The Backrooms (Found Footage)

4 Years on from Kane Pixels First Backrooms Video

4 years ago, an unknown 16 year old filmmaker who went by the name of Kane Pixels posted a short film on YouTube. The preview thumbnail of the film showed a creature in an area with yellow walls. The description said nothing more than September 23, 1996.

Today, this same filmmaker is directing a feature length movie with one of the most respected independent studios in the world, A24 — working with the likes of Mark Duplass and Renate Reinsve.

The Backrooms (Found Footage) has since amassed over 70 million views, over 2 million likes, and spawned a web-series based around the concept which combines analog horror and found-footage. Kane currently has 2.27 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

Before The Backrooms

Before releasing this video, Kane had released a handful of YouTube videos on his channel. These consisted of early live action videos (the first being posted in 2015), a couple of Portal videos and a series of Attack on Titan videos. In a couple of interviews from 2023, he mentioned that he had created over 400 videos, however nearly all of these have never been made public, however he did show some videos at local film festivals.

He was completely self-taught, he has never attended film school or similar. If you look back at his story highlights on Instagram, you can see posts where he shows his progress using the Blender software.

Revisiting an Idea

One of these un-posted videos was actually of the Backrooms. Around 2020-ish Kane came across the original Backrooms image while he was browsing Instagram. As he was learning Blender at the time, he decided to try and re-create this space. In November 2021, he came across the image he had created on his computer which inspired him to re-visit The Backrooms and create The Backrooms (Found Footage).

At the end of November 2021, Kane posted the first images of Backrooms (Found Footage) to his Instagram. The first video preview was also posted the day he posted the 2nd image. The 30 second video shows a scene looking down a long hallway with a grainy/VHS filter being used. Eventually a chair can be seen being thrown across the exit/intersection (the scene would go on to be used in the final video). The video would get 15 comments during the first week of posting.

Stories and Test Footage Video from Kane’s Instagram

On the same day he posted the video on Instagram, Kane also posted in r/backrooms on Reddit, posting an image of he hallway. Only 3 people replied to the post at the time. He posted another two screenshots in December — the second one received a few more comments (although it is interesting to note there were a few comments involving Extended Universe concepts), but the third one received only two comments.

The three preview images posted by Kane to Reddit.

According to an article posted by Vice, Kane took only a month to create the video. He used Blender and Adobe After affects to create the realistic looking spaces in the video.

Video Release and Going Viral

On January 7th, 2022, Kane uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube. The 9 minute video shot from a first person point of view, follows a young filmmaker as he “no-clips” into another reality that appears to be a place resembling endless yellow offices, halls and rooms.

In the first week, the video got around 16,500 views. In the first month, it had jumped to over 15 million views* and substantially increasing the subscriber count of Kane’s YouTube channel.

With this video, The Backrooms had it’s second viral surge — on a scale much larger than the original viral period from 2019 reaching many more corners of the Internet than it had before.

Interestingly, Kane had promoted the video in r/backrooms and it didn’t get much response. A couple of days later, another user posted a link to the video which received almost 300 comments. Kane even replied to this thread when someone asked if he was in the subreddit, saying “Right here! I tried uploading it myself a couple days ago, but it didn’t get much traction.”

After the success of this video, Kane went on to develop a backstories, a fictional company (Async), characters and a whole lore based around his Backrooms. He would post 17 more videos in 2022 which although not having the huge success of the first video, still gained millions of views in their first year showing that Kane had also gained a loyal fanbase interested in his Backrooms series.

Backrooms content in general exploded on YouTube with creators creating anything from their own Found Footage videos, analysis videos and even Backrooms related songs! People started teaching themselves Blender just to create their own Backrooms renders too. Reddit saw a huge increase in activity on r/backrooms and Kane created his own channel at r/KanePixelsBackrooms where people could talk specifically about his Backrooms without getting it mixed in with the Extended Universe. Around the same time, he also started his own Discord Server, a place where to this day he will occasionally come online and share information or just generally banter with his community. And the number of Backrooms games on Steam exploded with 41 games being published based on the Backrooms / Liminal Space concept.

In the media, Backrooms articles appeared on many media websites, even commercial sites like Wired and Vice got on board. ABC News went one step further and included a short interview with Kane for their Backrooms article.

Beyond 2022

At the one year mark in 2023, the video saw 43.6 million views. Since then, views have consistently been around the 10 million mark each year, although last year surprisingly saw it’s lowest view count, at around 6.5 million (we would have thought it would have increased with the movie going into production last year).

On February 6th 2023, Deadline posted an article that would announce to the world that A24, Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment and 21 Laps will be working with Kane Parsons on a full-length feature film. The film of course went into production in 2025 and is currently in post-production, set to be released later this year (date currently unknown).

After 2022 Kane posted only 4 more videos for The Backrooms series to YouTube (however one of these was his longest video he has made — Found Footage 3, which comes in at just over 45 minutes). He has indicated many times on his Discord server that he will release more videos, and had posted a couple of previews on his Instagram story on two separate dates at the start of 2025. Soon after however, he announced he was starting on the movie with A24.

Kane’s Instagram Stories from early 2025

And although The Backrooms is no longer in the viral phrase that it enjoyed in 2022 and early 2023, Backrooms content is still going strong, Backrooms communities are still active, and people are hyped about the movie’s release.

One wonders at times what the Backrooms today would be like if Kane had never decided to delve into those mono-yellow rooms and provide the world with some of the best Backrooms content ever made. Of course we’d still have The Extended Universe and the Wikis, and people would still be creating content — as The Backrooms itself inspires people like few other things do. But Kane definitely gave it a massive push and bought it to many people that may never have known about it.

… and he will do so again, later this year when he takes The Backrooms to another new audience.

Links

• Kane Pixels YouTube Channel
• Video: The Backrooms (Found Footage)
• Kane Pixels Instagram
• Kane Pixels Backrooms Sub-Reddit
• Kane Pixels Backrooms Wiki (Fan-Based Wiki)
• Kane Parsons on Wikipedia / Backrooms (Web-Series) on Wikipedia***

*Information obtained from a YouTube video analyzer tool (data doesn’t include likes, only views).

**YouTube only releases their top video lists each year by country. While there are non-official lists that cover worldwide videos, these are based on views alone, whereas YouTube states that their lists are based on several factors and not just views (likely their stats would attempt to eliminate bot accounts and take into consideration other factors).

***I actually found an error on both of these pages, as people always say, don’t only trust Wikipedia and back up your research elsewhere!