Backrooms creator turns viral series into movie
After the success of his internet series Backrooms, which gained millions of views on YouTube, American content creator Kane Parsons is bringing the concept to the big screen in a film where several people find themselves trapped in a terrifying and labyrinthine universe, AFP reported on Thursday.
The film, released Friday in the United States, is distributed by A24, the production company behind several horror hits such as Midsommar, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.
A photograph posted online in 2019 on a forum, accompanied by a short text describing a frightening parallel world, gave birth to this “creepypasta” — amateur horror fiction created in the United States and spread online for around 15 years, evolving through internet users’ stories.
“I don’t remember exactly when I first saw them because they were already everywhere online,” Kane Parsons told AFP, recalling that he was 13 years old at the time.
At the beginning of 2022, he created a short film for his YouTube channel in which a boy gets lost in frightening corridors. Within two weeks, the video surpassed 20 million views.
“I started receiving emails from many companies,” he said. “At the time I was 16 years old, everything was very new to me and I was very skeptical about dealing with people in suits over something so close to my heart.”
Eventually, an agreement was reached and filming took place during the summer of 2025, with American actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in the leading role and Parsons directing his first feature film.
“I never imagined myself as anything other than a director,” Parsons said. “I have always been very uncompromising about that.”
On his YouTube channel, Kanepixels, the young creator has already proven his success: he has more than three million subscribers, while the approximately 20 videos dedicated to the Backrooms universe have accumulated over 215 million views.
The movie is intended as a “direct continuation of the series,” Parsons explained. It alternates between “found footage” sequences filmed from a first-person perspective and scenes similar to those in his original work, shot in a more traditional cinematic style.
“It was a niche product, so it’s a little strange to see this universe becoming mainstream for wider audiences,” Parsons admitted.
This is not the only internet-born phenomenon entering cinemas this year. Mark Fischbach, who has 38 million YouTube subscribers, released Iron Lung in January, a horror movie adapted from a video game he himself popularized through online videos.
Previously, in 2018, another popular creepypasta-inspired production, Slender Man, featuring a thin monster in a suit, earned more than USD 50 million at the global box office.
“Backrooms is not over,” Kane Parsons promised, adding that he hopes to continue the story either in cinemas or through a television series.
In 2023, he also launched another YouTube series, The Oldest View, focused on exploring an abandoned underground shopping mall.
Photo: Wikipedia
