The 20-Year-Old Director Who Found Hell in Empty Hallways

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 Hobby Town 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 intrigue—including for one 13-year-old named Kane Parsons. Parsons was already deeply enmeshed in imagining, and visualizing, strange new worlds online. “It’s nothing,” Parsons told me recently, speaking of what drew him to the empty place shown in that particular viral photo. “But it’s also kind of giving us everything.”Within seven years, he would expand the simple notion of “the Backrooms” into a complex saga. He developed the concept into a string of YouTube videos, which have attracted hundreds of millions of views since he began uploading them in 2022. Now he has adapted the endeavor, which he began for fun in high school, into something much bigger: a feature film, coming to theaters before his 21st birthday.Parsons, who grew up in the Northern California countryside of Sonoma County, was given a hand-me-down laptop before he started middle school, and the internet quickly became what he describes as a third parent. (“That sounds really bad, but, you know,” he added ruefully.) He was inspired to create not by movies or television, but by YouTube, where he was drawn to DIY visual-effects demos; he was astounded that seemingly anyone could teach themselves how to make inventive videos using easily accessible software. “When I was in school, the only thing I would think about all day was a random little explosion effect I wanted to achieve,” he said. His eventual goal was to “make iPhone videos of things that didn’t actually happen, and have