Back in 2023, A24 and James Wan’s Atomic Monster teamed up to turn one of the internet’s biggest horror hits into a movie — The Backrooms. Created by Kane Parsons, also known as Kane Pixels, and based on a viral creepypasta, the YouTube series became hugely popular for its terrifying version of the endless maze-like space beyond reality, filled with strange anomalies and studied by a research group trying to understand it.
Almost three years after the movie was announced, filming has wrapped, and one of its actors, Mark Duplass, has high praise for the young director. In an interview with Perri Nemiroff for The Creep Tapes Season 2 at Fantastic Fest, he spoke about working with Parsons and the exciting story planned for his first feature film.
Duplass couldn’t share much about the plot, but Parsons’ many short analog horror films give a good idea of what to expect. The original Backrooms story started with an online image of a big, yellow, carpeted room with buzzing fluorescent lights where people supposedly go if they “no-clip” out of reality. Parsons expanded on it, creating Async, a research group that found the Backrooms in the 1990s and began studying them. Soon after, missing persons cases shot up, with the people trapped inside facing horrors beyond imagination.
As a filmmaker himself, having made movies like Baghead, Cyrus, and the series Room 104 with his brother, Duplass was amazed by how skilled and confident Parsons was on set. At only 19 years old, A24’s youngest director ever, he handled the challenges of working with well-known actors on a major studio film with ease. His ideas about liminal space horror also impressed Duplass, leaving him very confident about how the movie will turn out.
I can’t say anything about the story, and I really do want to protect it for Kane. His mind is a backroom, and a beautiful place, a beautiful, liminal space that is somehow not human and beyond all of us. But what I will say is that I have always fancied myself someone who loves to mentor young filmmakers and be around them, and I think that’s part of the reason why I got that gig was thinking, ‘You know what? Kane is 19 and he’s directing a huge studio movie for the first time. It’d probably be good to have Mark around, who’s really good at mentoring people,’ you know? And I was fully ready to do that, and got there, and I was like, ‘This guy is so in charge and knows every detail down to the last thing.’ He was so patient and good with the actors, with us. It was so impressive to watch him command that set in a lovely and humble way. So, look, I don’t know how it’s all going to come together. We’re going to have to see. But I feel very, very comfortable in his hands.
Duplass Tried Not to Overwhelm Parsons on the Set of ‘The Backrooms’
Even though he was ready to give advice and ask questions, Duplass was careful with his approach. Parsons had already made over 20 shorts for his YouTube series, with the first episode alone getting more than 68 million views. He had already found success and built his own world, one that Duplass didn’t want to disrupt too much while filming. He compared it to working on The Creep Tapes with Patrick Brice, which was more of a shared creative effort between two similar creators, unlike Parsons’ already established mythology that was being brought to the big screen.
What I discovered is that the nature of Kane’s brain, as I said, is just this really beautiful space, and so what I needed to do is sort of respect and hold the deep mythology going on in his brain, and not clutter that with too many words or too many questions and keep the line of communication very, very simple with him when I had a question for him and not bug him with too much stuff. When I’m working with, like, Patrick [Brice], we’re just like buds, and we’re just talking about everything; Kane is like a museum I wanted to be more careful with, because that’s, I think, what’s required to make the kind of art he makes.
The deep lore of The Backrooms has both Duplass and Brice excited for what Parsons will deliver with the film. “It’s a big one,” Duplass said about the mythology, before Brice gave a strong vote of confidence to Nemiroff.
It’s going to rip. That movie’s going to rip. There’s no question.
While Duplass joked that “The cast sucks,” the movie actually has a strong lineup, including him. The cast also features Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. While fans wait for the sci-fi horror of The Backrooms to appear in theaters, Duplass will return to horror first on November 14 with The Creep Tapes Season 2.
He and Brice wrote six new episodes exploring more of the VHS collection from the socially awkward serial killer, Peachfuzz. As the episodes unfold, the killer’s strange behavior makes it clear to victims that they’ve made a deadly mistake. This season features more well-known horror actors like Late Night With the Devil’s David Dastmalchian and Mike Flanagan regular Robert Longstreet, along with Katie Aselton, Diego Josef, Desean Terry, Alec Bewkes, Linas Phillips, Taylor Garron, Timm Sharp, Jody Lambert, and Jeff Man.
Season 2 of The Creep Tapes will premiere on Shudder as part of its Season of Screams event, celebrating the horror streamer’s tenth anniversary. The Backrooms, however, still doesn’t have an official release date.
Source: Collider