There’s a particular kind of American ruin that doesn’t make the history books: the dead shopping mall. No battlefield markers, no preservation funds, no elegies in stone. Just a husked-out atrium, a few ghostly storefronts and fluorescent lights dying slowly overhead. Kane Parsons understood something about that space so well that he used one from right here in Dallas as inspiration.
Over the last weekend, Parsons’ feature film “Backrooms” opened to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, boasting a staggering return on an estimated $10 million budget that rattled the industry and broke the internet all over again. At 20 years old, the YouTube filmmaker who built a cult following by turning a single grainy internet image into an immersive horror mythology is now officially a box-office phenomenon. The film, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, carries all the atmospheric dread Parsons perfected online: liminal spaces, institutional fluorescence, the creeping sense that something vast and indifferent is watching.
But before any of that, there was a mall in Dallas. And Parsons was already inside it…