Film Shrine caught up with Kane Parsons ahead of the release of his highly anticipated Backrooms, the horror sci-fi film based on his viral YouTube shorts first launched when he was just 16 years old. Now 20, Kane is set to join the number of YouTubers currently dominating the horror genre with his upcoming A24 movie. The Backrooms began as a viral creepypasta posted anonymously on 4chan in 2019, describing a supposedly endless maze of yellowed office rooms entered by “noclipping” out of reality. The concept quickly spread, spawning collaborative lore about numbered “levels,” entities, and survival rules. But Parsons, aka Kane Pixels, created an entirely new mythology with his eerie found-footage style shorts, which he began uploading in January 2022. Created using Blender, the teenage filmmaker perfectly captured what made the Backrooms terrifying while creating a comprehensive story of his own. His videos have amassed millions of views, and there’s just as much anticipation for his feature length adaptation. Written by Will Soodik, the film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, and centres on the characters’ journeys after a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. Significantly, the liminal horror aesthetic has been perfectly preserved in the big screen adaptation, which was no mean feat. How Kane Parsons brought the Backrooms into the real world Parsons previously revealed on Discord that around “90 per cent” of the film was created using practical sets, utilising approximately 30,000 square feet of space. Credit: A24 Film Shrine took the opportunity to ask the filmmaker more about the behind-the-scenes process of bringing the world to life. Parsons explained that despite the scale jump from YouTube shorts to a full A24 production, his creative process, at least at the beginning, remained surprisingly similar. Much like his original Backrooms videos, the filmmaker first built the environments digitally inside Blender, creating concept art and scenes before production had even begun. “It started just with concept art,” he told us. “I’d go into Blender and try to realise these spaces without pulling punches really, and present different shots from the hypothetical film before it’s been made.” Those early renders eventually evolved into full production blueprints once filming moved into pre-production. According to Parsons, the team used the Blender layouts to help map out the practical sets across multiple stages. “We already had a file with the layout that we were looking for for the film,” he explained. “Then it was a period of fine-tuning the Blender map that I’d made so things would fit inside the fire lanes and everything.” Credit: A24 Parsons also praised the collaborative nature of the process, explaining that the art department were able to work directly from his 3D files when constructing the physical environments. “I’d send the file to the art department, and they know how to read a Blender file perfectly fine… A 3D environment with lighting baked in is like a million [words],” he added. “Obviously, there’d still be a million other decisions and conversations stemming from that, but I think it was a great conversation starter.” Backrooms lands in cinemas on Friday, May 29th. For all the latest film and TV updates and hot takes, like our Facebook page. Featured images credit: A24 Post navigation Next storyPrevious story
