Some of today’s biggest genre companies – A24, James Wan‘s Atomic Monster, the Stranger Things makers at 21 Laps, and Planet of the Apes producers Chernin Entertainment – have joined forces on a new project called The Backrooms, which is set to mark the feature directorial debut of 17-year-old director and VFX artist Kane Parsons.
The Backrooms is based on a series of viral videos Parsons has been releasing through his YouTube channel Kane Pixels over the last year. There are currently sixteen Backrooms videos on the channel – with the number of total views being well past 100 million – and if you were to splice them together they would reach feature length, but the feature version of The Backrooms is going to be something entirely new. The screenplay for the feature has been written by Roberto Patino (DMZ). Parsons is still in school, so production will have to wait for his summer vacation to begin.
Deadline notes that details as to the plot of the sci-fi horror feature are under wraps. But in the original short, a young filmmaker’s fall into another dimension leaves him wandering through an unsettlingly yellow, empty and labyrinthine office space, which may or may not be home to otherworldly beings. The film’s title and setting draw inspiration from the imagery of a creepypasta (or internet urban legend) published to the website 4chan in 2019. An interview with Parsons on ABC provides the information that his series tells the story of a shadowy organization, called ASYNC, which in the late 1980s opens a portal connecting the real world to The Backrooms.
A24 and Chernin Entertainment are co-financing The Backrooms. Patino is producing the film alongside Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps and James Wan and Michael Clear of Atomic Monster. Alayna Glasthal is overseeing the project for Atomic Monster, while the company’s Judson Scott executive produces with Chris White.
Have you been following the Backrooms videos on YouTube, and are you glad to hear that Parsons is getting the chance to make a feature based on The Backrooms for some major Hollywood companies and genre filmmakers? Share your thoughts on this news by leaving a comment below. Honestly, I had never even heard of The Backrooms before this news was announced, but it’s quite an interesting success story.
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