20-year-old director Kane Parsons is taking his Backrooms project, which he started on YouTube, to the big screen, earning the title of A24's youngest director. The film will be released on May 29 and will feature prominent actors such as Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. Producers include James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins, while this horror film, written by screenwriter Will Soodik, will present a multi-layered structure.

Parsons created the video series he began uploading to YouTube in early 2022, drawing inspiration from internet legends and various web shares. In the videos, themed around an endless room maze, buzzing fluorescent lights, and yellow wallpaper, Parsons invited viewers into a disturbing atmosphere. In the A24 production, Reinsve plays a therapist searching for a lost patient in a strange dimension.

In a talk at the CCXP Mexico event, Parsons explained the film's approach: "The film is viewed from the subjective perspective of these characters. They are individuals living lonely, isolated lives. There are rarely multiple characters on screen at once. It's quite a lonely film." The director mentioned that he continues to use the open-source 3D graphic software Blender, which he learned while creating the YouTube series, and emphasized the importance of maintaining the continuity of the web series with cinematographer Jeremy Cox.

Parsons shared an interesting anecdote as he transitioned from set design to shooting: "I was modeling the sets in Blender, and then we were building them in real life. We conducted many tests to capture the atmosphere that people expect from the Backrooms. We did 50 wallpaper tests to get the yellow wallpaper just right." During the construction of the massive set, the director had to leave the building process to start outdoor shooting, and he expressed his shock and admiration upon returning to the completed set two weeks later.

The physical sets of the film were built on an incredible scale: "The set was huge. We built 30,000 square feet of real backrooms that we could walk through. Some people even got lost. It really felt like being there." Parsons paid special attention to maintaining the logic of this world, emphasizing that the backrooms were designed as a fixed but infinite maze, not a variable dream space.

Parsons was a content creator who uploaded his first YouTube videos at the age of 9-10. He attributes the deep impact of the Backrooms series on viewers to "the accumulation of collective anxiety surrounding economic, industrial, and other systems over centuries." This universal sense of unease forms the foundation of the cultural resonance of his project.