Culture 4 min read By Mason Emerson
Kane Parsons Says Backrooms Is Not a Horror Film at Zurich Summit
Director Kane Parsons told the Zurich Summit that his $400M hit Backrooms should not be classified as horror, while industry figures compare its box-office success to the Easy Rider era.
Kane Parsons, the director behind the $400 million hit Backrooms, told an audience at the Zurich Summit that he does not consider his film to be a horror project, despite its origins in internet creepypasta and its near-universal billing as a genre release.
«I didn't direct like a horror,» Parsons said during a panel at the summit on Saturday, explaining that his approach to the material did not follow the conventions the label implies. The film grew out of his own web series, which drew a following online before being adapted into a theatrical feature that went on to become one of the year's most unexpected commercial successes.
The distinction matters because Backrooms has been marketed and received as a horror title since its release, and its $400 million gross has been widely discussed as a milestone for the genre. Parsons' comments suggest that the film's creative identity is broader than the category that has been used to sell it, a tension that has followed other genre-adjacent projects that break out of their expected audience.
His remarks arrived during a broader industry conversation about the film's impact. According to Sony Pictures Classics co-chief, the twin successes of Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession represent a shift comparable to the one Easy Rider brought to Hollywood in the 1970s. The executive noted that the two films, both directed by filmmakers in their twenties who came out of YouTube, exceeded box-office expectations and brought large numbers of Gen Z viewers into theaters.
That comparison places Parsons at the center of a change in how young directors enter the film industry and how their audiences find them. The path from online video to a major theatrical release was once rare; Backrooms and Obsession have made it a subject of repeated discussion at industry events over the past three months, with producers and executives raising the phenomenon at panel after panel.
Parsons' refusal to accept the horror label also touches on a longstanding question in film culture: whether genre categories describe what a film is or simply how it is positioned for audiences. The director's web-series roots gave him a direct relationship with viewers before any studio marketing existed, and that relationship may explain why he resists a term that carries its own expectations.
The Zurich Summit panel gave Parsons a platform to address that question directly, and his answer was unambiguous. He did not direct the film as a horror project, and he does not view it as one, even as the industry continues to count its success in genre terms.
For now, the commercial story of Backrooms remains the dominant one. A $400 million gross from a filmmaker who began online is the kind of result that reshapes assumptions about who gets to make movies and what kinds of stories can fill theaters. Whether the film is ultimately remembered as horror, or as something that escaped the category, may depend less on its director's intentions than on the audience that made it a hit.
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