Kane Parsons, the YouTube Director Who Built A24’s Biggest Hit in Blender

Kane Parsons

Photo: Lachlan and Austin Macfarlane / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 18, 2005 Petaluma, California, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker
Known for	Backrooms

The rooms came first. Before there was a studio, a cast or a budget, Kane Parsons had a stretch of yellow wallpaper, the buzz of fluorescent tubes and a camcorder that never existed, all of it rendered on a home computer. That geometry now sits inside the most lucrative film A24 has ever released, and the director who drew it was still young enough, when Hollywood first called, that his parents sat in on the Zoom meetings. Whether a YouTuber can make a hit is settled. What his career has to settle now is ownership: whether the person who built this particular version of the place can keep it his while an industry tries to sell it back to him as a horror franchise.

Parsons grew up in Petaluma, California, the North Bay town where he was born. The tools of his future trade were already in the house. His father, Michael Parsons, is a visual effects artist; his mother is a therapist, a profession that would end up at the center of his first feature. He studied at the Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School and did most of his real training in Blender, the free modelling program that became his camera, his set shop and his lighting rig.

The first work that travelled was borrowed. In 2021 he turned Attack on Titan into animated fan shorts staged like historical war photography, and several outlets singled them out for their horror and for how closely they followed the source. The exercise taught him something he would use again: a fantastical premise gets scarier the more it looks like a document.

The Backrooms were not his invention. The idea began in 2019 on 4chan, as a story someone attached to a photo of an empty, sickly yellow room that was later traced to a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. By the time Parsons found it, fans had piled on levels, entities and wiki rules. He thought the results looked cheap. “There was definitely no real presence of high fidelity content being made,” he said later. On January 7, 2022, his channel, Kane Pixels, posted The Backrooms (Found Footage), a short stretch of fake recovered video, and it spread fast enough to become a series. Parsons folded in the Async Research Institute, an MRI manufacturer he had originally designed for an unrelated project, and cut his continuity loose from the fan lore. His Backrooms had a company, a paper trail and a timeline.

Within a month of the first upload, studios were calling. Lucas Ford, an assistant at Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment whose job was flagging interesting creators, found him early. In February 2023 the deal became public: A24, Chernin Entertainment, James Wan‘s Atomic Monster and 21 Laps would make a Backrooms feature with Parsons directing, at seventeen. He kept publishing in the meantime, launching The Oldest View, a mystery series about a vlogger named Wyatt who finds a staircase leading into an underground mall.

The film was shot in Vancouver in the summer of 2025 for less than $10 million, with Levy, Wan and Osgood Perkins among the producers. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a failed architect running a failing furniture store; Renate Reinsve is Mary, his therapist; Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia complete the cast. Parsons designed the spaces in Blender first, and production designer Danny Vermette turned them into more than 30,000 square feet of physical sets across four sound stages. He also co-wrote the score.

Backrooms premiered at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica in May 2026 and opened on May 29 to $81.5 million in North America, the biggest opening in A24’s history. Parsons, born on June 18, 2005, was 20 at the time, which made him the youngest director ever to open a film at number one in that market, a record previously held by Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle topped the chart. By September the film had crossed $400 million worldwide and passed Marty Supreme as the studio’s highest-grossing release.

The coronation story leaves out who wrote the words. The screenplay is credited to Will Soodik, who replaced Roberto Patino, and the reviews split along that seam. Most critics praised the images, and Rotten Tomatoes counts 87 percent positive reviews, while Beatrice Loayza in The New York Times wrote that the script “cobbles together ideas about trauma and the mysterious workings of the unconscious, and sprinkles on some metaphors about gentrification.” Paying audiences were cooler than critics, handing it a B-minus CinemaScore. Parsons, for his part, rejects the genre the posters sold. “I didn’t direct it like a horror film. I don’t view it as a horror project,” he said in Zurich, calling the label “the path of least resistance from a marketing perspective.” The trend pieces that file him next to Curry Barker, whose Obsession shared the summer’s screens, and David F. Sandberg as proof that YouTube is Hollywood’s new farm system miss the stranger point: his film keeps strict continuity with a web series most of its ticket buyers had watched for free.

He has been just as direct about machines. Shortly after the release he told The Australian that “if I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would,” adding that he gets no creative enjoyment from those tools. From someone whose calling card is digital environments, the line carries weight.

The summer did not end the story so much as stretch it. In July theaters got the Everything Must Go Edition, with a fifteen-minute coda of Async researchers cataloguing objects embedded in walls and floors; the footage reached his YouTube channel in August. In June he said he would love to adapt the video game Portal, one of the stated influences on the film. At the Zurich Film Festival’s industry summit in late September, sitting beside Academy chief executive Bill Kramer, he called the idea that his generation only wants short-form video “reductive” and repeated that his “dream scenario” is a limited series that reaches the saga’s “main ending.”

The next step, according to reports in September first published by Dread Central, is Backrooms 2 for A24, pushing back an original film he had been developing with Osgood Perkins. The studio had not formally announced it by the end of the month. If the sequel arrives first, the labyrinth stays in the family; if the series comes after it, Parsons will have done what few directors his age get to try, finishing a story on his own terms.

Tags: a24, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Kane Parsons, Backrooms, Osgood Perkins

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