Meet Kane Parsons, director of A24’s hit horror film Backrooms – who’s only 20 years old
What began as a 4Chan post and then a creepypasta led to Parsons’ viral YouTube series – and now, a debut movie cementing his role in Hollywood
Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, yet another YouTuber, the psychological thriller stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture salesman, who finds himself walking through a portal into an unsettling dimension – the “Backrooms” – of endless bare office rooms with fluorescent lights and eerie hallways.
The film’s premise was inspired by Parsons’ viral YouTube miniseries, which was further inspired by a 2019 4Chan post about a fictional empty office space with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting, where one has glitched “out of reality in the wrong areas”.
Here is everything you need to know about 20-year-old director Kane Parsons.
How did Kane Parsons get into making films?
Parsons was born in June 2005. His father works as a video game programmer while his mother is a therapist, per the Los Angeles Times. Even as a child, Parsons was filming on his parents’ tablets and cellphones. He later learned to use pirated software including Adobe After Effects, and soon became a self-taught expert fluent in the basics of VFX compositing by high school.