Featured Image Credit: The Backrooms/YouTube
Topics: Horror, Film and TV, YouTube
Claire Reid
A popular YouTube horror series created by a 16-year-old is set to get a big screen adaptation.
Teenage visual effects artist Kane Parsons released his nine-minute long film The Backrooms (Found Footage) in January last year, where it racked up a whopping 44 million views.
Following the success of his first short, Parsons developed a series, which has now had almost 100 million views in total and has been met with glowing praise from horror fans.
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A review from PopHorror at the time read: “I have to say that this short film is terrifying and made me love the work that this director has done at his age.”
The reviewer added: “It feels like it was done professionally and backed by a studio looking to pitch this into a bigger movie or an anthology series.”
While The Awesomer noted that the ‘short film shows how to create tension without a budget’.
Now, the series is set to get adapted into a feature length movie by A24, the studio behind Hereditary, The Witch and Oscar favourite Everything, Everywhere All At Once.
Parsons, who is now 17, will be onboard as a scriptwriter for the as-yet unnamed feature.
Plot details are scarce, but the original short movie was inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta, first shared online in 2019, which centred on liminal, inbetween spaces, such as those expertly created by Parsons.
In Parsons’s nine-minute flick, we see an indie filmmaker attempting to navigate his way around a labyrinth-like office space, with yellowing walls, harsh overhead lighting and no furniture.
Before long, some odd, supernatural beings start to stalk the filmmaker as he attempts to make his way out of the impossibly designed building.
The Backrooms is set in the 1990s and presented as found footage, although it's unclear if the feature length adaptation will have the same setting.
Parsons will direct, while Westworld's Roberto Patino will write the script.
A press release about the upcoming project explains that Parsons will ‘will direct the film over his summer vacation’.
Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen and Dan Levine are producing the movie for 21 Laps Entertainment along with heavyweight horror producer James Wan and Michael Clear for Atomic Monster.
It will be co-financed by Chernin Entertainment and A24.
As yet, no actors have been announced for the movie and a release date is yet to be shared.