‘Backrooms’ Director Kane Parsons on the Games, Shows, and YouTubers That Shaped Him
Kane Parsons, the youngest director in A24 history, discusses his journey from YouTuber to filmmaker with his new movie 'Backrooms.' The film, inspired by a 4chan meme, explores themes of liminal spaces and the unknown. Parsons aims to capture the eerie essence of these spaces while appealing to Gen-Z audiences.
- ▪Kane Parsons is the youngest person to direct an A24 movie.
- ▪His film 'Backrooms' is a feature-length adaptation of a popular internet meme.
- ▪The movie explores themes of liminal spaces and the unknown, appealing to Gen-Z perspectives.
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| Original publisher | GQ |
| Canonical URL | https://www.gq.com/story/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-influences |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 16:59:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T17:08:01.967Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T17:08:01.967Z |
| 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 | rDlYix7LJxSo · 2 stories |
| 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 |
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| 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
CultureBackrooms Director Kane Parsons on the Games, Shows, and YouTubers That Shaped HimThe youngest auteur in A24 history maps the influences that inspired the first-ever liminal-space horror movie.By Zack HauptmanMay 27, 2026Parsons on set with ‘Backrooms’ star Chiwetel Ejiofor.Everett CollectionSave StorySave this storySave StorySave this story“It's been a very weird time recently,” Backrooms director Kane Parsons tells me over Zoom, from his room in Vancouver. “It's been very strange—good strange, but it's all very new.”Only four years ago, Parsons was a teenage YouTuber creating videos based on “the backrooms,” a 4chan meme (born from a single photo of a mysterious yellow-walled room) that spawned its own online mythology about a parallel universe of eerily vacant and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GQ.
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