The Hollywood Gold Rush for YouTube Creators Is On: Money in the Backrooms

Once upon a time, aspiring directors made videos on home VHS cameras to show their friends, scratching the creative itch that might one day become a career. Today, those same personalities are drawn to platforms such as YouTube, where childhood passion projects can reach millions of people and somehow still not be seen by anyone I know.

The era of YouTube filmmaking is upon us. Movies based on YouTube videos are nothing new: 2016’s Lights Out was based on a short film posted three years earlier by the same director. The difference now is that films are being made by people who do not remember a time before YouTube; they are true natives of the medium. Case in point is Kane Parsons, who became the youngest filmmaker to open a movie at number one at the North American box office with his directing debut, Backrooms. A24 has its finger on the pulse in a way you would not believe.

Parsons was just 16 years old when, inspired by an internet creepypasta, he used the open-source 3D software Blender and Adobe After Effects to create what was intended as a visual-effects test. Uploaded to YouTube in 2022, the nine-minute short The Backrooms (Found Footage) garnered 20 million views in its first two weeks and was dubbed “the scariest video on the internet”.
As the popularity of Parsons’ Backrooms grew, Hollywood production companies began calling with interest in developing it for the big screen. In 2023, a year after the web series debuted, Chernin Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment and Atomic Monster teamed with A24 to back Parsons’ feature debut. Parsons guided screenwriter Will Soodik through the lore and story. People unfamiliar with the YouTube videos need not worry about doing homework. Just go and see it: it is a certified banger.

While still in high school, Parsons expanded the concept of his initial Backrooms clip, creating 22 additional episodes and developing its own mythology as it exploded in popularity online. To date, the web series has amassed 216 million views, spawning an ecosystem of fan subreddits and YouTube videos dissecting its canon in detail.

Liminal-space horror has a powerful pull. The idea of infinite corridors and hallways is easy to conjure. You may have found yourself wandering around an unfamiliar office block or on the wrong floor of a hospital, completely alone, with only a few dim exit lights for company. In our effort to insulate ourselves from the wild unknown of nature, we have created more of these haunting, vulnerable-feeling spaces. Somehow, they are worse because they are mundane, familiar and completely devoid of life.

“The liminal feeling,whether it be the transition between physical or emotional locations or in-between states, turns into a horror that harkens back to the subtle details of childhood,” says Parsons. “It’s exploring the past that gets left behind — and the longing to return to the past that doesn’t exist.”

The best way to create a past that does not exist is apparently to get a 20-year-old to make a film about 1990.

“I come from a very ARG (Alternate Reality Game), web series-centered space and I wasn’t trained on the conventions of traditional filmmaking,” Parsons says. “Making this movie was an incredible lesson in balancing what would work for a theatrical audience while also staying true to what I’ve created on YouTube.”

Parsons and Vermette, working with art director Alan Derksen and set decorator Trevor Johnston, spent three months building 30,000 square feet of Backrooms across four separate soundstages. A total of 32,000 square feet of wallpaper was printed and 27,000 square feet of carpet was procured to bring the dizzying, labyrinthine scale of the Backrooms to life. The immersive set build even proved a little too realistic at times. Production coordinators had to create daily maps to keep cast and crew from getting lost amid the warren of sprawling Backrooms that grew across multiple soundstages.

Like Hobbiton, it is the sort of set that would be a shame to dismantle when filming ends, especially while rabid fans continue generating material for the web-series lore. Three million YouTube subscribers are hungry for more.