‘Backrooms’ Creator Kane Parsons On Becoming A24’s Youngest Director Ever, Adapting His YouTube Series: “A Weird Dream Come True”
Kane Parsons has made history as A24's youngest director at just 20 years old with his film adaptation of his YouTube series, 'Backrooms.' The project, inspired by a creepypasta photo, began development after A24 recognized the potential of his web series. Parsons emphasizes the importance of creativity and self-taught skills in his journey to the big screen.
- ▪Kane Parsons created the web series 'The Backrooms: Found Footage' at the age of 16.
- ▪The film adaptation of 'Backrooms' stars Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve.
- ▪Parsons learned CGI using Blender and YouTube tutorials on a low-end laptop.
Deadline files mainly under film tv. We currently carry 598 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Deadline |
| Canonical URL | https://deadline.com/2026/05/backrooms-kane-parsons-a24-youngest-director-ever-disruptors-1236862181/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T16:07:38.273Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T16:07:38.273Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ktGpZnuPSfKK |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Kane Parsons and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of 'Backrooms' A24 Born in 2005, the year YouTube launched, Backrooms director Kane Parsons has “always taken that for granted,” having the platform at his disposal. “YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do,” he explains while discussing his “weird dream come true” debut as A24‘s youngest ever director, at just 20 years old. Parsons (aka Kane Pixels) was 16 when he created his web series, The Backrooms: Found Footage, in 2022, itself inspired by a 2019 creepypasta photo on 4chan of what appears to be never-ending vacant office space.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Deadline.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Deadline
