own belt.
Most horror directors your age work with young, relatively unknown actors in their films. Instead, you cast Academy Award nominees such as Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Was there a reason you chose them?
In terms of characters, I prefer people with more life experience. If an external idea hits a young person, they are immediately vulnerable. But when a person has a history and a set of beliefs and views, banging up against something new and unsettling causes a tectonic change. An older person evaluates an obstacle in a different way than a young person does—they have to weigh what they are seeing against their life experience. You couldn’t tell the same story with younger individuals.
Do you believe in ghosts?
I’ve experienced things that people might call ghostlike, but I prefer to think the ghost is in my own brain.
What scares you?
I’m most frightened of violence against consciousness. And, of course, that fascinates me also. I don’t like the idea of brains being grown in petri dishes. And I can be afraid of darkness. But isn’t everybody?
You have said that you often prefer television to films. Which shows do you love?
My brain goes to Mr. Robot, Better Call Saul, and Barry. I love Bill Hader.
Barry is a dark comedy. Would you ever direct a comedy?
I think I could! I’m not a funny person, but I think I could navigate that world.
Did you watch Backrooms with an audience in a theater on the opening weekend?
Yes. I watched it in the one theater in Petaluma where I saw films as a kid. It was great to see the poster in front. They were selling Backrooms merchandise in the lobby. It was quite wonderful, and also surreal.
You’re an original! Who is an original to you?
The musician Gary Wilson. My director of photography and I carpooled to set every day on Backrooms, and we’d play Gary Wilson in the car. On the days that we didn’t play a Gary Wilson song, we’d have a bad shoot day. So that became our superstition. Without Gary Wilson, there would be no Backrooms.
Grooming by Michael Moreno for Oribe at The Only Agency; Photo Assistant: Jordan Zuppa.
