I Explored the Real Mall That Inspired the Backrooms Movie (Before It Was Demolished)
By now, you've probably seen or heard about Backrooms — the A24 horror film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons that opened to $81 million its first weekend and became one of the most talked-about horror movies in years. Kane originally built his reputation on YouTube with his viral Backrooms series, which is based on the famous creepypasta internet legend. But between that series and the movie, he made a lesser-known horror web series called The Oldest View, set entirely inside a real abandoned mall in North Dallas, Texas, centered around a real piece of Dallas public art called the Rolling Giant.
Freshy Kanal Cinematic Wiki - Fandom
That mall was Valley View Center. And I walked through it — with the Rolling Giant right in front of me — before any of this existed.
What Is The
Oldest View?
I’m a huge fan of Kane Parsons, who is best known for his Backrooms series, the found-footage YouTube phenomenon based on the creepypasta legend of endless liminal spaces. But in January 2023, while his Backrooms series was on hiatus, he began a separate project called The Oldest View, which was a CGI horror web series (built in Blender, I believe) set specifically inside Valley View Center in Dallas, Texas.
The inspiration reportedly came from a liminal space image Kane stumbled across online around the summer of 2021. The image was of a bizarre, uncanny sculpture sitting in a dead mall that I actually got to meet in person years ago! (The picture is near the bottom of this article.)
Kane Pixels Backrooms Wiki
That sculpture was the Rolling Giant, a 12-foot wheeled puppet created by Dallas artist Kevin Obregon to depict French botanist Julien Reverchon for a 2012 Parade of Giants celebrating the opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. The Rolling Giant ended its days stored inside Valley View Mall, and when Kane discovered that image, it sparked an entire series.
In The Oldest View, a YouTuber named Wyatt discovers a mysterious staircase in an empty field that leads underground to a supernatural recreation of Valley View Mall, where the Rolling Giant hunts him through the corridors. Kane and his collaborator Corrupt painstakingly recreated the entire mall in CGI using Blender (Just confirmed this with a little research, lol). The series launched in March 2023 and racked up millions of views while becoming a cult favorite in the digital horror community.
The real Valley View Mall was demolished in May 2023, the same month the series was set. An event that I had a hand in...
Kane's aesthetic from The Oldest Viewwas filled with liminal dread, a dead mall atmosphere, and a sense of something massive and wrong lurking in familiar spaces which threaded directly into the Backrooms movie that just opened to $118 million worldwide.
I Was There First
Me and my friend Holland in the abandoned food court of Valley View Mall just months before it was demolished.
Here's where my story comes in.
A few years before The Oldest View existed, my friend Holland (aka The Helicopter Bear on YouTube) and I ventured out looking to make an urban exploration video. We'd originally planned to explore the Tri-City Hospital ruins in Dallas, but that didn't pan out. Then we tried a storm drain tunnel off Jupiter Road in Garland that I'd skated past a dozen times. That ended when the ankle-deep watered tunnels started filling with cockroaches and small fish, which felt like a clear message to leave.
On the drive back, I remembered Valley View. I'd spent a lot of weekends there growing up. I'd jotted down an idea for a video about it and never followed through… until that day.
Driving up, it looked like a bomb had gone off on one side while the rest still stood. We crossed a waterlogged field and walked through an entrance that had been forced open long before we got there. What was inside genuinely stopped me in my tracks.
Four floors of decay. A food court that looked like the apocalypse had come through and decided to stay. Graffiti covering every surface. Ceilings caved in. Blood stains on the concourse floor. Bullet holes in the old glass elevator. An abandoned AMC theater with the seats still bolted down. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I’m sure the Rolling Giant watched from afar.
What Happened After the Video Dropped
Shortly after the video went live, friends and YouTube subscribers started sending me links to a D Magazine article that referenced my footage. The piece noted that the city attorney's office was now threatening the property owners with litigation if the structure wasn't fully demolished within weeks, and my video was cited as evidence of just how accessible the dangerous building had become.
Then it made the Dallas Morning News. Then People Newspapers. Then I got a shout-out on the Ben and Skin Show.
I do want to be clear though: we didn't break into anything. Every entrance we used had been wide open long before we arrived. But the video apparently made visible what city officials needed to act on and they used this to push through a demolition that had been stalled for years.
Valley View Mall was demolished in 2023.
You can read the full story behind all of that here: I Accidentally Got Valley View Mall in Dallas Demolished (probably).
The Rolling Giant
Interesting enough, the Rolling Giant was a real piece of Dallas public art. It was a 12-foot wheeled puppet created by artist Kevin Obregon for a 2012 celebration of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge opening. It depicted Julien Reverchon, a 19th-century French botanist who settled in Dallas and catalogued Texas plant life. After the parade, it ended up stored inside Valley View Mall, where it sat through the building's long decline, surrounded by graffiti and debris.
When Kane Parsons turned it into the central horror entity of The Oldest View, he was working from a real image of a real thing in a real abandoned building; a piece of art that I actually met myself in 2012.
When I met the Rolling Giant May 19, 2013
There's something strange about getting a picture of a massive, creepy rolling sculpture in a once thriving mall, years before a teenage filmmaker in California would turn it into internet horror history. In retrospect, it makes my entire relationship to Valley View Mall feel different; a memory I know I’ll keep with me my entire life.
Final Thoughts
The Backrooms movie exists because Kane Parsons made a Backrooms YouTube series. The Oldest View exists among that series. And The Oldest View exists because a kid stumbled across a photo of a creepy rolling sculpture in a dead Dallas mall at 2am and got an idea for a video, much like I got my idea to make my video on Valley View Mall a year before.
The mall is gone and the Rolling Giant is gone, but luckily we have projects like this to keep such a cool (now dead) mall alive.
If you want to see what Valley View actually looked like from the inside, including the corridors, the food court, the AMC theater, etc before it was demolished, (AND before the CGI recreation and before any movie deal existed) here’s the video again:
Have your own Valley View memories?
Drop them in the comments below!
