Why Kane Parsons refuses to shut down your Backrooms theories

Film Shrine spoke with Kane Parsons about his Backrooms mythology, translating it to the big screen, and why he refuses to tell fans they’re interpreting it the wrong way.

The YouTuber to horror director pipeline is real, and it’s growing. But Kane’s story is unique. Since the age of 16, he’s been constructing and participating in one of the internet’s most obsessively dissected horror worlds. 

Little did he know that three years later, esteemed studio A24 would come knocking. Now, Backrooms is ready to be unleashed to the world, and it’s one of the most fascinating feats in modern cinema.

The movie is a direct adaptation from the liminal sci-fi space he created, but the filmmaker is well aware that the Backrooms existed before Kane Pixels. 

During our conversation, he not only acknowledged the various beliefs about what started its life as a creepypasta on 4Chan, but he’s open-minded about its evolution, embracing the idea that there may never be a single “correct” way to understand the Backrooms.

“The discourse around Backrooms is not like a lot of other projects for obvious reasons, just because it’s an open source project where there’s no true version,” Kane told us.

While his interpretation has become synonymous with the Backrooms for many viewers, he pointed out that his version differs significantly from some of the other communities online. 

“There are very much distinctions between mine narratively and stuff that has these levels and these lists of entities that are all labelled,” he explained.

Kane said he continues to draw inspiration from the original Backrooms post that sparked the phenomenon, viewing his work as a “logical next step” of that initial concept and taking a “hard sci-fi approach” to it. 

While some horror fans may consider it a supernatural force both in his shorts and his film, Kane positions it as something arguably far scarier. 

“Even though there are these impossible, fantastical things happening, I would like to frame it more as a force of nature or something that people don’t have writing on yet.”

This way, the film puts the audience in the same boat as the characters. “It’s not the notion of a magical world that is judging the hearts of these characters,” he added. “It feels more like being lost in the forest or a canyon.”

Despite embracing fan analysis and being part of that community, Kane admitted there’s a fine line between rewarding dedicated viewers and overwhelming newcomers.

He said one of his biggest concerns was allowing the mythology to become so dense that it lost sight of the story itself.

“You could easily go too far into that and end up convoluting the story into oblivion,” he said.

For that reason, Kane was careful about which mysteries and which Easter eggs genuinely mattered. 

While he expects fans to dissect the film in the same way they analysed his YouTube series, he also wanted the narrative to remain accessible to audiences encountering the Backrooms for the first time.

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Featured image credit: A24