There was a stressful time on TikTok a couple of years ago when you would be scrolling through your FYP and a POV video will appear of a seemingly normal everyday space, usually teeming with life, now cavernous, made disconcertingly uncanny by its emptiness alongside eerie music. The overall effect? To make you feel deeply uncomfortable.
This was the creepy horror trend of liminal spaces, partly inspired by “The Backrooms”, a disquieting creepypasta image posted anonymously to a paranormal 4Chan board in 2019. The Backrooms featured an empty and endless maze of office spaces tinged in a haunting low-lit yellow hue. Now, that space will be the setting of an upcoming A24 horror movie that will turn Kane Parsons’ nine-minute YouTube video from 2022 into a feature film.
Under the alias Kane Pixels, the 17-year-old’s video turned the lore surrounding “The Backrooms” into a found footage short horror movie of the same name. In the film, set in 1996, we watch as a young filmmaker accidentally falls into the world via noclipping (a cheat in gaming that allows players to pass through usually impenetrable objects) and finds himself lost in the creepy office space within a parallel reality. Running around this endless maze searching for a way out, he is chased by screeching entities and finds his way onto other levels. The short was incredibly popular upon its release, being described as “the scariest video on the internet” and Kane was praised for his filmmaking skills at such a young age despite his lack of budget. The video now has 44 million views on YouTube and has inspired 15 sequels, all created by Kane.
Kane will work with A24 to take on directing duties over his summer holidays. What the plot and cast of the movie will look like is still to be determined but the script will be penned by Roberto Patino, the Emmy-winning writer and producer behind the dystopian sci-fi series Westworld. Producing the movie is an exciting line-up of horror auteurs too. James Wan, famed for co-creating The Conjuring, Saw and Insidious franchises (as well as chaotic evil queen of the gays M3GAN) will be producing under his Atomic Monster production company, alongside his oft-collaborator Michael Clear. Also producing is Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen and Dan Levine of 21 Laps, the company behind Stranger Things.
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What will be interesting is seeing how the team narrativise the story for a feature film: will it have an extended lore to the parallel universe in a similar style to Stranger Things? Or perhaps it will be something far more hauntingly minimalist, dark and ominous, like Kane’s original film, and the recent success that was Skinamarink. With filming and post-production limited to this summer while Kane is off from school, there’s a possibility we’ll get to watch the sure-to-be deeply creepy movie before the year is out.