Last winter, Kane Parsons felt like his heart was ripped out of his body. It happened during a visit back home in Petaluma, California, a scenic Bay Area suburb in Sonoma County. It’s the kind of place you imagine raising a family: ocean-blue skies, verdant landscapes, an abundance of farms—“It smells like cows all the time,” Parsons says—and a walkable riverside downtown that typifies Main Street, U.S.A. The rolling hills of “Bliss,” the default desktop wallpaper for Windows XP, are just a 15-minute drive from Parsons’s home.
But when he returned, Parsons found that his mother had broken down and removed their rotting backyard gazebo. He loved that gazebo, and he mourned it. “I have a strong attachment to inanimate buildings and structures,” Parsons tells me over Zoom. He thinks deeply—very deeply—about manmade structures. But not all buildings are so innocent. “You could look at buildings as a parasitic organism,” he says. People build them just to exist, like bees building a beehive. “Now the planet’s covered in structures that are gonna live longer than people,” he says. “The buildings are winning.”
How fitting, then, that Parsons’s first film as a Hollywood director centers on a hostile abyss of plaster and wallpaper. Backrooms, the buzzy new horror thriller from A24 set for theaters on May 29, is chiefly set inside a metamorphosing maze housing unspeakable nightmares. Adapted from Internet folklore and Parsons’s own DIY YouTube series that he made as a teenager, Backrooms is one of the most highly anticipated horror films of the year. It’s also an unprecedented task for its young creator.
Parsons, who is all of 20 years old, enters Hollywood like a glitch in the system. He’s an outsider—raised on a diet of video games, anime, and YouTube. In conversation, Parsons squeezes his origins down to “a subtle drip of many things since I was two.”
“I got access to the Internet around eight or nine,” Parsons says. “I would watch short films and be curious about the people who made the films. It was a lot of independent people who put an emphasis on the behind-the-scenes of what they do and how they do it, and I was constantly consuming that.”
Driven by a need to make fan art of his favorite games—namely Portal and Half-Life—Parsons learned how to put together visual effects using free software tools online. He completely credits, and blames, the decorated video game studio Valve with shaping his imagination. “Valve had the biggest grip on all of my creative preferences as a kid and have dictated where I’ve gone creatively over the years,” he says.
His imagination shaped some nightmares too. In one of his recurring dreams, he’s alone, exploring Aperture Science, the sinister laboratory in Portal. Parsons was only six when he learned to fear liminal spaces and entities that may not be present—the character Doug Rattmann especially. “The schizophrenic guy who would write on the walls—and was very cryptically hidden in the games—freaked me the fuck out,” he says. “There’s this wall where you can hear his voice. You don’t know if he’s dead or alive. He’s a faint Easter egg. That sound file would send me into a cold sweat if I heard it. I couldn’t be in a room alone because I got freaked out.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world took up bread making and other now-forgotten hobbies, Parsons played with the 3D creation software Blender. Even just through working on a “shitty laptop,” he soon found that his aspirations could go far beyond video game fan art. “I can make borderline photoreal stuff in an afternoon,” he says. “It’s like magic.”
By Eric Francisco
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