Backrooms director Kane Parsons says $400M hit is not horror
The director behind a $400 million cinema hit says he never made a horror film.
Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms was released by A24, told an industry panel at the Zurich Summit on Saturday that he does not view the project as horror and did not direct it that way, according to Deadline. Selling it as horror, he said, was the path of least resistance from a marketing perspective. It was a label of convenience, not a description of the shoot.
Backrooms grew from Parsons' own web series, which drew on creepypasta, the homemade scary stories, images and videos that get shared, copied and remixed online. For a general audience, that is the key backstory: a story born on the internet, built episode by episode for viewers watching on phones and laptops, then expanded into a feature for cinema screens. Parsons said the horror tag stuck because it was simple to sell, not because it matched what he thought he was making.
The remarks came during a broad session on the summer's $4.7 billion recovery at the U.S. box office, the money taken from cinema ticket sales across the season. Parsons spoke alongside Academy chief executive Bill Kramer, Mattel Studios president and chief content officer Robbie Brenner, and Sony Pictures Classics co-head Michael Barker. The mix on stage said a lot about the topic, with a filmmaker, the head of the Oscars body, a toy-company studio chief and an arthouse distributor discussing the same ticket-sales rebound.
Kramer tied Backrooms directly to its online roots, saying the fandom travelled from YouTube to theatres. That journey from small screens to cinema seats powered the film to $400 million and made it A24's biggest theatrical hit to date, as Deadline reported in August. A distributor, the company that books a film into cinemas and handles its release, lives or dies on that kind of transfer.
Parsons was the headline filmmaking name in this year's Summit lineup. The 2026 Zurich Summit runs from 25 to 27 September at The Dolder Grand and takes place during the 22nd Zurich Film Festival, where Parsons is listed as Director of BACKROOMS.
What makes this stand out is the split between creator and category. A label can get people through the door. It does not always tell them what the director thought he was building.
