The 20-Year-Old Director Who Found Hell in Empty Hallways
Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old director, has turned his viral YouTube series 'Backrooms' into a feature film. The film explores a surreal dimension filled with empty hallways and strange creatures, drawing inspiration from internet folklore. Set to release soon, it aims to attract both fans of the original series and new audiences alike.
- ▪Kane Parsons began creating content inspired by a viral 4chan post about the Backrooms in 2019.
- ▪His YouTube videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views since their launch in 2022.
- ▪The film adaptation features acclaimed actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve and is expected to exceed its $10 million budget at the box office.
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FilmThe 20-Year-Old Director Who Found Hell in Empty HallwaysWith his film debut Backrooms, the YouTuber Kane Parsons reimagines mundane spaces as hallucinatory nightmares.By David SimsMichael Tyrone Delaney for The AtlanticMay 27, 2026, 7 AM ET ShareSave In 2019, a mysterious post took off on 4chan, that ever-churning morass of anonymous commentary and internet peculiarities. In response to a yellowed picture of an empty, carpeted room (actually in a vacant HobbyTown store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), a user wrote, “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms.” To “noclip” is to walk through solid surfaces in a video game, and the idea of blipping out of reality and into some odd, mundane parallel universe sparked instant…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Atlantic.
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