He Posted a Backrooms Video at 16. Now His Movie Is A24’s Biggest Hit Ever.
In early 2022, a 16-year-old named Kane Parsons uploaded a nine-minute video to YouTube about the Backrooms, the internet’s favorite liminal space horror meme. It hit a million views. Then seven million. Then 55 million.
Three years later, he’s the youngest director to open a film at number one at the North American box office, and his A24 horror feature has grossed $272.7 million worldwide, making it the studio’s highest-grossing film of all time.
The path from creepypasta kid to Hollywood record-breaker is one of the strangest success stories the internet has produced.
What the Backrooms actually is
If you’ve spent any time in online horror communities since 2019, you know the Backrooms. The original concept was a single image: a photo of a yellowing, fluorescent-lit office space that appeared to extend infinitely in all directions. The caption described it as the sensation of “no-clipping out of reality” and finding yourself in the endless hallways behind the world.
The image became a meme. The meme became a creepypasta. The creepypasta became a subgenre. Thousands of people contributed stories, rules, entities, and lore to what grew into a sprawling collaborative fiction about a place that doesn’t exist but feels like it should.
Parsons’ YouTube series turned that lore into short films. His found-footage aesthetic and practical approach to the horror, no jump scares, just dread, resonated with a generation raised on internet horror.
The YouTube series caught A24’s attention, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The film
The A24 feature, released May 29, 2026, moves the story into a more structured narrative. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner, and Mary (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, discover a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces accessed through a basement. The rest of the cast includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell.
James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins served as producers, a heavy bench of horror and genre experience to support a first-time feature director.
The film opened at number one, with Parsons becoming the youngest director to achieve that, beating Josh Trank who was 27 when Chronicle topped the chart in 2012. Per Dazed, Parsons was 20 at the time of release.
The numbers
$272.7 million worldwide. A24’s biggest film ever, surpassing Everything Everywhere All at Once. The ninth-highest-grossing film of 2026. The second-highest-grossing horror film of the year.
A film made by a kid who started shooting YouTube content in his parents’ house is now the most commercially successful thing A24 has ever done.
“Kane Parsons made a YouTube video at 16, got 55 million views, and then A24 handed him a major horror film at 20. The pipeline from internet creator to major studio director is real.”, The Hollywood Reporter
What people are saying
Audience response has been strong across the board. A 93% Rotten Tomatoes critics score with a matching audience response suggests the film avoided the trap of losing what made the YouTube series work in translation to a bigger format.
“I watched the Backrooms YouTube series when I was in high school. Seeing it become an A24 film and actually be GOOD is something I didn’t think would happen.”; r/horror
“Kane Parsons is 20 years old. He made A24’s most successful film. Every person telling you YouTube is a dead-end career, show them this.”, X post with hundreds of thousands of likes
“The Backrooms movie understands why the original concept was scary. Most studios would have turned this into a monster movie. A24 didn’t.”, Letterboxd review
The bigger thing happening
The Backrooms film is part of a pattern that keeps accelerating: internet-native creators making work that translates directly to mainstream commercial success. Parsons didn’t go to film school. He didn’t apprentice on studio sets. He made YouTube videos about a meme, got very good at it, and caught the eye of a studio that recognized what he was doing.
The gap between “viral YouTube video” and “A24’s biggest film ever” turned out to be three years and one very specific skill set. Whether that pipeline becomes more common or Parsons remains an outlier is the question.
For now, he’s the youngest director to open a film at number one, and the Backrooms is no longer just an internet meme.
