Kane Parsons was just sixteen when he uploaded ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’ to YouTube. Four years later, the viral horror phenomenon has become an A24 feature film and a landmark example of how internet folklore, online communities, and digital storytelling are reshaping contemporary cinema culture.
Kane Parsons was born in 2005 — the same year YouTube went live. He was sixteen years old when he made ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’ in 2022. The 9-minute short film follows an amateur filmmaker who seemingly falls through a crack in reality and finds himself in the ‘backrooms’, an eerie liminal space resembling an empty, abandoned office space with pale yellow wallpaper and buzzing fluorescent lights, haunted by strange, malformed entities. Four years and 86 million views later, Parsons’ ‘backrooms’ shorts became the foundation for his feature debut ‘Backrooms’ (2026) starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, making him the youngest director to work with the critically acclaimed A24 Films.
Parsons is also arguably part of the first generation of filmmakers who grew up on the internet, making vines and YouTube videos, similar to an earlier generation of filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who grew up making films on 8mm and 16mm films and VHS tapes. For younger creators and viewers, the ‘backrooms’ — originating from an anonymous 4chan post in 2019 — represents a liminal space like the labyrinth at Knossos, or the threshold guarded by Hermes Psychopompos, or the crossroads between the realms from ancient mythological and folkloric frameworks. Like these lores and urban legends evolved over thousands of years of retellings to represent cold dark caves and unfamiliar thresholds as repositories of the dark, the backrooms lore coalesced in comment sections and Discord servers before it found a definitive form in Parsons’ shorts and eventual feature film for a generation growing up on the hyperreal internet for whom the uncanny familiarity of the physical world represents a similar atmospherical horror.
‘Backrooms’ also represents the return of auteur-driven original IPs after years dominated by superhero movies, nostalgia-fuelled sequels, and increasingly formulaic franchise filmmaking. Its journey from YouTube phenomenon to feature film adaptation signals a fundamental shift in how stories are created, circulated, and canonised in contemporary cinema culture. Cinema no longer belongs exclusively to studios, production houses, or established filmmakers. Some of the most compelling narratives of the digital age now emerge from film forums, fandoms, gaming communities, and social platforms before finding their way to the big screen.
The film’s Mumbai premiere, presented by PVR Cinemas and Homegrown, was both a celebration of that shift and a recognition of the audiences driving it. More than the arrival of one of the year’s most anticipated horror films, the event acknowledged a generation of viewers whose cultural references are shaped as much by YouTube rabbit holes, Discord servers, and online folklore as by traditional film and literary canons. In bringing ‘Backrooms’ to Indian audiences, the screening affirmed that stories originating on the internet are no longer peripheral to contemporary culture; they are increasingly at its centre.
As Indian audiences respond to the haunting world of ‘Backrooms’, its arrival signals an increasing appetite for bold, unconventional storytelling and a promising future where the next great cult film phenomenon may emerge not from a legacy studio, but the limitless imagination of creators and the endless playground of the internet.
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