Bored by doom scrolling, you find yourself lost in a random feed. Then, suddenly, something catches your eye: a neon light flickers behind a corridor that seems to never end. The carpet repeats itself, room after room, and every step you take resonates like a distant echo. You realize you have entered the Backrooms.

You might not know it, but you are in the world of Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels. Born between 2005 and 2006, Parsons’ is a filmmaker, visual effects artist, YouTuber, and musician who has conquered the web thanks to his ability to create unsettling, creepypasta-style atmospheres. His notoriety exploded in January 2022 with the YouTube release of The Backrooms (Found Footage), a short film set in the Backrooms universe. It quickly went viral, serving as a prelude to a series of episodes that redefined the perception of “internet-native stories” within the horror genre. The success of the series paved the way for a film adaptation directed by Parsons, produced by A24 and expected in theaters on May 27th.

Parsons’ interest in visual effects began at a very early age through playful and creative digital experiences. After his first experiments with LittleBigPlanet and Adobe After Effects, his encounter with Blender offered him increasingly greater creative freedom, allowing him to build the environments, lighting, and atmospheres that would later become the aesthetic signature of the Backrooms. Concurrently, Parsons also cultivated electronic music, releasing his first tracks on SoundCloud and YouTube.

The concept of the Backrooms has deep roots in internet culture: infinite, monotonous, labyrinthine, and strangely familiar environments that evoke a strong sense of liminality. Parsons discovered the phenomenon online and, dissatisfied with the quality of existing content, decided to reinterpret it with a more sophisticated visual and narrative approach. Although initially conceived as an independent short film, The Backrooms (Found Footage) accumulated millions of views and launched a saga that explores alienating architectures and intermediate spaces where time seems suspended.

The uncanny nature of the Backrooms also stems from the fact that they do not look entirely fictional. Their endless corridors recall spaces we cross every day: business hotels, empty offices, semi-deserted shopping malls, neon-lit conference rooms, and corporate interiors designed to be anonymous. Rather than inventing an impossible universe, Parsons exaggerates the impersonal aesthetic of contemporary architecture, transforming familiar environments into deeply unsettling places.

As Valentina Tanni points out in her book Exit Reality (2023), these digital aesthetics do not convey content in the traditional sense, but rather emotions: nostalgia, temporal displacement, loneliness, and a tension toward the infinite. The Backrooms perfectly embody this concept, becoming liminal spaces that reflect a contemporary condition suspended between the real and the virtual, safety and anxiety, familiarity and estrangement

In this sense, Parsons’ work belongs to a long tradition of imaginary environments designed to alter the perception of space and stimulate emotions. The Backrooms thus become a sort of “digital ruin”: a glitched, endless version of the contemporary interiors that inhabit our daily imagination.

The upcoming film, directed by Parsons and distributed by A24, promises to further expand the Backrooms aesthetic through infinite settings, immersive sound design, and advanced visual effects, while maintaining the found-footage approach that made the original short film viral. Rather than simply adapting a horror meme, the project will bring to the big screen one of the most recognizable and unsettling spatial imaginaries born on the internet in recent years.

Opening image: Backrooms. Courtesy A24