Heat vision
While most people his age are in college, Parsons is already breaking records in Hollywood. THR rounds up everything there is to know about the new genre director.
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It’s an exciting time to be a horror fan, especially for the younger generation of filmmakers who are reshaping the genre.
The talk of the town over the past few weeks has been surrounded by two surprise hits: mania and Back rooms. He was the first to arrive maniareleased on May 15 by 26-year-old director Cary Parker. Then he came Back roomswhich arrived in theaters on Friday and quickly made box office history, grossing $97.7 million domestically and becoming A24’s highest-grossing film of all time in North America.
What makes the achievement even more remarkable is that Back rooms Director Ken Parsons is only 20 years old. The psychological horror film, produced by A24 and Chernin Entertainment alongside Atomic Monster, Blumhouse and 21 Laps, follows Marie (Renate Rensef), who ventures into an alternate dimension after her patient Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) disappears there. The film marks Parsons’ debut as a feature director, and he already has horror leads Jason Blum and James Wan in his corner, both of whom recently praised the genre for helping “save our industry.”
Read on to learn more about the rising star behind one of the year’s biggest horror sensations.
What is Ken Parsons’ backstory?
Parsons was born on June 18, 2005 in Petaluma, California, and taught himself video production as a child. He later attended Marin School of the Arts’ Novato High School where he studied film. In 2015, Parsons launched his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, and initially posted Minecraft videos and internet memes while continuing to expand his skills with software such as 3D animation software Blender.
“I’ve been a very online person most of my life,” Parsons said IndieWire. “I started getting into VFX-based channels that would help me realize that it was accessible and something I could do,” he said. “I started using the resources I had, like a laptop, and I was hacking VFX software and other things when I was 11 or so and started learning After Effects.”
When he was 13, Parsons was diagnosed with arthritis and could barely walk at times, which affected his filmmaking career, where he built 3D sets to immerse himself in.
What was the inspiration for “Back Rooms”?
Image credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection The idea for the film stemmed from an Internet urban legend that arose from a strange photo posted online and became part of Creepypasta lore. Inspired by this phenomenon, Parsons created found footage around the concept, and uploaded it Backrooms (found footage) to YouTube in 2022. Between 2022 and 2025, the series went viral, attracting the attention of studios interested in developing it into a feature film while Parsons was still in high school.
While applying to colleges, Parsons began sending offers to turn the project into a film. As interest continued to grow, A24 made an offer, and he deferred university to pursue further studies Back rooms.
“I suddenly felt like there was a new path that was still risky,” Parsons said. “It’s very unstable. And I was assuming that this would come and this would be over quickly. That’s exactly what’s happening, and that’s great, but I’m going to try not to get too involved in it because I see that happens to people all the time, and it usually turns out to be nothing. I’ve been wary of that.” IndieWire. “And I was still applying to colleges and stuff. It wasn’t until we pitched this to the studios in the fall of 2022 that I made up my mind about a school. And I decided to really stick with it. That was after we went with A24 and they picked this thing up.”
What do the critics say?
Image credit: Courtesy of A24 The film, which stars Ejiofor, Rensef, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, with a screenplay by Will Sodekan Wan and Osgood Perkins among its producers, has an 89 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Hollywood Reporter Angie Hahn wrote in her review, “The oddity itself has its limits. The more time we spend exploring back rooms, the less terrifying and more random these oddities become. They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or the psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing; they only work until it becomes clear that there are no meaningful answers to come.”
Click here to see what more critics are saying.
And yes, Parsons actually directed it
Image source: Lisa O’Connor/AFP After haters online started spreading rumors that Parsons couldn’t have actually directed it Back rooms Because of his age, one of the film’s cast members, Mark Duplass, was quick to defend him.
“Hmm, with all due respect, I don’t remember seeing you on set. When I was there, Ken was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3 times his age,” Duplass responded to an X user who claimed, “Ken Parsons didn’t direct this movie at all.”
He wore many hats in the “back rooms.”
Parsons also contributed to the creation of… Back rooms Recorded with Edo van Bremen.
“I ended up getting a lot of food on my plate,” he said. new york times, Adding that he had a “self-imposed” 21 hours of work to perfect his feature. “I’ve definitely abused my nervous system to the utmost extent possible.”
What records did Parsons break?
Photo credit: Todd Williamson/January Images In addition to becoming A24’s youngest director ever and the youngest film to top the worldwide box office, in less than a week, Parsons became the youngest film director to top the domestic box office, surpassing $100 million on a $10 million budget. Back rooms It is also A24’s highest-grossing film of all time in North America. The title previously went to Josh Safdie’s Marty Supremestarring Timothée Chalamet, grossed $96 million domestically and was the studio’s most expensive production.
Will there be a sequel?
Image credit: A24 Despite reports that Parsons was looking for a writer for Back rooms In sequel, the director denied those conversations during Thursday’s episode of the show The City with Matthew Bellone Podcast. “I’m not sure where that came out; this seems like a hallucination based on the idea that I’m very open to continuing this project. However, there is no meaningful movement on this currently.”
So, it seems unclear what Parsons will do next. However, it’s hard to believe that the sequel will never happen, given how well the movie did. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Parsons is strongly against artificial intelligence
As artificial intelligence continues to expand in Hollywood, Parsons makes it clear he doesn’t want to be a part of it.
“Art is a way to process life. That’s inherently how it’s supposed to be for most people,” he told Gayle King on morning cbs On Thursday. “I don’t see the value in outsourcing any element of that. And when I look at someone else’s project, if I see an element of the environment, they use generative fill or something to change something in the scene, even if that just shuts off the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details because I’ll assume they’re willing to make an arbitrary choice for literally anything.”
Who else is a YouTuber to the director’s pipeline?
Image credit: Alan Chapman/Dave Bennett/Getty Images; Amanda Edwards/Getty Images ObsessionsParker also got his start on YouTube, posting short clips with his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson (who also stars in… mania). With a much lower budget of $750,000 and selling to Focus Features for about $15 million, the film was also a huge success at the box office, grossing over $111 million in its third week of release.
THR He called on insiders to know the outlook on who could be on track to follow in the footsteps of young filmmakers. One of them was Dylan Clark, who is set to direct a film The Blair Witch Project Reboot for Lionsgate. (Click here to see the rest.)
“It’s their hope, their wish, their dream, to make great movies,” Jason Blum recently said of young creators transitioning from YouTube to film. “Back rooms and mania Edgy, weird and silly nuts. And for me, there’s almost a ’70s feel, of a new generation of young people making exciting films that keep going into theaters in a crazy way. A lot of young people grew up in a time where they couldn’t go to the movies, and they didn’t have something made for them to get them off their iPads and into the theaters. Suddenly, they had two movies.
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