Backrooms Director’s Next Project Could Finally Adapt a Masterpiece Sci-Fi Game

Horror filmmaking rarely has a debut as staggering as what 20-year-old Kane Parsons delivered with Backrooms. Distributed by A24 and produced on a $10 million budget, the film opened to $81.4 million domestically and $118 million globally, shattering the studio’s all-time opening weekend record and making Parsons the youngest filmmaker in history to top the worldwide box office. The achievement is made more remarkable considering Parsons built his entire mythology from scratch as a teenager, uploading a viral YouTube series of found-footage shorts under his online alias Kane Pixels beginning in 2022, using the internet creepypasta of fluorescent-lit, infinitely looping hallways as his raw material. The finished feature, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, proved that the creative instincts Parsons sharpened on a bedroom computer translated to a professional production, as Backrooms also received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

That success has opened every door in Hollywood, and Parsons is already looking beyond Backrooms toward his next creative obsession. Speaking to the New York Times, the director revealed he would love to make a Portal movie, which he called his “dream project.” The filmmaker also confirmed the ambition extends well past personal enthusiasm, stating he is actively looking into the rights situation for the Valve franchise with “a lot of curiosity.” This is not the first time Parsons mentions Portal, which he described as being the greatest creative influence on his work during an interview with Letterboxd.

Why Kane Parsons Is a Great Choice to Make a Portal Movie

Valve’s Portal gaming franchise, which spans the landmark 2007 puzzle-platformer and its acclaimed 2011 sequel Portal 2, centers on a woman named Chell who wakes inside the vast, sterile corridors of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. She is guided, taunted, and actively endangered by GLaDOS, a malevolent artificial intelligence that controls the facility and forces Chell through increasingly elaborate test chambers using a handheld device capable of creating traversable wormholes between two flat surfaces. The environment is simultaneously clinical and claustrophobic, a labyrinthine complex of sealed rooms and humming machinery where the architecture itself functions as an antagonist. In short, both Backrooms and Portal derive their psychological tension from leading the audience through a structure that appears infinite, impersonal, and indifferent to the human being lost within it.

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Beyond thematic alignment, Backrooms proved that Parsons has the technical skill that any serious Portal adaptation demands. Working with a fraction of the average Hollywood production budget, Parsons consistently created images of spatial disorientation, building environments that felt simultaneously mundane and cosmically wrong. The Aperture Science facility menace comes entirely in its blankness, its repetition, and the queasy sense that its geometry does not obey the rules a human expects. A director who could conjure that sensation from a $10 million budget and a set of mostly featureless rooms has already proved he can manage Valve’s property. Add to that Parsons’ deep personal investment in the Portal games, and we can only hope A24 will help the director pursue his dream project.

Backrooms is currently available in theaters.

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