“It’s done, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. ”Even a short break,” he says, ‘will give him some better perspective on what’s happened over the past few years.” But for now, he’s enjoying the spotlight – and thinks he’ll take at least another month to consider his big break.
back roomA moody horror masterpiece starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsway, it is a cerebral expansion of Parsons’s atmospheric YouTube web series of the same name. This marks his first feature film as A24’s youngest director ever, a film long awaited by a huge and hungry internet fan base. You could hardly have asked for a better start to the summer blockbuster season.
Yet Parsons describes his tremendous success as something of an accident. “I never set out to make that first short or make a series with the intention of just saying, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that’s viable for a movie,'” he says.
That original nine-minute video, titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, was inspired by, of all things, a horrifying 4chan meme that spawned a collaborative mythology. A 2019 post on the notorious image board’s /x/ forum included an unsettling photo of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. One anonymous user described being transported to “the backroom, where there’s the stench of old, damp carpet, mono-yellow madness, endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum and about six hundred million square miles of randomly fragmented empty rooms to get stuck in.”
A 4chan user said, “If you hear the sound of something moving nearby, God save you, because it sure as hell heard you.”
Others took the concept and created spinoff imagery and stories on various social platforms. Parsons encountered these, as well as then-popular memes about surreal liminal spaces – The Backroom being an extraordinary extension of this phenomenon. He was curious about what this material revealed, but felt that it had not been fully explored.
“It was clearly scratching something that I hadn’t really seen other media scratching,” he says. “I think there was just that element of, I wish there was more for me to connect to here.”
To that end, Parsons decided to see if he could get a comprehensive view of the backroom with Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. That initial video, in which a man is stalked by an evil life-form in back rooms, went massively viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ technical prowess and the horrifying mystery he created. Fans excitedly speculated on the larger mythology of the supernatural setting. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes of a full-length film.
Although Parsons was still a teenager at the time, he knew enough to be wary of overtures. He says, “I was very incredulous about what was happening, just because I think that kind of thing having nothing happen is a very common experience.” “Or you’ll end up with less than nothing.”
Ultimately, though, he got what any young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to pursue his vision, in this case with top talent behind him. a script for a feature film Homeland And done by Writer Will Suddick and producers include horror maestros Osgood Perkins and James Wan.
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