20 year old filmmaker Ken Parsons has risen to the top so quickly that he’s had zero time to process how far he’s come.
“It’s done, go, go,” Parsons tells Wired. “Even a short break,” he says, will give him a little better perspective on everything that’s happened in the past few years. But for the moment, he’s lighting up — and thinks it’ll be at least another month before he has the space to consider his big break.
Back roomsa moody horror piece starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is a cerebral extension of Parsons’ atmospheric YouTube web series of the same name. This marks his feature debut as A24’s youngest ever director, a long-awaited feature by a large and hungry internet fan base. You could hardly ask for a better start to the summer blockbuster season.
Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success look like an accident. “I never made this first short or series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that’s viable for film,'” he says.
He The original nine-minute videotitled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, was inspired by, of all things, a shared legend. A 2019 post on the infamous Imageboard’s /x/ forum included a disturbing image of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. An anonymous user described “Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the smell of old, damp carpet, the insanity of Mono Yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at max volume, and about six hundred million square miles of randomly distributed empty rooms.”
“God save you if you hear something going around, because it sure as hell heard you,” the 4chan user added.
Others adapted the concept, creating spin-off imagery and stories on various social platforms. Parsons encountered them, as well as popular memes of the time about unrealistically infinite spaces—backrooms being an unusual extension of this trend. He was intrigued by what happened to the material but felt that it had not been fully explored.
“It was clearly scratching something that I didn’t really see other media scratching,” he says. “I think there was an element of that, I wish I had something else to engage with here.”
To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could combine an immersive vision of the backrooms with Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. That initial video, in which a man is chased through backrooms in a grisly lifeform, went viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ technical skill and the chilling suspense he created. Fans enthusiastically speculated on the epic sequence of the paranormal. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes of a finished film.
Although still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be wary of offers. “I had a lot of confidence in what was happening, just because I think it’s a common experience for these types of events to come to nothing,” he says. “Or you end up with nothing.”
Ultimately, however, he got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the opportunity to pursue his vision, in this case with superior talent on his part. The feature film is scripted by homeland And Westworld Writer Will Sudek, and producers include horror masters Osgood Perkins and James Wan.