The Backrooms: How a Teenager’s Creepy YouTube Series Became the Year’s Most Anticipated Horror
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Adam Daniel traces the remarkable journey of Kane Parsons — known online as Kane Pixels — from teenage bedroom filmmaker to Hollywood director at age 20. The story begins in May 2019, when an anonymous 4Chan user posted a photograph of a yellow-walled hallway, sparking a creepypasta mythology known as The Backrooms. Parsons, aged 14 at the time, encountered the image and spent a month creating a 9-minute video using free software tools Blender and Adobe After Effects. Uploaded in January 2022, the video leapt from one million to seven million views within 48 hours, and the full web series has since accumulated nearly 200 million views.
The article uses Parsons’ trajectory to argue that a significant internet-to-Hollywood pipeline is emerging — especially in horror. Studio A24 greenlit a Backrooms feature film in 2025, with producers Shawn Levy and James Wan attached, and Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve starring. Daniel argues what makes this case distinctive is that the original creator was retained and the mythology treated as a genuine asset rather than a marketing hook. YouTube, he suggests, now functions as an open-access development slate that major studios actively monitor for new voices — a shift that could reshape how the screen industry discovers talent.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
From 4Chan to A24
The Backrooms mythology began with an anonymous 2019 4chan post and grew, through Kane Parsons’ YouTube series, into a major A24 feature film releasing May 29, 2026.
Creepypasta Drives Viral Horror
The Backrooms is a “creepypasta” — anonymous internet folklore that invites collective expansion — and its power came from a single unsettling image of a liminal, yellow-walled space.
Internal Logic Made It Work
Parsons’ videos stood apart from other Backrooms content through rigorous internal consistency, exploiting the instinctive human need to map and understand spaces to generate dread.
Creator Retained, Concept Intact
Unlike earlier internet-to-Hollywood adaptations, A24 kept Parsons as director and treated the mythology as the core asset — not merely a brand name to be stripped for parts.
YouTube as Development Slate
Horror filmmakers like the Phillipou brothers and Curry Barker show a growing pattern of studios treating YouTube as a free, open-access space to identify the next generation of directors.
Horror Leads the Internet Pipeline
Of all genres, horror is most suited to this shift: low budgets, high atmosphere, and YouTube’s visual culture allow horror filmmakers to hone craft and build audiences simultaneously.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
YouTube Is Rewriting Hollywood’s Talent Pipeline, Starting with Horror
Kane Parsons’ path from bedroom filmmaker to A24 director is not an anomaly but a symptom of a structural shift in how the screen industry discovers talent. The Backrooms case shows that internet-native creative properties — when handled carefully — can move from anonymous online mythology to mainstream cinema without losing their essence, and their creators along with them.
Purpose
To Contextualise Parsons’ Success as Industry Trend, Not Personal Luck
Daniel explicitly frames Parsons’ Hollywood deal as “far from a lucky break” and positions it within a larger argument about where the screen industry is sourcing new ideas. The purpose is to inform a general audience — and industry observers — that YouTube has matured into a legitimate creative development space, using the Backrooms as the most vivid current example of this transformation.
Structure
Origin Story → Profile → Industry Analysis → Broader Trend
Narrative → Expository → Analytical. The article opens with the mythology’s anonymous 4chan origin, then moves to a profile of Parsons and his creative process, then steps back to place his success within a wider industry pattern. It closes with a meta-commentary — casting Parsons himself as having “noclipped” past Hollywood’s gatekeepers — that ties the essay’s framing device back to its central subject.
Tone
Admiring, Analytical & Culturally Curious
Daniel writes with clear admiration for Parsons’ achievement while maintaining the measured voice of cultural journalism. The tone avoids hype, grounding the story in specific facts — view counts, greenlit dates, software tools — while remaining accessible to readers unfamiliar with internet horror subcultures. The playful closing metaphor about Parsons “noclipping” past gatekeepers shows genuine engagement with the material’s own internal language.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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Impossible to pass through or enter; used in the article in its gaming context to describe solid surfaces like walls or floors that characters normally cannot move through.
“‘Noclipping’… refers to when players pass through normally impenetrable objects such as walls, ceilings and floors.”
Denoting events or phenomena that are beyond the range of normal scientific explanation; relating to claimed supernatural experiences, ghosts, or the inexplicable.
“…an anonymous user on the site’s paranormal board posted a photograph of a yellow-walled hallway…”
A very typical example of a certain thing, or an original model from which copies are made; in psychology and culture, a recurring symbol or pattern that resonates deeply across human experience.
“I think it carried, and still does carry, this archetype of doom.”
Making a particular element the most prominent or noticeable aspect of something; bringing it to the front of attention so the audience focuses on it above all else.
“Part of the horror lies in the way it foregrounds the disorientation and dread produced by an environment that seemingly never ends.”
Leading or directing something as the person in charge; derived from “helm” (a ship’s steering wheel) and used in film industry to mean directing a movie or major production.
“…traditional gatekeepers who may have balked at the notion of 20-year-old director helming a Hollywood film.”
Refused to proceed or showed reluctance and resistance in the face of something unwanted or unexpected; stopped short and declined to go along with a course of action.
“…traditional gatekeepers who may have balked at the notion of 20-year-old director helming a Hollywood film.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1Kane Parsons uploaded his first Backrooms video with the expectation that it would go viral and attract Hollywood attention.
2According to Adam Daniel, what distinguishes the Backrooms film from earlier examples of internet-native content reaching cinema screens?
3Which sentence best expresses the article’s central argument about YouTube’s role in the film industry?
4Evaluate the following statements about the origins and development of The Backrooms.
The original Backrooms image was posted anonymously on 4chan in May 2019 in response to a thread asking users to share unsettling photographs.
Kane Parsons used Blender and Adobe After Effects — both free online tools — to create his first Backrooms video.
The Backrooms feature film is set in the present day and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a scientist who discovers the portal.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5Based on the article’s closing metaphor — that Parsons has “noclipped” past the traditional gatekeepers — what can we most reasonably infer about the author’s view of the traditional Hollywood development system?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Noclipping is a video game term for passing through surfaces — like walls or floors — that are normally impenetrable. In the Backrooms mythology, noclipping means accidentally slipping out of reality into the strange infinite maze. Daniel uses it as a closing metaphor to describe how Parsons bypassed the traditional Hollywood gatekeeping system: just as noclipping lets players move through barriers that should block them, YouTube let Parsons reach a directing career that the conventional industry path would have made far harder.
The liminal spaces aesthetic centres on photographs of transitional or in-between places — empty corridors, deserted shopping malls, vacant hotel lobbies — that feel simultaneously familiar and deeply unsettling. The power comes from recognition without comfort: these are spaces humans know but should not be alone in. The original Backrooms photograph of a yellow-walled hallway tapped directly into this unease, making it one of the most shared examples of the aesthetic and giving the creepypasta mythology its emotional foundation.
The Phillipou brothers are Australian filmmakers who built their audience on YouTube before directing the critically acclaimed horror film Talk To Me (2022) and its sequel Bring Her Back (2025). Daniel cites them — alongside comedian-filmmaker Curry Barker — as evidence that the Backrooms case is not an isolated fluke. Together, these examples support his argument that a genuine pattern is emerging in the horror genre: YouTube functions as a development space that studios increasingly treat as a talent pipeline rather than a novelty.
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This article is rated Intermediate. The vocabulary is accessible but includes domain-specific terms from gaming culture (noclipping), internet culture (creepypasta, liminal spaces), and the film industry (greenlit, development slate). The argument requires readers to follow an implied industry trend rather than one stated explicitly, and to interpret the closing metaphor as analytical commentary rather than mere wordplay. Readers will benefit from familiarity with how the film industry works, though the article explains most key concepts in context.
Adam Daniel is an academic writing for The Conversation, a publication that specialises in expert-authored journalism aimed at general audiences. His piece situates the Backrooms story within film studies and media industry analysis — examining it not just as an entertainment story but as evidence of a structural shift in how Hollywood discovers talent. The Conversation’s academic framing means Daniel is more interested in the industry pattern than in celebrity coverage, giving the article its analytical rather than merely promotional tone.
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