The 17-Year-Old YouTuber Who Became A24’s Youngest Director
The "summer job" that shook Hollywood
Hi everyone —
It’s launch day at Eddie AI. We’re also hiring.
Check out Don’t be a Schmuck:
Eddie is now more agentic.
Toss in a URL and Eddie will pull out the client’s key talking points—like your smartest intern who actually read the brief.
Rough Cuts stretch all the way to 40 minutes. YouTubers, documentarians, rejoice.
B-roll logging now listens too. If someone’s chatting in the background, Eddie catches it. (No more “Wait—did he just say the key quote off-camera?”)
Oh, and Eddie will now hand you a title and description for your YouTube video—basically the whole “ready to publish” package.
We’re not just speeding up the edit anymore—we’re helping shape the story, catch the gems, and even dress it up for the premiere. Read about the updates in CineD.
Hiring:
Do you love to act and make entertaining shorts?
Send us three links to your funniest/zaniest/most entertaining videos (TikTok, IG, YT). We’re hiring a FT content creator (act, write, direct, edit), in person (in Palo Alto, CA).
Now, onto this week’s story…
In February 2023, a bulletin hit the trades: A24, arbiter of modern indie cool and prestige horror was developing a feature film based on a viral YouTube series called The Backrooms.
The film would be helmed by the series’ creator, Kane Parsons, then a mere 17-year-old from Northern California who would “direct during his summer break”.
Calling it a dream summer job wouldn’t quite cut it..
Fast forward to today, Kane has just wrapped production on the film and at 20 years old is still the youngest director in A24’s history.
Kane’s leap isn’t a fluke.
His backrooms work is generational-genius level Internet folklore maturing into viable, franchise-ready IP.
We’re in the era of the solo creator as a one-person proof-of-concept and Kane is the proof.
Anatomy of a Creepypasta
On May 12 2019, a creepypasta /x/ thread on 4chan asked for “images that feel off.” Among the replies: the above photo.
A Dutch-angled photo of near-endless, empty office space, mono-yellow walls and fluorescent hum.
Wait, what’s a creepypasta?
creepypasta /ˈkriːpiˌpɑːstə/ noun
A short horror story or piece of urban legend that circulates widely online, typically copied, pasted, and re-shared across forums and social platforms.
Often anonymous in origin, creepypastas use unsettling imagery, supernatural themes, or digital folklore to evoke fear and unease.
Origin: early 2000s, from creepy + copypasta (slang for blocks of text repeatedly copied and pasted on the internet).
In that spirit, users gave this liminal nowhere a name.
The Backrooms.
An endless maze you might stumble into by slipping through the cracks of reality. Like stepping out the Matrix.
That single mechanic, borrowed from video-game glitches made the supernatural feel tech-adjacent and eerily plausible (years later, internet sleuths would trace the actual image to a 2002 HobbyTown renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin;)
The Backrooms crystallized an aesthetic that was already spreading online: liminal space threshold places typically heaving with human flow, suddenly emptied of people.
A transitional or "in-between" space evoking strangeness and nostalgia.
Spaces like these:
Then the 2020 pandemic hit.
The world’s real offices, schools, and malls turned into actual backrooms. That liminal space vibe that felt niche for the terminally online crew suddenly wasn’t so niche anymore.
As the myth spread to subreddits, wikis and youtube deep dives. Fans built out “levels,” rules, and entities. Two storytelling camps emerged: purists who believed the Backroom architecture itself was enough of a narrative driving force as the antagonist of pure environmental dread.
On the other side you fans who wanted more.
Monsters, history, and lore.
At this stage, the Backrooms felt kind of un-adaptable. Surely you couldn’t release 100 minutes of beige hallways, fluorescent hum and call that story. Right?
Wrong. (Well, sort of)
The Kane Pixels Canon
In January 2022, a YouTube channel by the name of Kane Pixels, dropped The Backrooms (Found Footage): a nine-minute short built largely in Blender with After Effects, styled as a VHS tape from the mid-’90s.
The channel had already built a following with VFX-heavy fan animations like Attack on Titan, crossing 100,000 subscribers by 2021.
But The Backrooms was its true north star.
Within two weeks the video crossed 9 million views, while the channel quadrupled to 400,000 subscribers.
His channel was soon becoming the defining legend for a new generation.
What few people knew at the time was that the creator was none other than Kane Parsons. A literal 16 year old. Born in the UK but raised stateside. A self taught VFX-whiz literally creating high-end lore from his bedroom.
Crucially, Kane solved the Backrooms story thinness issue.
He invented ASYNC Research, a late-’80s institute that accidentally tore a hole into “the Complex.” Period-setting justified the tape-degrade look; a shadow-science frame introduced characters, stakes, and mystery.
Then he created a single, sparingly used creature that kept the analog horror purists happy while giving the broader audience something to fear.
Kane would go on to produce 20-plus YouTube videos in the Backroom series. Slow-rolled a mythology with its own internal logic and timeline.
In the old pipeline, a young filmmaker makes a festival short and prays for generals. Parsons is the embodiment of what we as modern day creators have at our disposal.
The ability to create our own narratives. Cultivating rabid fanbases on our terms. Not chasing Hollywood to come calling because it’s likely they won’t.
Luckily for Kane, they did.
17 to 24
Multiple studios circled immediately, eager to turn his eerie yellow hallways into a feature.
The first move came through 21 Laps Entertainment, Shawn Levy’s production banner, where executive Lucas Ford brought the project in-house. From there, James Wan’s Atomic Monster, with its proven track record of turning viral shorts like Lights Out into box office juggernauts, signed on.
And then came A24.
Reaching out to Parsons, then only 17, anointed him their youngest-ever director. His arrival alongside names like Ari Aster, Trey Shults, and Robert Eggers signaled that The Backrooms was far beyond another creepypasta adaptation.
It was an entry into A24’s horror pantheon.
Pixel to Picture
And that brings us to today. The Backrooms feature recently wrapped principal photography after filming ran from July 7 to August 14 in Vancouver, under the working title Effigy.
The cast is stacked. Led by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia in supporting roles.
Directed by Kane from a script by Roberto Patino and Will Soodik with release slated for 2026.
A New Map for Hollywood
Trace the arc: an anonymous imageboard post becomes a shared nightmare; a teenager with Blender and YouTube turns that vibe into a potential franchise.
Hollywood has always trafficked in the “proof of concept,” but the source of proof is shifting. The old path of film school → festival short → water-bottle meetings is out.
The new path is simple: just make the damn thing.
And from there, who knows where it might take you?
If you enjoyed reading this story please hit the ❤️ on the Substack app!