The Films, Games, and Shows That Built Kane Parsons

Kane Parsons is about to become A24's youngest-ever feature director when Backrooms opens in theaters on May 29.

If you're not caught up, Parsons started uploading a found-footage horror series to his YouTube channel (Kane Pixels) in January 2022, when he was 16, adapting the "Backrooms" Internet meme (an eerie internet myth of fluorescent-lit, infinitely looping liminal rooms) into a cinematic, scary short.

The videos went viral, A24 came calling, and the rest is recent history. We've been following this story since the beginning.

In a recent interview with Letterboxd, Parsons walked through the pop-culture influences that shaped both his YouTube series and the feature. We always like to see the things that shape writers and directors' work, and it's a good reminder that art is always influencing art, and to keep looking for inspiration everywhere.

Quick note— Punishment Park is noted in the thumbnail but not the interview. The mockumentary in which political dissidents have the option to endure being hunted for sport in exchange for a lighter sentence.

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Portal 2

Parsons starts with a game.

"It's the easiest one for me to pin down as like the strongest influence over like everything I've done in my entire life, probably," Parsons said.

He's talking about Valve's Portal series, puzzle games built around a gun that lets you open connected portals between any two surfaces. Portal 2 in particular. The game drops you into the Aperture Science testing facility, where you're slowly piecing together what happened to the place while an AI guides you through it in a tone that is corporate, robotic, and just slightly wrong.

It has a bleak premise, understated delivery, and dark humor embedded in the architecture, which is exactly what Parsons absorbed.

"You're slowly seeing that there's only kind of a monotone, what feels like a robot, slightly inhuman voice talking you the whole time, and it's very corporate, and it feels like there's something slightly wrong with it. That's inherently kind of comedic and absurd," he said. "All of these so many like kind of bleak creative choices come from an inherent humor."

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Dread and deadpan as a combination are in his work, too, if you look for it.

What stuck with him most, though, was the space itself. The Aperture Research Center is gray, enormous, and rotting by the second game. Murals on the walls hint at other people who passed through.

"The general set construction of the Portal games is something that's been in my brain for so long. I frequently have dreams where I'm just in the Aperture Research Center," Parsons said.

A built interior that seems to extend forever in all directions... which is, of course, the familiar logic of the Backrooms.

Game design crossing into filmmaking language is nothing new, but Parsons is one of the cleaner examples of a creator who took a game's spatial grammar and constructed an entirely new visual world around it.

Mr. Robot

Parsons finished his first Backrooms short and watched Mr. Robot for the first time in the same week.

"I immediately rewatched Mr. Robot again afterwards," he said.

Sam Esmail's series, which ran four seasons on USA, follows Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer and hacker, navigating systemic collapse and his own fractured identity. It's technically about corporate power and class warfare, but what Parsons latched onto was the way massive societal stakes ultimately filter through one person's interior world.

"You can go as big as you want, but at the end of the day, it's all just being perceived by a single brain and a single head," he said. "It all kind of goes back to a place of that inner world."

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The mythology of the Backrooms is vast, but it's always seen from a single perspective, usually a POV shot under the contrivance that a character is carrying a camera. So we see what they see and experience it alongside them.

He also just loved how the thing looked. Parsons called Mr. Robot probably his single biggest visual and tonal reference for Backrooms.

"Of all the specific films that I think it's the one we referenced the most visually and tonally for Back rooms , I think certainly on a cinematography front and acoustic front, we definitely went to it quite a lot."

He praised the score from Mac Quayle. Cinematographer Tod Campbell's work on the show, with its deep-corner compositions and suffocating negative space, is clearly an inspiration, too.

Paranoia Agent

The most interesting influence on the list is Satoshi Kon's 2004 anime series_. Paranoia Agent_ follows a rotating cast of characters in Tokyo, all connected by a mysterious young attacker wielding a baseball bat and rollerblades. The show is not really about the attacker. It's about collective anxiety and social pathology that takes on a physical form.

Parsons said he's drawn to work that engages the metatextual dimension of storytelling (the relationship between the audience and what they're watching), but what specifically hooked him about Paranoia Agent was Kon's refusal to overdefine the threat.

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"There's this sort of being or entity or force of nature, or it's not defined, and it shouldn't be defined, and you don't need to define it, but it's metabolizing itself into this physical form that is somehow drawing from and reacting to and responding to a trait within people," he said.

It's a human-made monster that's more a manifestation of something already present in human culture. He connects that directly to Backrooms.

"Backrooms is responding to a lot of the anxieties around the level of urbanization and industrialization and, like, corner cutting we're at right now, where there's so much information but it means so little to most people," Parsons said.

That's a sophisticated piece of conceptual framing from someone who was a teenager when he created this. And you can definitely feel it, watching his YouTube series.

Backrooms opens this week. If you want to brush up on the shorts first, now's the time. Which of his inspirations surprised you the most?