October 9, 2023
Kane Parsons was in his bedroom at his home in California. At first glance, it could have looked like the bedroom of any eighteen-year-old.
A desk with a powerful computer and several monitors. The typical setup that so many people had nowadays.
The difference was that, from that very room, Kane had created something that millions of people around the world had seen.
His YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, was already one of the most recognizable names in Internet horror.
He had long since passed two million subscribers and was a little over one hundred thousand away from reaching two and a half million.
Within analog horror, liminal-space, and YouTube horror short-film circles, practically everyone knew who he was.
Almost everything had started with a single video: The Backrooms (Found Footage)
A short film just over nine minutes long that Kane had uploaded in January 2022.
He was sixteen years old.
By October 2023, the video had accumulated more than seventy-five million views.
Saying that it had changed his life would have been an understatement.
For weeks, it had appeared everywhere. Reaction videos, analyses, theories, explanations, and imitations. People who had never even heard of the Backrooms ended up discovering them because of him.
A lot of video games had even come out.
Even after almost two years, the short was still getting views and bringing new viewers to his channel. But probably the most impressive thing was how he had made it.
Kane hadn't simply been the kid who had come up with a good idea.
He had built much of the short film practically on his own: visual effects, the creature, animation, editing, and a large part of the sound design.
He had even used several of his friends for some of the footage he needed before transforming those images into enormous yellow hallways that seemed to stretch on forever.
That had caught the attention of several Hollywood studios.
The success of the short had demonstrated something fairly obvious.
The Backrooms had the potential to work as a horror movie.
The concept was easy to understand, visually recognizable and, perhaps most importantly, already had a gigantic audience waiting to see what could be done with it.
At the beginning of 2023, offers started coming in.
Not vague proposals.
Real offers.
Well-known studios wanted to turn his YouTube universe into a feature film.
While other students his age were thinking about college applications, final exams, and what career to choose, Kane had to sit down and listen to pitches from executives who wanted to finance a movie based on something he had created on his computer.
For a while, he considered several possibilities. Until A24 showed up, and they didn't come alone.
Alongside the studio were James Wan and Shawn Levy.
For Kane, that meant quite a lot.
Wan was one of the biggest names in modern horror. He had directed Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring, as well as helping build several of the most successful horror franchises of the past few decades.
Shawn Levy, on the other hand, had enormous experience handling much larger productions, from Night at the Museum to Free Guy and Real Steel.
Two people who knew exactly how to turn an idea into a studio production and, more importantly, seemed interested in helping him learn how to do it.
They didn't simply want to buy the Backrooms from him and hand them over to someone else.
They wanted him to direct the movie.
That was what had ultimately tipped the scales.
There was also A24.
Among young filmmakers, it had a particular reputation.
It wasn't seen simply as another major studio trying to find a new piece of intellectual property to turn into its next golden goose.
A24 had built much of its image around supporting strange, personal, and, at times, fairly risky films.
Especially in horror.
Movies that hardly seemed designed by a committee trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
For someone like Kane, that mattered.
A24 seemed to offer him something other studios couldn't guarantee in quite the same way: trust, creative freedom, and the chance to remain the author of what he had created.
So he accepted.
In February 2023, the news spread across the Internet and quickly reached the Hollywood trades.
The young filmmaker behind one of YouTube's most viral horror shorts would direct a feature-film adaptation of The Backrooms for A24, with James Wan and Shawn Levy involved as producers.
At the time, he was still only seventeen years old. So naturally, it attracted quite a bit of attention.
But there was one problem: he was still in school, in his senior year. His mother had been very clear from the beginning. He had to finish it.
The movie could wait a few months. It wasn't that long.
His studies couldn't.
Kane hadn't argued much about it either. He only had a few months left before graduating, and it would have been a shame not to finish. Besides, he had friends and classmates he had known for almost his entire life.
Walking away from all of it just a few months before graduation simply because Hollywood had come knocking at his door seemed unnecessary.
So the project entered a kind of pause.
In June, he finally graduated, and with that, the last obstacle disappeared.
Four months had passed since then.
Kane hadn't started college. He had decided not to go.
From the outside, the decision might have seemed risky.
To him, it made perfect sense.
Why spend four years and an enormous amount of money studying how to break into the film industry when the film industry was already knocking at his door?
A24 was financing the biggest feature film he had ever attempted to make.
James Wan and Shawn Levy were behind the project.
He had access to professional producers, entire departments, film crews, and people who had been working in the industry for decades.
He was going to learn how to direct a feature film by directing a feature film. It was difficult to imagine a film school offering him anything equivalent.
His mother had eventually agreed with the decision.
Not because she wanted Kane to abandon the possibility of studying forever, but because she understood that this opportunity was simply too good to pass up for the sake of college.
So ever since graduating, Kane had barely stopped.
His time was divided between two projects.
The first was still entirely his and lived on his YouTube channel.
His Backrooms series was on a temporary hiatus. Not because he had lost interest in it, but because that universe was now beginning to make the transition into A24's feature film.
So Kane decided to do what he had been doing for years whenever he came up with a new idea.
The result was The Oldest View.
A new analog horror series, this time centered around an enormous abandoned shopping mall buried underground.
Over the past few months, he had spent countless hours modeling environments, animating, rendering sequences, editing footage, designing sound, and composing music.
He didn't do absolutely everything by himself.
By that point, he already had a few people collaborating with him on different parts of the process.
But Kane was still involved in practically every major decision.
The first video, The Oldest View — Renewal, had been released in March 2023.
It was barely four minutes long. More than a full episode, it served as an introduction. It had already surpassed four million views.
The second arrived in May.
The Oldest View — Beneath the Earth.
It ran for twelve minutes and was far more ambitious. It was already approaching seven million views.
But neither of them compared to what he had uploaded the day before.
The Rolling Giant — The Oldest View Part 3.
More than forty minutes long and, naturally, the one that had demanded the most work from him.
At the same time, while working on The Oldest View, he was also moving forward with A24 on The Backrooms.
Most of that work could still be done from home. There were no sets yet, no cameras, no casting process.
Just early pre-production: writing and development.
Several times a week, Kane connected through video calls with Will Soodik, the screenwriter assigned to the project.
Kane wouldn't be primarily responsible for writing the film's script.
His job would be to direct it.
And naturally, he would also be credited as the creator of the web series the feature film was based on.
But that didn't mean he had simply handed over his universe and disappeared while someone else wrote the story.
His role during those meetings was fairly clear.
Kane was, essentially, the guardian of the Backrooms. How the world worked and what its rules were.
Soodik had another problem to solve.
Kane's videos weren't structured like a traditional movie.
They were fragments. Small pieces of information that forced the viewer to reconstruct what was happening for themselves.
That worked perfectly on YouTube.
But a traditional movie needed the typical beginning, middle, and end structure.
So much of Soodik's job consisted of taking that fragmented format and turning it into a three-act cinematic structure without removing what made the original videos special.
That night, the final meeting had gone on longer than expected.
When it finally ended, Kane said goodbye to Soodik and closed Zoom.
The screen returned to his desktop.
For a few seconds, he sat still in front of the monitor. Then he opened YouTube almost on instinct and went straight to his channel.
His eyes immediately stopped on the number beneath the video he had uploaded the day before.
More than a million views in less than twenty-four hours.
A small smile appeared on his face. "Nice... a million," he murmured happily.
After months of working on that video, it had crossed that milestone in barely a day.
Kane left the cursor still on the screen for a few seconds before another thought came to mind.
'Second Take...' he thought.
He remembered watching the Fantastic Fest vlog Owen had uploaded not long ago.
At some point in the video, he had mentioned several important dates for the following few weeks.
One of them was that very day.
October 9.
That meant there was probably already something new uploaded.
Kane looked over at the left-hand column on YouTube, where the channels he was subscribed to appeared.
He didn't have to look for long.
Second Take Films was near the top.
He clicked on it. The channel page appeared in front of him and, almost out of habit, his eyes went first to the subscriber count.
14.25 million.
Kane raised his eyebrows slightly. It still seemed insane to him.
The channel wasn't even three years old. It had been created in 2022 and yet was already closing in on fifteen million subscribers at a ridiculous pace.
It wasn't one of those channels uploading three videos a day in an attempt to constantly feed the algorithm.
Quite the opposite. It had surprisingly little content. Fewer than thirty videos.
They could practically be divided into three categories: short films, trailers, and vlogs.
That was it.
All you had to do was look at the numbers to understand why it was growing that way.
The latest videos were passing ten million views within a few days as if that were completely normal.
Kane had watched the Fantastic Fest vlog, for example. In barely a week, it had come close to thirty million views. Now it had already passed that.
Then there was Curve. That one he had been particularly interested in, since it was horror.
That alone was enough to catch his attention.
But there was another detail that felt familiar to him: the director, Curry Barker, had also come from YouTube.
It wasn't exactly the same situation as his, but Kane inevitably saw a certain parallel.
Curve had been uploaded on October first.
A little over a week ago.
He clicked on the video to get a better look at the numbers. It had accumulated 23 million views and reached two million likes.
He had liked it himself. In fact, it was one of his favorite short films on the channel, if not his favorite. He had loved the concept far more than Lights Out.
Two million likes. His own video had crossed one million views that night.
Curve had almost twice as many likes as his video had total views.
It wasn't an especially fair comparison. Second Take Films was operating on an entirely different scale. But it was still difficult not to think about it.
Kane also remembered fairly well that when he had watched Curve on the day it premiered, the channel had been sitting at around thirteen and a half million subscribers. Now it was at 14.25.
Almost a million subscribers in about eight days.
Kane slowly exhaled through his nose. "That's insane..." he murmured.
He went back, since he had already watched Curve more than once, and saw the new video. Uploaded about twelve hours ago.
What's Next for Second Take Films? – New Movies, Black Mirror & More
Kane moved the cursor over the thumbnail, which showed Owen and Matt standing in front of a whiteboard covered with several question marks.
7.9 million views in twelve hours.
That was exactly what made the channel's growth seem as though it had no ceiling.
Every time it seemed like Second Take Films had just had its big moment, something else appeared: a new trailer, a new vlog, or a new short film.
The snowball never seemed to stop rolling, and at the center of it all was one person.
Twenty-one-year-old Owen Ashford.
For months, Kane had been hearing stories about how strange it was that A24 had trusted someone his age with a movie like The Backrooms.
When the project had been announced, much of the conversation had revolved around exactly that.
Seventeen when negotiations began.
Eighteen when he finally signed and pre-production started.
He could become the youngest director in A24's history to direct a theatrically released film.
There had been headlines about his age, about how precocious he was, comments wondering how he would possibly handle a professional set, among other things.
Sometimes it felt a little strange.
Until he thought about Owen.
Because then his own situation seemed fairly normal.
Owen was only three years older than him and was already operating on an entirely different scale. He was an actor, screenwriter, producer, financier, and the founder of a production company.
A production company that seemed incapable of releasing anything without it eventually turning into a success.
Its most recent release was the perfect example.
Lights Out.
The movie had just passed ninety million dollars worldwide during its opening weekend.
But what caught Kane's attention most wasn't exactly the box office.
It was where it had come from.
Because Lights Out had also started as a short film on YouTube.
In fact, a fairly small short film, less than five minutes long, built around a simple idea: the monster appeared when the lights went out.
No massive mythology, no dozens of fragmented videos expanding the world. Nothing like what he had done with his version of the Backrooms.
Just a clear and effective horror concept. Owen and Matt had made that short approximately a year earlier.
Now there was already a full movie based on it, released in theaters around the world and making tens of millions of dollars.
All in roughly twelve months.
Kane found that almost more impressive than the numbers themselves.
He had been developing The Backrooms with A24 for months and they were still working on the script and pre-production.
Which was normal. Movies took time. There were hundreds of things to figure out.
But Second Take Films seemed to move at a different speed. Especially considering that in July of that same year, they had released Good Will Hunting, which had been even bigger at the box office and in terms of impact than Lights Out itself.
And now there was a video that, judging by the title, seemed ready to announce several more major things.
Kane looked at the thumbnail for another second and then clicked.
[Hey, everyone,] Owen greeted.
The image showed him sitting at his desk, leaned back in a chair while the camera filmed him from a few feet away.
Kane recognized him immediately. At this point, it would have been difficult not to.
He had been following the channel since the Paranormal Activity days. In fact, he had subscribed not long after they uploaded The Black Hole, their first short film.
He could probably consider himself one of the older subscribers by now.
What still felt strange to him was Owen himself. At first glance, he fit the image of a young Hollywood star perfectly: millions of followers, young, famous, and good-looking. Except then you remembered that the same guy didn't just stand in front of the camera. He did almost everything else too.
The strangest part was that acting didn't even seem like some secondary role he had taken on simply because he could cast himself or didn't have the money to pay someone else.
Owen was really good. There was a reason he had won Best Actor at Cannes. And out of all the shorts on the channel, the one he starred in was the one that had won the Oscar.
Kane found that combination interesting.
An actor who could easily look like the public face of a production company but who, in reality, was also the person building almost everything happening behind it.
[Like I announced at the end of the last vlog, you'll be watching this video on October ninth. Even though I'm recording this on Wednesday the fourth,] Owen continued casually.
Kane shifted slightly against the back of his chair.
[First: Curve is out. Go watch it if you haven't already. It's doing incredibly well, so thank you all for the support. Curry's happy. Too happy, actually. I think Matt infected him with his energy.]
Kane smiled faintly.
[Which means he's spent the last three days sending me screenshots of the view count every thirty minutes like I can't check it myself,] he added, shaking his head.
He paused briefly and continued, [But seriously, I'm really glad it worked. Especially because building that damn curve was way more complicated and expensive than it had any right to be.]
The video cut for a second to a shot of the massive set used for the short film.
[Now we have it sitting in storage and nobody knows what to do with it. Matt wants to keep it and preserve it like some kind of relic. Which might work if it weren't six meters wide and nine meters long...]
Kane let out a quiet laugh through his nose.
On screen, Owen fell silent for a few seconds.
He looked down.
From his expression, he seemed to be mentally calculating how much space the structure was taking up and what the hell they were supposed to do with it.
Eventually, he exhaled and looked back at the camera. [Problem for future me. By the way, two days until the worldwide release of Lights Out.]
A huge message immediately appeared in one corner of the screen:
OCTOBER 6
Accompanied by the same exaggerated countdown they had used several times during the Fantastic Fest vlog.
[Relax. I'm not going to bother you with the date today,] Owen commented.
The countdown disappeared.
Only to come back a second later, much larger.
OCTOBER 6
Owen kept a straight face for a moment and commented as if he had seen it coming, [If the date is showing up, it's probably Matt's fault. He's been messing around with the edit.]
Kane let out another small laugh.
[Alright,] Owen said, bringing his hands together. [So, what major announcements are in this video? Several. But I can't tell you from here.]
Owen stood up from the chair and picked up the camera from the tripod, [I'm going to tell you from the new Second Take Films offices.]
Large letters appeared across the screen.
SECOND TAKE FILMS MOVED
Kane raised his eyebrows slightly.
[Yeah,] Owen said. [We leveled up.]
The image began moving as he walked out of the room.
[The production company moved. And not just to better and much bigger offices. I also changed part of the company's structure.]
That last part caught Kane's attention more. A new office was one thing.
A restructuring sounded like something much more complicated and much bigger.
[I'll explain on the way.]
Owen started walking through the house while holding the camera.
[Ryan isn't here to film today,] he said as he turned down a hallway. [So I need to find myself another cameraman. I already have someone you guys know.]
Someone immediately came to Kane's mind.
Owen reached what looked like a living room. There was a girl sitting at a table with an open laptop in front of her.
Black headphones completely covered her ears while she stared intently at the screen.
Kane recognized her almost instantly: Jenna Ortega.
Owen walked over to the table.
Jenna noticed him, turned her head toward him, took off her headphones, and looked at the camera pointed at her.
[Are we leaving already?] she asked, as if she already knew perfectly well what was going on.
[Yes,] Owen replied from behind the camera. [She's going to be our camerawoman for the tour of the new offices. After that, I'll set the camera down to tell you all the important announcements.]
Jenna closed the laptop and stood up. [It'll be an honor to take over Tyler's old job,] she joked.
Owen laughed as he handed her the camera.
Jenna took it and, the moment she had it in her hands, turned the lens toward Owen.
Now he was the one on screen.
[The good thing is you already have some experience,] Owen commented. [You filmed part of the Oppenheimer premiere vlog.]
Jenna nodded proudly. [Exactly. I'm not a rookie.]
[Although your camera work left a little to be desired,] Owen commented, and Jenna's smile, although it couldn't be seen, disappeared.
[Not even two minutes since I appeared in the video and you're already criticizing my camera work. Tyler and Ryan must have a pretty difficult life working for a boss like you,] Jenna said.
Kane smiled in front of the monitor.
Owen raised his eyebrows slightly. [Second Take Films has high quality standards.]
[I don't doubt it. The people deserve quality,] Jenna said, completely agreeing.
But suddenly, the image began shaking violently.
As if Jenna were incapable of keeping the camera still for more than half a second.
Kane laughed.
Owen did too.
[Perfect,] Owen said between laughs. [These are the standards the people deserve.]
[What? Does it bother you? I'm doing my best,] Jenna shot back.
Owen shook his head, amused.
Until, a few seconds later, Jenna stabilized the image again.
After a few more jokes, Owen looked at the camera and said, [Alright. See you there.]
He raised a hand and brought his palm toward the camera until it completely covered the lens.
The image went black.
One second, two, and then it returned.
Owen was now standing in the middle of a completely different space. Much larger and brighter.
Behind him, desks and rooms separated by glass walls could be seen. He spread both arms.
[Welcome to the new Second Take Films offices.]
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