How Kane Parsons Remade the Backrooms Meme for the Silver Screen
To build the world of Backrooms, Parsons packed up his life in California and moved to Vancouver—where, for the better part of a year, he did what he’d always done: modeled every environment in Blender. But this time he handed the files to an art department, which built them into a 30,000-square-foot maze of a movie set. “Before we even were greenlit, I had conceptualized the whole environment for the pitch deck…[which was] inherently one of the biggest selling points of The Backrooms as a project,” he explains. If there were any edits in the set-design process, Parsons “didn’t have to put pen to paper at all. I could go spend 15 minutes [in Blender] and have an actual tangible thing to…give actionable directions for.” The bigger challenge for Parsons, it turned out, was the script, and “finding an engine that was viable for people who don’t quite understand this world I’ve been creating for a while and where my audience is at.” He and screenwriter Will Soodik landed on a plot centered around psychology, …

