Mark Duplass has publicly backed Backrooms‘ director Kane Parsons. The actor shut down claims that the young director didn’t actually helm the upcoming A24 horror movie. Parsons, just 20 years old, built his reputation online through his wildly popular YouTube found footage series before landing one of indie horror’s most anticipated feature deals.
Now, with the film’s release soon, skeptics on social media are questioning whether someone his age could genuinely lead a major production, and Duplass isn’t having it.
Mark Duplass says Kane Parsons was ‘100% in control’ amid Backrooms directing rumors
The pushback came after an X (formerly Twitter) user suggested that Parsons “absolutely didn’t direct this movie,” adding a backhanded compliment that the film was still “moving in the right direction.” Duplass fired back, writing, “Hmmm, with all due respect I don’t remember seeing you on set. When I was there, Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”
This comes as a strong endorsement from the actor. Duplass stars in Backrooms alongside an impressive cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, with James Wan, Shawn Levy, Osgood Perkins, and others producing.
The upcoming movie is based on Parsons’ own web series, The Backrooms: Found Footage, which he created in 2022 at just 16. The series drew from a 2019 creepypasta image on 4chan — an eerie photo of what looks like an endless, vacant office space — and spun it into a gripping found footage story about the fictional Async Research Institute investigating mysterious disappearances tied to a strange dimension.
It seems A24 took note of the series and decided to make it into a movie. The feature adaptation followed, with Vancouver as the backdrop for production last summer. Parsons himself has described the journey of scaling his vision to the big screen over four years as “a very bizarre dream,” while noting there have “really not been many barriers to creative control” in his collaboration with the studio (via Deadline).
Originally reported by Devanshi Basu on ComingSoon.
