Before Kane Parsons ever set foot on a professional film set, he was a teenager with a camera and an idea rooted in internet mythology. At 16, he began posting videos based on the Backrooms an online creepy pasta concept built around liminal spaces, those eerie, fluorescent lit corridors that feel both vaguely familiar and deeply wrong. The videos went viral. Millions of viewers followed along as Parsons expanded the lore video by video, building a horror universe from scratch without a studio, a budget, or a publicist.
By the time A24 and producer Chernin Entertainment came knocking, Parsons had already done the hard part: he had an audience. On May 29, 2026, the theatrical version of Backrooms opened in cinemas nationwide, and it did something rare it lived up to the hype. The film became A24’s fastest grossing horror debut in five years, earned an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.2 out of 10 on IMDb, and made Parsons, now 20, the youngest director in A24’s history to helm a feature.
A cast that matched the vision
Parsons did not arrive at the studio system alone. The Backrooms feature stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass a lineup that signals the film was never treated as a gimmick or a novelty act. It was a serious production, and the performances reflect that. Part of what made those performances land was the environment itself. Parsons insisted on practical set construction: 30,000 square feet of physical Backrooms sets gave the cast real spaces to inhabit, real walls to touch, real distances to navigate. That decision expensive, deliberate, old-school paid off in every frame.
The film does not rely on jump scares. What Parsons built instead is sustained dread, the kind that lives in sound design and negative space, in the way a hallway seems to stretch just slightly too long. Critics noticed. Reviewers repeatedly praised his ability to translate something born on the internet into something that genuinely terrifies in a darkened theater.
The sequels were always the plan
Parsons has been clear: the first film was never meant to stand alone. He has stated in interviews that expanding the Backrooms mythology into multiple films has been his intention since 2022, years before the feature was even in production. The original YouTube series operated the same way each video added to the world without requiring viewers to have seen the one before it, building a universe through accumulation rather than strict continuity.
The sequel strategy follows that same logic. Rather than producing linear follow ups, Parsons envisions each new installment exploring a different layer of the Backrooms topology. That means new environments, new entities, new casts and new time periods a multidimensional approach that protects the franchise from the formula fatigue that has hollowed out so many horror sequels. Industry observers are already anticipating that Backrooms 2 could enter pre-production as early as 2027, with a theatrical release potentially following within two to three years.
Why this model matters for horror
The Backrooms is not just a successful movie. It is a proof of concept for how horror gets made now. Parsons did not come up through a traditional film school pipeline or apprentice on other directors’ sets. He built an audience first, then leveraged that audience into creative leverage with a major distributor. His roughly six million YouTube subscribers did not just watch the trailers they showed up opening weekend.
A24’s willingness to give Parsons creative control, a genuine rarity for any debut feature director, reflects how the studio reads the market. Horror audiences increasingly follow directors the way they once followed stars, and Parsons had already proven he understood his viewers better than any marketing department could. The three to five film saga he has outlined is ambitious, but his track record suggests the discipline to see it through.
What comes next
The central challenge ahead is one every successful horror franchise eventually faces: how to grow without losing what made it work. Parsons has a structural advantage treating the Backrooms as a multidimensional space rather than a single location means each sequel can genuinely feel different rather than merely louder or more expensive. The precedent is uneven across the genre, but Parsons has already demonstrated something that matters more than precedent: restraint. That, more than any box office number, is the reason the next Backrooms film is worth anticipating.
