12 June 11 - 17, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents ▼ FILM GHOST OF DALLAS PAST BEFORE “BACKROOMS” BECAME A BREAKOUT HORROR FILM, A MALL IN DALLAS INSPIRED THE SCARES. BY PRESTON BARTA T here’s a particular kind of American ruin that doesn’t make the history books: the dead shopping mall. No markers, no preservation funds. Just a husked-out atrium, a few ghostly storefronts and fluorescent lights dying slowly over- head. Kane Parsons understood something about that space so well that he used one from Dallas as inspiration. Parsons’ feature film “Backrooms” opened to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, boasting a staggering re- turn on an estimated $10 million budget. 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 a box-office phe- nomenon. The film, starring Chiwetel Ejio- for, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, carries all the atmospheric dread Parsons perfected online: liminal spaces, institu- tional fluorescence, the creeping sense that something vast and indifferent is watching. But before any of that, there was a mall in Dallas. Valley View and the Afterlife Valley View Mall opened in North Dallas in the early 1970s and spent decades as a local institution with big-name retail anchors, discount floors and families moving through its corridors. By the time demolition got un- derway in 2017, Valley View had become a canvas for the people the city had largely stopped paying attention to. In 2012, new ownership made an unusual call. Rather than let the empty wings rot, they opened the Gallery at Midtown and Artist Studios, inviting Dallas’ artistic com- munity to occupy the halls. Among the artists who moved in was Kevin Obregon, who had built something remark- able: a towering papier-mâché figure on wheels depicting Julien Reverchon, a 19th- century French botanist with roots in Dallas history. The piece was created for the 2012 Pa- rade of Giants celebrating the opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge over the Trinity River. Known as the Rolling Giant, it found a home outside Obregon’s studio inside the mall — a silent, looming likeness of a long-dead Frenchman who once cataloged the Texas wild, haunting the corridors of a dying mall. This is the imagery that threads through Parsons’ CGI web series “The Oldest View,” the project that came before “Backrooms.” It remains one of the stranger, more haunt- ing pieces of internet filmmaking. Ghost in the Flora “The Oldest View” is built around a piece of history most Dallasites wouldn’t recognize. In the 19th century, Reverchon emigrated with his family to the south bank of the Trinity River in Dallas County, settling with the utopian colony of La Réunion, a short- lived French socialist experiment. Rever- chon became a professor of botany at Baylor University College of Medicine and Phar- macy in Dallas, spent decades cataloging the flora of Texas, and was eventually honored with Reverchon Park. In “The Oldest View,” Reverchon ap- pears as a black-and-white wanderer, drift- ing through the forest. He’s a figure at home in a world that no longer exists. The series follows Wyatt (played by Parsons), a young YouTuber who documents his travels as he trespasses into a private park and stumbles upon a hidden tunnel beneath an oak tree. When he climbs down, he finds avast space that mirrors the layout of Valley View Mall. There, in the corner, stands the Rolling Giant. Dallas as Mythology What makes Parsons’ “Backrooms” origin story richer than a simple “kid goes viral” narrative is that he never went to the mall. Parsons had saved an uncanny photo he stumbled across online, drawn to it out of cu- riosity, and traced it back to its source: an abandoned mall in Dallas. The building blocks of his aesthetic were assembled in Val- ley View before “Backrooms” took theaters by storm. Dallas’ past gave him the material that would shape everything what followed. The city has a habit of demolishing things before it realizes they mattered. Parsons no- ticed before we did — and the box office re- ceipts suggest the rest of the world was ready to follow him in. Culture from p11 Asterios Moutsokapas A still from “Backrooms,” the new horror film breakout from A24.
