With the success of A24’s “Backrooms,” the film’s young director, Kane Parsons, has become one of Hollywood’s most talked-about new filmmakers. Parsons, 20, began creating the YouTube series that inspired “Backrooms” while he was a teenager.
Parsons delayed college and is now exploring a career in Hollywood, and has mentioned he would like create a TV series based on his “Backrooms” content.
“I feel like I’m going to go insane if I don’t get this out of my system,” he told the New York Times in an interview published Friday. “The reason I do ‘Backrooms’ at all is for stuff that hasn’t quite happened yet.”
Read on to discover everything you need to know about Parsons.
Kane Parsons is the youngest A24 director
At 20, Parsons is the youngest director to head an A24 film. He grew up near Silicon Valley, and he told the New York Times he began creating films with a previously owned digital camera when he was a kid.
A medical diagnosis at 13 prompted him to begin creating movies. Arthritis meant he was sometimes unable to walk, so he began using software to create visual effects.
“Backrooms” was inspired by a meme
Parsons’ “Backrooms” footage went viral between 2022 and 2025, which got the attention to the studio. Parsons’ own film was inspired by a meme shared on 4chan in 2019.
The success of his footage found Parsons on the receiving end of studio offers to turn the movie into a full-length feature before he graduated high school.
“Putting it out for the first time and experiencing that was very much throwing a wrench, but I think it was a welcome wrench in what I was going through at the time,” he told IndieWire in an interview published Tuesday.
“Because it was junior year in high school. Like a lot of people, I was going through the very normal experience of just trying to figure out what the f–k I’m going to do with the next two years and what college is going to be and what that’s going to look like,” he continued. “I was looking at these options into the film industry by way of academia through school, it felt so bogged down with all these things that didn’t feel practical. And they work for plenty of people, but they felt very at odds with the way that I operated. And so, I was pretty bummed out about that.”
He’s skipping college to make movies
After taking an offer from A24, Parsons decided to delay college to try his hand at Hollywood, but he doesn’t anticipate being successful in the industry for long. “It very much felt like, boom, suddenly there’s a new avenue that is still risky. It’s not stable at all. And I was assuming this will come and this will go, this will be over quickly,” he told IndieWire.
Parsons helped compose the score for “Backrooms”
In addition to directing, Parsons also had a hand in composing the film’s score alongside Edo Van Breemen, something that resulted in long days.
“I ended up getting a little bit too much on my plate,” he told the Times. “I definitely abused my nervous system to the fullest degree I possibly could.”
