Backrooms is A24’s highest-grossing film in the studio’s history. It was directed by Kane Parsons, who is 20 years old, and it started life not as a script sold to a studio but as a self-shot YouTube short he posted in 2022 under the name Kane Pixels.
Parsons posted “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” on YouTube in 2022 at 16 years old, tapping into a viral internet horror concept built around “liminal spaces” empty, off-feeling, familiar-but-wrong environments like abandoned offices and endless carpeted hallways. He kept building the world across 24 total shorts between ages 16 and 19, developing an entire mythology before he ever had a studio deal. A24 picked it up as his feature directorial debut, and the film released in theaters on May 29, 2026, following a premiere at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on May 7.
The feature version stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, alongside Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia, and sets the story in the 1990s, leaning into found-footage textures that echo Parsons’s original YouTube aesthetic rather than smoothing it into a conventional studio horror look.
To recreate the feeling of Parsons’s original self-made videos, and the specific first-person immersion of the internet games that grew out of the Backrooms concept, cinematographer Jeremy Cox shot the film handheld on a RED Komodo. It’s a deliberate choice to keep the camera language close to what made the original YouTube shorts unsettling in the first place, rather than trading it in for a more polished, tripod-and-dolly studio horror grammar.
Backrooms has grossed $394.1 million worldwide, making it A24’s highest-grossing film to date outperforming the studio’s entire prior catalog. Parsons became the youngest director ever to debut a film at number one at both the domestic and global box office simultaneously, at age 20. A24 re-released the film on July 3 with 15 minutes of additional post-credit footage to keep it in theaters longer.
The Backrooms pipeline teenager builds an audience and a visual language on YouTube with no budget, then gets handed a real one by a major studio that keeps the original aesthetic intact instead of erasing it is becoming a real pathway into the industry, not a fluke. For anyone building an audience on video right now, it’s a genuinely useful case study in what a studio will actually pay for: not polish, but a voice nobody else has.
Variety. “Backrooms Explained: Director Kane Parsons on Liminal Spaces, Sequels.” https://variety.com/2026/film/features/backrooms-explained-director-kane-parsons-sequels-1236760780/. 2026.
IMDb. “’Backrooms’ Poster — A24’s Liminal Horror Movie Will Release in Theaters This May.” https://www.imdb.com/news/ni65721170/. 2026.
Yahoo Entertainment. “How Were Backrooms’ Found Footage Scenes Shot? Director Kane Parsons Explains.” https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/were-backrooms-found-footage-scenes-160540395.html. 2026.
Wikipedia. “Backrooms (film).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backrooms_(film).