But is the original short worth all the fuss?

Absolutely.

Backrooms Found Footage is just as important to the Kane Parsons story as the feature itself. The short will undoubtedly inspire a generation of filmmakers to see YouTube not just as a platform, but as a legitimate path into the film industry.

Running at less than ten minutes, the film is a marvel of simplicity. In business, people often say, "Do one thing, and do it well." That is exactly what Parsons does.

Created almost entirely in Blender, with only the opening shot filmed in camera and the ending composited in After Effects, the story follows a young boy who accidentally falls into the Backrooms, an endless maze of empty corporate hallways. If you have ever fallen through the map in an old PlayStation game, you are already close to understanding the feeling. Except here, something else lurks in the maze, a towering creature that is as mysterious as it is terrifying.

After rendering, the footage was transferred to VHS, and that may be the film's most important visual effect. The degraded image sells the illusion that this was genuinely captured on tape. While the creature occasionally appears animated, that actually works in the film's favor. Its unnatural movement gives it an alien quality that makes it even more unsettling.

The ending is wonderfully bleak. The boy finally escapes the Backrooms, but his exit leads to him free-falling through Earth's atmosphere. Some people are just unlucky.

Parsons understands something many filmmakers forget.

Keep it simple.