Kane Pixels

That certainly proved to be the case in Kane Parsons’ first YouTube video. Astonishingly, the sole-creator was only 16 at the time he used Blender to create the photorealistic depiction of a first-person journey through the Backrooms. It’s a cunningly slow build, showing off directorial chops well beyond his years, introducing not only the liminal space, but then daring to add something to it. Something that’s only glimpsed, and yet in its scribbly, intangible form, possesses everything that makes online horror memes so compelling.

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Parsons, under his Kane Pixels moniker, has gone on to create a whole series of videos that develop the mythos of this space, creating a narrative that begins in 1988, where scientific research appears to be exploring methods to create access to the Backrooms through some sort of portal. By 1990, government researchers are entering the Backrooms to begin investigations, resulting in Parsons’ next longer video, an internal informational video about what has been learned so far.

Kane Pixels

Watching through the current total of fifteen videos (some just a couple of minutes, others as long as a quarter of an hour), the influence of both Half-Life and Portal is very clear. In the 14-minute-long Pitfalls, there’s a very deliberate nod to Half-Life’s omnipresent mysterious figure, G-Man, staring down from an observation window at the facility’s entrance to The Backrooms.

Kane Pixels

Over the course of the videos, there’s a very subtly introduced colonization of the yellow corridors, as the researchers build their own facilities within the formerly liminal space, carrying through not just equipment, but creating far more tangible rooms within, seemingly oblivious to the monstrosities that exist beyond.

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What’s so spectacular about this series is the restraint. The videos are all compelling, but more for what they don’t deliver. The very first showed what might exist in the floors above and below the yellow office space—a subject that has literally caused schisms in The Backrooms’ subreddits—but then this is entirely ignored for the next handful. Indeed, the monster doesn’t appear again for a tantalizing number of entries. Parsons is enormously brave for this, showing a maturity missing in most adult directors. Of course, this means when we do get to see more, it means vastly more to us, and is seventy-thousand times more scary. And oh wow, does that come to fruition in Found Footage #2:

Kane Pixels

The Backrooms Movie

With news that a movie is set to be made, set in The Backrooms, this year, that’s perhaps something to be deeply hesitant about. Creepypasta tends to work online because of its unfixed state. There are no time limits, no fixed locations, and it sits alongside all the other information in the universe. Attempting to capture such things, and confine them to 90 minutes of film, more often than not defies the very reasons the fiction was ever effective. 2018’s Slender Man might have been a terrible film for any number of reasons, but it also might never have been able to not be a terrible film. (Meanwhile, 2018’s The Rake, and 2019’s The Soviet Sleep Experiment slipped so far under radars that neither has received a single review from any major site.)

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However, when it comes to The Backrooms, there’s more cause for hope. While it certainly has origins in that same nonlinear online space, it’s a myth that came into its own via Parsons’ YouTube work. It really found its feet as film, and so does seem more likely to lend itself to the format. And in a more peculiar detail, despite the serious names attached to the project, the 17-year-old YouTuber is set to direct.

This a film coming from A24, who are currently riding high on the Oscars success of Everything Everywhere All At Once, alongside production companies Atomic Monster (M3gan, Mortal Kombat), Chernin Entertainment (New Girl, Luther: The Fallen Sun) and 21 Laps Entertainment (Shadow and Bone, Stranger Things). Stranger Things producers Shaun Levy and Dan Cohen are on board. Saw writer James Wan is also producing. And as previously mentioned, DMZ’s creator and writer, Roberto Patino, is set to script it. Should the production successfully go ahead, this is a movie from a who’s who of horror, giving a teenager a chance to direct his own creation.

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If the film could be presented similarly to the YouTube videos, as a compilation of found footage, scientific archival tape constructed into something suggesting a narrative, then there’s every hope that The Backrooms could survive the transition that few creepypastas have before them.

Beyond The Backrooms

The joy of creations like The Backrooms is they don’t “belong” to anyone. Beginning in the anonymity of the internet’s most fetid image boards, then leaking out in various directions via Reddit, YouTube, Tiktok and so on, there’s no outright owner to start imposing restrictions, flinging copyrights, or perhaps most interestingly, dictating the direction in which the myth can head. Like a playground rhyme, such memes spread virally, maintaining their core elements while expounded upon by whomever may pass it on next.

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The Backrooms is especially interesting in this respect, given how many directions it’s taken. Dozens of games, with inevitably dozens more to come, are one channel. Another is Parsons’ video series leading to what seems inevitably to be a movie franchise. Then there’s the so-called “liminal spaces” movement, where the concept of uncanny reality, empty transitional spaces, is its own phenomenon.

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Tiktoker THIS IS FRANK is creating their own peculiar take on the potential of The Backrooms, while ChildhoodDreams takes the concept more broadly, pairing uncanny photographs with distorted music to excellent effect.

And The Backrooms’ influence is spreading into the wider public consciousness, with TV shows like Severance citing it as a source of inspiration for its unsettling office spaces.

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While Slender Man may have far greater public recognition, and creepypasta-adjacent horrors like Poppy Playtime may have inexplicably found their way into children’s toy stores, The Backrooms is likely having a far greater influence overall. It’s just, until you accidentally fall into it for yourself, you might never know it’s there.