The 2026 movie schedule is filled with projects from filmmakers who made a name on YouTube first. Perhaps the most highly anticipated is the upcoming A24 movie, Backrooms, from Kane Parsons. When CinemaBlend sat down with the YouTuber-turned-movie director, he talked to us about making one of the best found footage movies in some time for the big screen.
Much like Parsons’ viral Backrooms web series, which was 24 episodes and based around liminal spaces since 2022, the movie takes place in the 1990s and has tons of found footage elements where audiences experience his horrific visions of unsettling spaces through grainy camcorder footage. When comparing his series to the movie, he told CinemaBlend the following:
Really the process kind of became pretty similar to what I've been doing for a long time on YouTube. So, in a lot of ways it's the exact same process. We were running it through the same VCR and doing all the same distortion techniques for specific moments.
So did Kane Parsons use a real old-timey camcorder for the found footage scenes or not? Here’s what he had to tell me when I asked:
I'm sure avid AV fans are probably gonna have thoughts about the realism of this. And, I think as I talk about the length of this project, and trying to get so many things accurate, I'm usually such a stickler for technical accuracy. I would say, when it came to the look of the camcorder footage, we were sort of operating from, I think given the ambiguity of not identifying the exact body of the camera, we had some wiggle room to define the look ourselves. There's some information regarding the way that it looks like this tape has probably been copied and digitized at some point in time that you can maybe drive a little bit of narrative information from.
Actually, in both scenarios, Parsons doesn’t use a real camcorder. However, when it comes to his feature film, rather than the backrooms being created using CGI and animation software, the production team built 30,000 square feet of the backrooms, making his vision a real place. The space was big enough to cause crew members to regularly get lost on set.
While a camcorder wasn’t used to film any scenes, it’s certainly part of the movie. In one sequence, which is teased in the Backrooms trailer, Finn Bennett’s Bobby is carrying around his own camera, filming. They used a few "parameters" for the effect.
So, there's a few parameters that we were able to tweak outside of the simple context of what camera did they physically use? Because we shot it on a proper cinema camera, but in the shot where Bobby's holding it and turns to the side is more of an optical illusion where we had [cinematographer Jeremy Cox] camera operating right off frame and so, we did a switch off right there. The real camera's right out of right at the angle where you can't see it, so it looks like he's using the proper handycam.
The Backrooms movie follows Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, a manager of a furniture store, who stumbles upon a portal to a series of seemingly never-ending rooms in the basement of his place of business. When he tells his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve), about it and then goes missing, she goes after him. During our interview, Parsons also explained one more reason why using a camcorder didn't make sense for this movie:
There's a few things we wanted to look at to sort of sharpen the image and make sure that we have enough clarity when we're blowing up the image on such a big screen. And also, we were assessing for like, ‘Is this gonna be motion sickness inducing and whatnot?’
As one of the earliest viewers of Backrooms, I cannot recommend this film enough to horror fans, whether you’ve seen Kane Parsons’ YouTube series or not. It’s incredibly imaginative, scary, and thrilling to think of being inside a place like the backrooms, and I can’t wait to see it again.
Backrooms hits theaters this Friday, May 29, and you can always check out the other upcoming horror movies hitting the schedule in the coming months if this isn't enough in the way of scares for you.
