The strange thing about the internet in the year 2026 is that we all seem to know not to trust anybody but we also all seem to trust everybody. It often seems like literally anyone can say literally anything and it’ll at the very least spark a conversation about whether it’s true or not.
It happens almost every week in the online horror community alone, where fake news spreads like wildfire no matter how unreliable or unknown the source may be. The latest bit of fake news circulating online? Kane Parsons didn’t actually direct A24’s Backrooms movie.
From what I understand, the conversations originally kicked off over the long holiday weekend with the same rumor spreading about Curry Barker and his hit horror movie Obsession, with the conversation then quickly pivoting to Kane Parsons and Backrooms. Both Obsession and Backrooms are the work of young filmmakers who got their start on YouTube, leading many naysayers to fire up rumors that their big screen features were “ghost directed” by others.
Kane Parsons was just 19 years old when he was hired to direct Backrooms for A24, a feature length expansion of his own viral YouTube videos, making him the youngest director in A24 history and one of the youngest filmmakers to ever direct a big time mainstream movie. Rather than celebrating that fact, well, some online trolls are instead choosing to call it into question.
Parsons was surrounded by established genre names including James Wan and Osgood Perkins when it came time to turn his viral videos into a theatrical feature, with Wan producing the film for Atomic Monster and Perkins serving as a mentor of sorts. “When we started production up in Vancouver, I was working very closely, literally in the same office with Osgood Perkins,” Parsons told DiscussingFilm. “So, he’s been a really great mentor figure in a number of ways, in that it’s very much the crew that he and Chris Ferguson put together over a number of years. There’s a lot of secondhand resources I’ve been able to lean on while working on this.”
The rumor here is that Wan and/or Perkins actually directed Backrooms rather than Parsons himself, but Backrooms star Mark Duplass has taken to social media to quickly shoot it down.
Duplass tweets, “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”
Duplass explains in a longer video post on Instagram, “So a lot of takes going on right now about whether Kane Parsons, at the tender age of 19, actually directed Backrooms. Or whether it was more ghost directed by one of his more experienced producers. Um, I was there. I suspect one of the reasons I was hired is because I mentor a lot of young filmmakers, and they may have thought it would be good to have someone there who’s sensitive to that. And I was prepared to help out, and what happened was, he didn’t need any of us.”
“He was intensely prepared,” Duplass adds. “He spent the last five years of his life building out one of the most detailed mythologies I’ve ever been a part of. Worked incredibly closely with his crew, particularly his DP and shot design. And was VERY sensitive and calm and smart in dealing with actors. So for those of you who have all these thoughts, were you there?”
Of course, this isn’t the first time rumors like this have been started about horror movies directed by young filmmakers who were working with more experienced producers. The most famous debate has to do with whether Tobe Hooper truly directed Poltergeist or it was actually the work of producer Steven Spielberg, but let’s not get lost in that rabbit hole again…
From DIRECTOR KANE PARSONS, Backrooms will be released in theaters May 29.
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