How this 20-year-old went from building worlds in Minecraft to making Hollywood movies

Kane Parsons began building worlds at the age of 10. He’d piece together entire realms on sandbox games like Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet, deepening his fascination with mapping out new spaces. A decade later, he’s still building worlds – but now he’s doing it for Hollywood.

Parson’s debut feature Backrooms lands in cinemas. The horror film follows an architect-turned-furniture store owner who discovers a hidden portal and becomes trapped in a mysterious, maze-like space. His concerned therapist eventually embarks on a mission to find him, entering the otherworldly realm herself.

Now aged 20, Parsons has already secured the backing of buzzy indie studio A24, as well as legendary horror producer James Wan and Longlegs director Osgood Perkins. As if that weren’t already enough star power, he also landed two Academy Award nominees – Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) – to feature as his leads.

Considering it was only 10 years ago that Parsons was tinkering away on Minecraft in his California childhood home, this accomplishment is beyond massive. How did he, at just 20 years old, end up rubbing shoulders with some of Hollywood’s most elite?

It all began with a picture on the internet. Around 2021, Parsons – who’s best known by his YouTube handle Kane Pixels – came across an image on the anonymous bulletin-board 4chan. It was a basic picture of some kind of dingy office space or furniture store with off-yellow wallpaper. Its caption read: “If you’re not careful and you no-clip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but … approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

This is what’s known as a “creepypasta” – short, user-generated horror stories that are copied and shared across the internet. Think of them as the spooky campfire stories of the internet age.

The image planted a seed in Parsons’ mind.

“[The Backrooms] looked like a place I’ve been at some point in my life, I just couldn’t place where it would have happened or when exactly,” Parsons says. “It seemed evocative of a distant memory you have from being a kid … It sort of makes you feel seen a little bit. It’s like you’re reconnecting with something really distant that you can’t quite put into words yet.”

Parsons turned to 3D computer graphics software suite Blender to create his own version of the Backrooms – a labyrinthine liminal world that looks just mundane enough to be unsettling. But what began as an exercise in fulfilling his own curiosity snowballed into a global phenomenon when he shared his creation on YouTube.

His first video, uploaded in January 2022, now has more than 78 million views. Though Parsons never necessarily considered the Backrooms “scary”, millions on the internet did.

“It bears the hallmarks of a supernatural extreme horror take on the fear of the banality of the super-system we’re building around ourselves,” he says. “The idea of being stuck in an updated, slightly different version of the classic purgatory archetype … But it’s a purgatory of man’s own creation.”

What makes this version of purgatory even more disconcerting, however, is its lack of meaning. People fall into it at random, like a glitch in the matrix. There’s no fairness to the Backrooms, Parsons says.

Its found footage style and “grainy ’90s digicam” aesthetic create a strange sense of nostalgia that pulls people in, he adds. For many, it feels hyperreal, as if they’ve stumbled upon a long-lost home video and accidentally discovered a horrifying alternate universe. Add to that the fact that it expands on an already beloved piece of internet lore, and it’s no wonder the Backrooms series took off like a rocket.

Before long, Hollywood took notice of Parsons’ growing traction. Various studios began reaching out to the young YouTuber, offering him ways to bring the Backrooms to the big screen. Though initially cautious – Hollywood has occasionally adopted and destroyed beloved internet IP (remember Slender Man?) – Parsons eventually struck a deal. Before he knew it, his version of the Backrooms was being brought to life.

He began by mapping out the film’s space on the open-source software program Blender, creating a 3D blueprint for the 30,000 square metres of Backrooms space they went on to physically build across four sound stages.

“Stepping on [set] for the first time was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had because it has been digital for so long, and now I’m actually able to see it with my own eyes and touch the wall. It was very bizarre,” Parsons says.

He was determined to maintain the same “mythology and texture” of his original web series. Simplicity was key because the concept was, after all, born from a simple image.

He was also keenly aware that as a newfound Hollywood filmmaker, his audience was expanding.

“I wanted to avoid the problems you can get with lore bloat. A project that’s born online gets so much attention from an answer-seeking audience that sometimes creators get stuck in a feedback loop of over-catering to that set of sensibilities. You then get something that’s way too dense and contrived for a person from the outside to approach. So, we wanted something that worked for both groups,” he says.

Once again, his time on Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet came in handy. By the time he entered Hollywood, he was accustomed to creating worlds that an array of people can’t help but explore. The only difference with Backrooms is that once you begin exploring, you may never get out.

Backrooms is in cinemas from Thursday, May 28.

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