A Horror Masterpiece You Might Have Missed
How an incredible 50-minute short, The Rolling Giant, builds tension, embraces the uncanny and gives viewers the virtual creeps
The Rolling Giant, Kane Pixels
“What’s up, guys! Wyatt here.”
The horror begins with the cheerful banality of countless YouTube videos, as our teenage host treks through secluded woodland, chuckling as he passes an ‘Area Closed’ sign, until he finds the really cool thing he’s hoping will finally get his subscribers into the high hundreds.
Hidden in the shade of an old tree, we find what looks like some kind of burrow. Curious, we peer inside and see a flight of concrete stairs, eerily symmetrical, perfectly lit, leading down, down, down into seeming infinity.
Thus opens The Rolling Giant, easily one of the most effective horror movies of 2023 and – somehow – the least talked about.
It’s a stunning 50-minute short and the latest in a so-far three-part series subtitled The Oldest View (comprising not-strictly-necessary prologue shorts Renewal and Beneath the Earth), written and directed by 18-year old wunderkind Kane Pixels (real name Kane Parsons). He’s a VFX artist, musician and filmmaker who has been creating seminal horror shorts for the last few years in between homework assignments and thinking about college applications.
His previous nine-minute short, The Backrooms (2022), was inspired by an anonymous 4chan thread about unsettling environments. This deeply uncanny found-footage horror piece features a hapless high-school filmmaker who ‘no-clips’ out of reality only to find himself trapped in a formaldehyde-yellow maze of office spaces, stalked by a screeching, lumbering… something.
According to a 2023 interview with fellow YouTuber Desolar, The Backrooms took Kane’s YouTube subs from barely 200,000 to over one million in a little over six weeks and quickly expanded into a web-series that both teased and accommodated the inevitable viewer theories that followed - all of them straining to defuse the very inexplicability that makes the horror of The Backrooms so effective.
The Backrooms also inspired a host of chased-through-a-maze creations by indie and DIY game designers (there remains some debate over whether or not The Backrooms is essentially an open-source concept), as well as boosted wider artistic interest in ‘liminal spaces’. In February 2023, Deadline announced that Kane was working with A24 to direct a (copyrightable) Backrooms feature film from a script by Robert Patino.
The Rolling Giant continues the technical assurance and minimalist brilliance of The Backrooms and is arguably Kane’s most accomplished movie yet, assuring us that his previous hit was not just a viral fluke…
