Every generation has its own idea of what horror should look like. In the creaky old days of Hammer Films, it looked like a Gothic castle, complete with a cobwebbed crypt. By the Stephen King era in the 1980s, fear had moved into the abandoned house at the end of the block in an all-American small town. And given how much time the members of Gen Z and Generation Alpha spend online, it makes sense that the spaces that capture their imaginations would be virtual as well. Enter Backrooms and its creator, 21-year-old Kane Parsons.
Parsons was still in high school when he uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube, building on a growing fascination with “liminal horror” that reframes abandoned malls, industrial hallways, and buzzing fluorescent lights from neutral spaces into sites of eldritch terror. That video, which has since racked up an astounding 78 million views, was made with the computer-graphics software Blender; only now, with the backing of A24, have the Backrooms become a real place, a 30,000-square-foot complex that was created for the live-action film version of Parsons' web series.
