- The director of A24 Backrooms The film has expressed its opinion on why some film adaptations fail.
- Kane Parsons believes some studios ignore the “real DNA” of franchises that made them popular to begin with.
- BackroomsThe filmmaker is also the creator behind a viral YouTube series that was inspired by this film’s source material.
The director of A24 Backrooms The film has been vocal about why some film and TV adaptations fail and how its first big-budget project will attempt to avoid similar pitfalls.
Speaking exclusively to TechRadar, Kane Parsons suggested that the reason some adaptations don’t succeed is because studios and/or a production’s main creative team don’t fully understand why fans latched onto them in the first place.
For the uninitiated: Backrooms is a feature-length retelling of The Backrooms. A creepypasta (read: horror folktale created on the internet) that has only been around since 2019, The Backrooms is described as an incredibly large interdimensional space filled with a seemingly endless number of rooms and hallways, and populated by monstrous entities.
Since its inception, The Backrooms has not only become one of the most popular analog horror games on the Internet, it also spawned a wave of independent horror video games and served as inspiration for a American horror stories episode.
Additionally, a viral YouTube series, which began in 2022, racked up hundreds of millions of views and further helped shape The Backrooms’ extensive history. The individual behind said YouTube phenomenon? Parsons, then 16, was hired to direct the film adaptation of A24 just over a year after his first video metaphorically caught fire.
Given his prominent role in popularizing The Backrooms and realizing their myths through his short films, Parsons seems like the ideal candidate to direct. Backrooms. It’s a decision that, despite Parsons’ tender age (he’s still only 20), should also pay off, especially with Backrooms is intended to draw in long-time fans of its source material and Parsons’ work to see if its big-screen adaptation is as faithful as Backrooms‘The trailer proves it.
Other studios may also want to take that first leaf out of A24’s playbook, especially from the perspective of live reinventions of other forms of media. In fact, from Netflix bebop cowboy Television show and Paramount The last airbender movie, to resident Evil films and more, Parsons believes that studio interference and/or hiring the wrong people to oversee such adaptations is the root cause of his downfall.
“I think what happens is that there is an overvaluation of the suits worn by a PI [intellectual property]”Parsons told me when I asked him how Backrooms threads the needle of appealing to both die-hard fans of The Backrooms and movie buffs in general.
“And that’s where most film adaptations go wrong,” he continued. “It’s almost as if the skin, specific characters, and other elements of an IP were taken without the actual DNA that motivated those creative decisions in the first place. So I feel like what we need to do (and we did in our film) is rewind to the beginning and remember why people latched on to that initial release. [of The Backrooms] and my first short film.
“Basically, for all the history and depth, The Backrooms is a story that takes place on the periphery of a fairly simple concept. Whether people have seen it online or not, I think they can understand that it is quite supernatural in its composition, so it will be quite digestible for them.
“And I would also say that the goal is not to feed that simplicity in a negative way,” Parsons added of one of this year’s most exciting new films. “It’s about figuring out what was so effective about that first almost sensory experience that fans had, and following that thread to build this movie from the ground up.”
Backrooms opens in theaters worldwide on Friday, May 29.
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