Breakthrough Filmmaker Brings Analog Horror to the Big Screen

A24's "The Backrooms" official teaser trailer is here. Photo by Emily Klena '28

A low-quality, yellow-tinted horror story proves that the path from bedroom YouTube creator to film director is now a real possibility in modern cinema. On Feb. 24, A24 released the first official teaser trailer for “The Backrooms,” a feature-length expansion of the viral YouTube series. Leading the project is 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who is now the youngest director to ever direct a project for the studio. 

Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, first gained massive internet attention in 2022 with a short film that applied high-end VFX to the liminal space aesthetic, an internet art style that focuses on images or environments that feel eerily familiar yet empty or out of place.

The aesthetic typically features locations such as vacant malls, empty hallways, quiet parking garages or fluorescent-lit offices, often photographed with low resolution, analog noise or early-2000s digital camera effects. 

This unsettling atmosphere became the foundation of Parsons’ viral short film and the broader Backrooms series, which used the liminal space aesthetic to tell a found-footage style horror story set in endless, empty office corridors. 

What started as a solo project built with open-source software in Northern California has since evolved into a major motion picture backed by renowned producers James Wan and Shawn Levy.

"What I discovered is that the nature of Kane’s brain, as I said, is just this really beautiful space, and so what I needed to do is sort of respect and hold the deep mythology going on in his brain,” Mark Duplass said in an interview with Collider's Perri Nemiroff.

“Kane is like a museum I wanted to be more careful with, because that’s, I think, what’s required to make the kind of art he makes," he continued.

Before his success with the Backrooms storyline, Parsons developed his technical style through a series of shorts titled Attack on Titan (Historical Footage). ​​In these videos, he reimagined the popular anime as if it were filmed during an early 1900s war. Instead of smooth, polished animation, he used grainy 3D effects. This helped him practice making digital scenes look like real found footage.

Parsons mainly uses Blender to create 3D models and Adobe After Effects to edit his videos. He adds small mistakes on purpose, like uneven lighting, bright camera flashes and VHS grain. He also moves the virtual camera like it’s being held by hand and adds blur and distortion to make it look like an old, worn-out tape.

The narrative of the original Backrooms YouTube series centers on the Async Foundation, a fictional research institute that discovers the Backrooms in the late 1980s. In the lore created by Parsons, Async is a private organization that develops the Low Proximity Magnetic Distortion System to open a portal into a dimension they call the Complex.

Their goal is to solve the global housing and storage crisis by utilizing the infinite space within the Backrooms. However, in the found footage tapes, the foundation’s missions uncover dangerous creatures and strange changes in the space, showing that the dimension is not as safe or empty as they first thought.

The transition of analog horror from computer monitors to movie screens presents a shift in how the genre is produced. While the style usually relies on the intimacy of low-quality media, the A24 teaser suggests a larger scale. 

“As someone who adores the Backrooms and liminal spaces, I’m so excited for this,” user Pop_Candyyz wrote in the comments on an A24 TikTok post featuring the film’s trailer, adding that they hope “it will be eerie, not just some scary monster horror, but something unsettling that leaves you on edge and paranoid.”

Parsons is part of a growing trend where studios hire creators straight from online platforms and independent communities. This shift was recently highlighted by the commercial performance of “Iron Lung,” written and directed by YouTube creator Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach. 

For students and independent creators, the success of directors like Parsons and Fischbach shows that filmmaking is becoming more open and accessible. Access to advanced rendering software has helped young filmmakers create detailed and impressive visual worlds without needing a Hollywood budget.

“[Parsons’] achievement is most definitely a win for filmmaking as a whole and is adding to the rise of independent filmmaking, which will always be a positive… and a more competitive industry in my opinion is a positive thing,” Marist University media studies and production student, Sam Carine ‘28 said.

The success of “The Backrooms” will show if online creators can stay true to their unique visual style while working with a big studio, and it is scheduled for a theatrical release on May 29.

“It is, of course, inspiring to me to see Kane rise to the heights he has. He's a very skilled animator and deserves the success he is seeing. He's worked very hard to achieve it, and it's paying off now and, hopefully, at the Box Office,” Carine said.