Backrooms, the latest from A24, releases in cinemas this weekend, and is proudly projected to be A24’s biggest opening weekend yet. Starring Oscar-nominated Chiwetel Ejiofor and recent Cannes champion Renate Reinsve, you’d think a reliable, successful name would be at the helm of this anticipatory golden goose. But you must have been living under a rock (or terminally lost amid the acid-yellows of The Backrooms itself) to not have heard the trivia tidbit that this gem is directed by none other than then-19-year-old Kane Parsons.
Parsons, A24’s youngest ever director, did not ‘invent’ The Backrooms. Instead, he was responsible for its evolution, transforming the phenomenon from a creepypasta concept and adjunct spooky image or two (spawned from the depths of Hell: 4chan) into an effective and revered mythology of found-footage short films on YouTube. Utilising Blender, Adobe After Effects and motion capture suits from just the age of 16, it was clear that his talent in filmmaking would blossom into something huge — assuming the web series wasn’t that already.
Now that his tremendous visionary talent is getting its flowers, and certainly earning its scares, the internet’s catacomb-dwellers have unearthed themselves to don tinfoil hats and ruin the fun. In the days before release, a pseudo-smear conspiracy has gone viral to suggest Parsons did not ever ‘direct’ Backrooms, and was instead a marketing ploy while on-set producers and ghost-directors did the project’s heavy lifting.
Legendary horror figures like James Wan and Osgood Perkins were producers on set alongside Shawn Levy and others, leading nay-sayers to posit that Parsons was not the mastermind beyond the camera as A24’s marketing would love for you to believe. While Parsons does consider these figures as great mentors, this scantily conceptualised argument, based on no hard evidence beyond merely these directors being amid the production, completely disrespects the mythos Parsons has clearly built in his YouTube series, and the capacity he has already shown to make something truly great and nail-biting. They were exactly that: “mentors”.
Figures from set have already come out to dispel these tear-down rumours. Mark Duplass, a supporting actor, explained that he believed himself to be hired for the possibility of mentorship and guidance on-set, but instead Parsons displayed a control of his arena and actors that rivals many who have been in the industry for years. Duplass added, “For those of you who have all these thoughts, were you there?” as if to tell these conspirators to trust what they see on screen.
Parsons also humorously responded, noting that near-all Hollywood productions are ghost-directed by the enigmatic “Older Gentleman”, seemingly able to marionette the entire industry into his shadowed grasp. Parsons did the right thing, not bothering to emphatically shut down the claims and instead let the film do the talking, but these circulating beliefs are nonetheless clear irreverence for the empirical talent he has shown at cultivating a logic, designing the sets, and even composing the score, as he is co-composing for the film also alongside Perkins mainstay Edo van Breeman.
Everywhere we look in the horror hemisphere of Hollywood right now, YouTuber-turned-directors are coming out of the woodwork with mesmerising, eye-capturing ideas, and the talent to back it up. Curry Barker just made history with Obsession; Markiplier‘s Iron Lung broke the box office earlier this year; and Michael Shanks’ (aka timtimfed on YouTube) Together also released in 2025. The Backrooms debate is a targeted hypocrisy, a bizarre attempt to shut down something spectacular, and a blatant disregard of the 24-episode anthology built on the doorstep of Parsons’ filmmaking career. Duplass is right: we were not there, and this argument is, bluntly, ridiculous. Let filmmakers make movies.
I sat down with director Elias Demetriou to talk about his film ‘Maricel’ which follows a Filipino domestic worker in Cyprus caring for an elderly couple who have a lot of unspoken family drama.
