“Back Rooms” takes you deep into the internet’s most bizarre horror legend

The 20-year-old director Ken Parsons has risen to the top so quickly that he has hardly had any time to comprehend his reach.

“It just went, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. “Even the smallest break would give him a better perspective on everything that has happened over the past few years,” he says. But for now, he’s enjoying the spotlight, and believes it will be at least another month before he has the space to think about his big break.

Back roomsa moody horror piece starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Rainsef, is a cerebral expansion of Joe Parsons. YouTube The web series of the same name. This marks his debut as A24’s youngest director to date, at the helm of a film that has been highly anticipated by a massive and avid online fan base. You couldn’t ask for a better start to the popular summer season.

However, Parsons makes his meteoric success look like an accident. “I’ve never done my first short film or series production with the goal of: ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is a valid drive for a movie,’” he says.

Which Nine-minute original videotitled “Back Rooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, inspired by everything – Wicked 4chan The meme that spawned collaborative mythology. A 2019 post on the infamous image board /x/ forum included a disturbing image of an empty hallway bathed in dim light. An anonymous user described how he was transported to “the back rooms, where there is only the smell of damp old carpet, the madness of monochromatic yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum buzz, and nearly six hundred million square miles of randomly divided empty rooms to be trapped in.”

“God bless you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it definitely heard you,” the 4chan user added.

Other people have adopted this concept, creating images and sub-stories on different social platforms. Parsons confronted these, as well as then-popular memes about surreal liminal spaces – back rooms being an uncanny extension of the phenomenon. He was fascinated by what this material sparked but felt it had not been fully explored.

“It was clearly scratching something I haven’t really seen a lot of other media scratch,” he says. “I think there was an element of admiration, and I wish there was more for me to deal with here.”

To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could conjure an immersive backroom vision using Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. This initial video, in which someone is chased through back rooms by a malevolent life form, went viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ artistic skill and the eerie suspense he created. Fans have enthusiastically speculated about the larger mythology of the strange place. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes of producing a full-length film.

Although he was still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be wary of the shows. “I was feeling insecure about almost everything that was going on, just because I feel like it’s a very common experience for this kind of event to turn into nothing,” he says. “Or you’ll end up with less than nothing.”

However, in the end, he got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to pursue his vision, in this case with the best talent at his side. The feature film contains a screenplay by Homeland and Western world Writer Will Suddick, whose producers include horror masters Osgood Perkins and James Wan.