- The director of A24’s Backrooms the film has had its say on why some film adaptations fail
- Kane Parsons believes that some studios are ignoring the “actual DNA” of the franchises that made them popular to begin with
- Backrooms‘ filmmaker is also the creator behind a viral YouTube series that was inspired by this film’s source material
The director of A24’s Backrooms the film has spoken his mind about why some film and TV adaptations fail — and how his first big-budget project will try to avoid similar pitfalls.
Speaking exclusively to TechRadar, Kane Parsons suggested that the reason some adaptations fail is because studios and/or a production executive’s creative team don’t fully understand why fans latched onto them in the first place.
For the uninitiated: Backrooms is a feature film retelling of The Backrooms. A creepypasta (read: an internet-created horror vernacular) that has only existed since 2019, The Backrooms is described as an impossibly large, interdimensional space filled with a seemingly infinite number of rooms and corridors and populated by monstrous entities.
Since its conception, The Backrooms has not only become one of the internet’s most popular analog horrors, but has also spawned a wave of indie horror video games and served as the inspiration for a American Horror Stories episode.
In addition, a viral YouTube series that began in 2022 has amassed hundreds of millions of views and further helped shape The Backrooms’ extensive history. The individual behind said YouTube phenomenon? A then 16-year-old Parsons who was hired to direct A24’s film adaptation just over a year after his first video metaphorically caught fire.
Given his prominent role in popularizing The Backrooms and unfolding its myth through his short films, Parsons seems the ideal candidate to lead Backrooms. It’s a decision that, despite Parsons’ young age – he’s still only 20 – should also pay off, especially with Backrooms set to attract longtime fans of its source material and Parsons’ work to see if its big screen adaptation is as faithful as Backrooms‘ trailer makes it out to be.
Other studios might also want to take the expert first leaf out of the A24 playbook, especially from the perspective of live-action re-imaginings of other forms of media. Actually from Netflix Cowboy Bebop TV show and Paramount’s The Last Airbender movie, to Resident Evil movies and more besides, Parsons believes that studio interference and/or hiring the wrong people to oversee such adaptations is the cause of their downfall.
“I think what happens is that there is an overestimation of the costumes that an IP wears [intellectual property],” Parsons told me when I asked how Backrooms threads the needle to appeal to die-hard fans of The Backrooms and general moviegoers.
“And this is where most screen adaptations go wrong,” he continued. “It’s almost as if the skin, specific characters, and other elements of an IP are taken without any of the actual DNA that motivated the creative decisions in the first place. So I feel like what you have to do—and we did on our film—is rewind to the very beginning and remind ourselves why people latched onto the first entry. [of The Backrooms] and my first short film.
“Basically, The Backrooms is a story that plays on the periphery of a fairly simple concept. Whether people have seen it online or not, I think they can understand that it’s 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 into that simplicity in a negative way,” Parsons added of one of this year’s most exciting new films. “It’s finding what was so effective about the very first, almost sensory experience that fans had, and following that thread to build this movie from the ground up.”
Backrooms launches in cinemas worldwide on Friday 29 May.
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