Kane Parsons

Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, is an American filmmaker and 3D artist whose best-known work is The Backrooms, a YouTube horror series that transformed the internet’s Backrooms creepypasta into an ongoing found-footage narrative. He released the first episode, “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” in January 2022. Its opening follows a cameraman who falls through reality into a maze of yellow, fluorescent-lit rooms. The VHS-like image, unstable camera movement, and sparse sound make the setting feel less like a conventional monster story than a disorienting archival record. The video became a major viral success and established Parsons’s distinctive filmmaking voice.

Subsequent installments broaden the fiction through materials attributed to the fictional Async Research Institute, an organization investigating the anomalous space. In “Informational Video,” Parsons frames Async’s work as a corporate presentation for the Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System, a machine intended to open a gateway to the Backrooms. “Autopsy Report” uses a clinical recording to reveal that an unidentified body has nonhuman features. These videos expand the series without abandoning its pseudo-documentary method: logos, dates, technical diagrams, and degraded footage imply a concealed institutional history behind the maze. That approach lets information emerge as evidence rather than exposition delivered directly onscreen.

Alongside The Backrooms, Parsons released The Oldest View, another YouTube horror project set around an abandoned shopping mall and a colossal grinning figure known as the Rolling Giant. The series begins with a man exploring the derelict complex, then shifts into a wider mystery involving redevelopment, a historical attraction, and an attempt to escape the building. Unlike The Backrooms, which centers on a liminal labyrinth, The Oldest View makes a recognizable commercial space feel uncanny. Its mall interiors, archival presentation, and escalating pursuit show Parsons continuing to use computer-generated imagery to build physical environments for online audiences with minimal dialogue.

In February 2023, A24 announced a feature-film adaptation of The Backrooms, with Parsons attached to direct. The announced creative team included screenwriter Roberto Patino and producers James Wan, Michael Clear, and Shawn Levy. The project marked a transition for Parsons, a filmmaker whose reputation was built through independently released internet videos, into a studio development process. His work is associated with liminal spaces, simulated analog media, and stories pieced together from incomplete records. Rather than treating the Backrooms merely as a recognizable online image, Parsons gave it an internal mythology involving researchers, missing people, and impossible architecture.