Horror hits rarely wait long for a follow-up announcement. This one has taken exactly the amount of time Hollywood usually needs to argue about who gets to make it first.
Dread Central reported Friday that Kane Parsons has officially signed on to direct Backrooms 2 for A24. The outlet cited sources close to the project and said an official studio announcement is imminent.
That word matters. Nothing here comes from A24 itself. It's a reported deal, not a confirmed one, and the studio hasn't put out a statement.
Still, the report answers a question that's been hanging over Parsons since May. Backrooms turned into the biggest release in A24's history, opening to $81.5 million domestically and finishing its run close to $400 million worldwide against a $10 million budget. A film that big was always getting a sequel. What wasn't clear was whether Parsons would direct it himself, or whether he'd take on something else first.
He has an original project in development with Osgood Perkins, the filmmaker who produced Backrooms and mentored Parsons through his first studio feature. According to World of Reel's reporting on the new Dread Central story, that Perkins collaboration has reportedly been shelved for now, with Backrooms 2 positioned as Parsons' next film.
Parsons was 16 when he first uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube in 2022, expanding the internet's existing liminal-space mythology into his own analog horror series. Executive producer Chris White discovered the videos after his son showed them to him, and eventually brought the project to James Wan and Michael Clear at Atomic Monster. A24 acquired the rights from there, and Parsons directed his feature debut as a teenager.
This is where the story gets messier. Back in June, Deadline reported that Parsons was searching for a screenwriting collaborator on the sequel, and that his contract for future Backrooms projects sat with A24. Parsons pushed back almost immediately.
Speaking on The Town with Matt Belloni, he addressed the writer-search claim directly. "I'm not sure where that got out," Parsons said, adding that it "seems more like a hallucinated [thing]."
That denial was narrow. Parsons disputed the specific claim about actively hunting for a co-writer. He never said a sequel wasn't happening at all, and he'd already told Screen Rant before release that Backrooms was far from finished for him.
Today's report doesn't reconcile every detail from June. It doesn't confirm whether Parsons found a writer, and it doesn't touch the earlier denial directly. What it adds is something more specific: a signed directing commitment, and word that this will be his next project rather than a someday plan.
Nothing about casting has surfaced. The first film starred Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, alongside Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia, but none of them are confirmed to return.
There's also no release date, and no filming timeline attached to this report. Anyone searching for one right now is going to come up empty, at least until A24 makes something official.
One other detail keeps resurfacing. Parsons has talked before about wanting to continue the Backrooms story as a television series rather than a straight sequel. He's called that his "dream scenario," and said a series would be "the most practical way to narratively get what you want" out of the world he built.
That leaves an open question sitting underneath today's news. A signed movie deal doesn't rule out a television version down the line. It just means the movie comes first.
For now, what's confirmed is narrow but real. Parsons has a directing deal for Backrooms 2. A24 hasn't said a word publicly.
Everything else, the cast, the date, the format beyond this one film, stays exactly where it was yesterday. Unconfirmed.
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