EXCLUSIVE: Backrooms director and cast break down turning a viral webseries into one of A24’s most unsettling horror films
A24's Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, is a horror film based on a viral webseries. The story follows a therapist searching for her missing patient in an alternate dimension. This film exemplifies the trend of YouTubers transitioning into filmmaking, particularly in the horror genre.
- ▪Backrooms is directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons and stars Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
- ▪The film is inspired by an internet creepypasta and has gained popularity through Parsons' viral YouTube shorts.
- ▪Backrooms continues the rise of liminal horror stories, joining the ranks of films like Skinamarink and I Saw the TV Glow.
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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 | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/exclusive-backrooms-director-and-cast-break-down-turning-a-viral-webseries-into-one-of-a24s-most-unsettling-horror-films/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T10:02:57.947Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T10:02:57.947Z |
| 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 | 00ZMsVfHPaDJ |
| 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
In recent years, multiple popular YouTubers have successfully made the leap into horror filmmaking, and A24’s Backrooms may be the most ambitious example yet. Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, Backrooms follows therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) as she searches for her patient Carl (Chiwetel Ejiofor) after he vanishes into a strange alternate dimension hidden behind his furniture store. Though Backrooms is based on an internet creepypasta, Parsons popularized the concept through his viral YouTube shorts, transforming an online myth into one of the internet’s defining modern horror phenomena.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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