HollywoodCGFX

How a Kid With Blender Built the Most Anticipated Horror Film of 2026

It started with a single photograph. Posted to 4chan in 2019, it showed an empty room. Yellowed wallpaper. Buzzing fluorescent lights. Dead air. The caption said it was what you’d see if you “noclipped out of reality.”

The internet ran with it. Reddit threads built elaborate lore. Fan fiction mapped hundreds of “levels,” each with its own layout and creatures.

The Backrooms might have stayed a niche creepypasta. Then a teenager opened Blender.

Kane Pixels Builds a World in Blender

Parsons goes by Kane Pixels on YouTube. His first Backrooms video “The Backrooms (Found Footage) ” was uploaded to Youtube on Jan 7, 2022, during the covid pandemic.

His entire vfx pipeline utilised Blender 3d. He used Adobe After Effects for compositing to get that degraded, VHS-era look. The architecture, lighting, and camera movement all came out of a free, open-source tool anyone can download.

What made it work wasn’t technical complexity. It was restraint.

Empty corridors. No people. Sound design that sat just below the threshold of comfort. Blender’s photorealistic rendering made those mundane spaces feel genuinely wrong — and audiences noticed.

The series racked up over 197 million views across 23 installments. Parsons won a Creator Honor at the Streamy Awards. Hollywood came calling.

A24 Gets Involved — and Blender Comes With Him

In February 2023, A24 announced the film adaptation. The producing team is stacked. James Wan through Atomic Monster. Shawn Levy through 21 Laps Entertainment. Peter Chernin through Chernin Entertainment. Osgood Perkins also on board. The script is credited to Will Soodik (Westworld, Homeland).

Parsons was always going to direct. When he arrived on set, Blender came with him.

At CCXP Mexico, he described his process. He’d model sets digitally in Blender first. He’d run lighting tests. He did 50 wallpaper tests to land the right shade of yellow. Then he handed those files to the art department as physical construction blueprints.

A24 built 30,000 square feet of Backrooms on a Vancouver stage.

When Parsons returned from exterior shooting two weeks later and walked the finished set, he called it “the strangest, coolest moment on this project.”

The film shot through the summer of 2025 and wrapped in August. Budget: $9–15M. Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes.

Cast and Story

Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner. He finds a doorway to the Backrooms in his basement. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), investigates when he goes missing. The rest of the cast: Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia.

Parsons kept the mythology grounded. In his version, the Backrooms don’t shift or change. The space has a consistent internal logic.

“It preys on the human brain’s ability to map spaces,” he said at CCXP. “If you go back the way you came, you will go back the way you came — but it just keeps going and going. That’s where the confusion comes from.”

A clip shown at the event sets the tone. Clark is alone in the showroom after hours. He’s watching TV. The screen flicks to a security-camera view of a yellow hallway. He goes to the basement to check the power. He noclips out of reality.

The score is co-composed by Edo Van Breemen and Parsons himself.

What This Means for Blender Artists

The Backrooms story matters beyond horror fandom. It’s a proof-of-concept for what self-taught Blender artists can do.

Parsons built a cinematic world from scratch. He did it alone. He did it for free. The work attracted one of the most respected studios in independent film.

His pipeline mirrors how pre-visualization works at the top of the industry. Prototype in Blender. Iterate. Hand off to physical production. The difference: he was a teenager doing it in his bedroom.

The technical takeaways are concrete. Blender’s Cycles renderer produces atmospheric, photorealistic imagery that can sustain a full feature. The found-footage look — handheld simulation, film grain, chromatic aberration, color grading — is achievable entirely inside Blender’s compositor. No expensive plugins required.

But the bigger takeaway is simpler. Parsons didn’t wait for resources. He built what he wanted to see. Then he published it.

In Theaters May 29, 2026

Backrooms opens wide via A24 on May 29.

If you haven’t seen the original YouTube series, watch the first few episodes before you go. They’re short. They’re free. And they’ll make every empty hallway you walk through feel a little suspect.

HollywoodCGFX covers VFX breakdowns, 3D production techniques, and the tools behind film and television. Follow us for more coverage as Backrooms rolls out.