20-Year-Old Director: Backrooms – From Internet Meme to Million Box Office Hit
[18:12 Mon,8.June 2026 by Thomas Richter]
About 7 years ago, an anonymous user on the internet forum 4Chan posted an image of a pale yellow, neon-lit, eerie-looking backroom—a comment accompanying it gave birth to a new meme, "The Backrooms," which captured the imagination of many and continued to spread in the following years. In 2022, 16-year-old Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels) posted a 9-minute Blender-rendered clip on YouTube that further explored these rooms and has since been viewed over 80 million times.
The indie production company A24, known for its unusual films (such as "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "Aftersun," "The Whale," and "Midsommar"), took the bold step of giving the then 18-year-old Parsons a budget of 10 million dollars to bring his vision of the Backrooms to the big screen in feature-film length. A gamble that has already paid off: after just over a week of release in the US (the German release is June 17), "Backrooms" is already the most successful film A24 has ever produced, with a box office gross of over 200 million dollars. The money was used, among other things, to build a roughly 3,000-square-meter labyrinth of backrooms as a set, in which the film was partially shot—the footage, captured with RED cameras, was then combined with scenes rendered in Blender using After Effects.
The image and the comment that started it all:
If you&re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you&ll end up in the Backrooms, where it&s nothing but the stink of moist, damp carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.
anonymous: 4chan (05/12/2019)
§PIC2":The original image of the Backrooms
Horror through eerie spaces
What is particularly special about "Backrooms" is that the horror does not come from a direct threat, but primarily from the oppressive atmosphere of the rooms ("liminal spaces") themselves—eerie, endlessly nested, deserted places that seem to tap into something in the subconscious. Due to the openness of the motif and its impact, there are many attempts to explain what the Backrooms metaphorically represent: AI? The digital world? Alienation through capitalism? Modern purgatory?
🎬 Backrooms (2026)
One of the internet&s greatest success stories.
In May 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan posted a grainy photo of an empty room. Sickly yellow walls, harsh neon light, damp carpet, and an overwhelming feeling that something was completely wrong. Someone… pic.twitter.com/Fr6c2su3ES
"Backrooms" is part of an interesting trend where some of the most interesting new films of recent years are made by directors who became known as YouTube creators and published their first works there. Examples include the second current horror surprise hit "Obsession," Markiplier&s self-produced Iron Lung, or "Bring Her Back" by the Philippou brothers.
The internet enables incredible success stories like that of Parsons, who learned the tools necessary for his film, such as Blender and After Effects, over the course of just a few years and is now, at 20, the director of a blockbuster debut. New talents and their cinematic hits are thus bypassing the classic route through Hollywood studios, which are otherwise famously risk-averse and critical of new ideas. Hollywood as a gatekeeper is becoming increasingly passé, allowing for more innovative films.
Parsons on AI
Viewers might attribute the eerie images of the Backrooms to AI, but the director and creator Parsons speaks out quite decidedly against the use of generative AI in an interview with an interesting argument. When asked if he wants to use AI, he replies as follows:
No, absolutely not. Yeah, for me, the whole point of what I do is that art is a way of processing life. That is exactly what it is supposed to be for most people by its very nature. I don&t see the value in outsourcing any element of that. If I look at someone else&s project and notice that an element of the environment, you know, was changed with generative fill or whatever to alter something in the scene... then the part of my brain that wants to learn more about that world and look for details just shuts off, because I would assume: If they are willing to make an arbitrary decision there, then they can literally make an arbitrary decision about everything.
Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director of the box office-topping film “Backrooms,” is “absolutely not” going to embrace AI, explaining that he doesn’t “see the value in, like, outsourcing” the making of art. pic.twitter.com/iVuUiTxGxy
