'Backrooms' Director Kane Parsons Is Horror's Next Great Storyteller

"“It happened during a visit back home in Petaluma, California… It’s the kind of place you imagine raising a family: ocean-blue skies, verdant landscapes, an abundance of farms—‘It smells like cows all the time,’ Parsons says—and a walkable riverside downtown that typifies Main Street, U.S.A.”"

"“I have a strong attachment to inanimate buildings and structures,” Parsons tells me over Zoom. He thinks deeply—very deeply—about manmade structures. But not all buildings are so innocent. “You could look at buildings as a parasitic organism,” he says. People build them just to exist, like bees building a beehive. “Now the planet’s covered in structures that are gonna live longer than people,” he says. “The buildings are winning.”"

"How fitting, then, that Parsons’s first film as a Hollywood director centers on a hostile abyss of plaster and wallpaper. Backrooms, the buzzy new horror thriller from A24 set for theaters on May 29, is chiefly set inside a metamorphosing maze housing unspeakable nightmares. Adapted from Internet folklore and Parsons’s own DIY YouTube series that he made as a teenager, Backrooms is one of the most highly anticipated horror films of the year. It’s also an unprecedented task for its young creator."

"Parsons, who is all of 20 years old, enters Hollywood like a glitch in the system. He’s an outsider—raised on a diet of video games, anime, and YouTube. In conversation, Parsons squeezes his origins down to “a subtle drip of many things since I was two.”"

Kane Parsons describes a visceral sense of loss tied to a rotting backyard gazebo removed after his mother’s breakdown. He expresses a strong attachment to inanimate buildings and views structures as parasitic organisms that outlive their builders. His first Hollywood directorial film, Backrooms, is a horror thriller set primarily inside a metamorphosing maze filled with unspeakable nightmares. The film is adapted from Internet folklore and from Parsons’s own DIY YouTube series created as a teenager. At age 20, Parsons enters Hollywood as an outsider shaped by video games, anime, and YouTube, framing his background as a gradual accumulation of influences.

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