Chiwetel Ejiofor says the set for Backrooms was a maze of carpeted, fluorescent-lit corridors that seemed to go on forever, and people kept getting lost in it. The 30,000 sq ft labyrinth, dressed in the same sickly yellow wallpaper, was the physical home of a buzzy A24 horror film built from an idea that began as an internet image.
Ejiofor, one of the actors in the Backrooms movie alongside Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, said the confusion was immediate, especially in the first days of filming. “Especially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure that’s the way,’” he said. “And you find yourself just back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you’re like: ‘Get me some help!’” By the end, he said, the experience had gone well past odd. “There was stuff that we were doing by the end of the film that I was just like: ‘This is among the most bizarre things I have ever been involved in.’”
At the center of it all is Kane Parsons, 20, who had never made a feature film before Backrooms. Parsons said he had been making films since he was a small child and had made several hundred films, but the leap from online work to a studio feature still landed hard. “I recognised it as a big, potentially jarring, leap forward,” he said. “Holy shit, I am on an accelerated fast track somehow, because some shadowy overlord decided to …” He added, “I have no idea how all of this spiralled to the place it’s at now.”
Parsons also said the shift carried a personal cost. “It’s something that I didn’t ever make enough time for in the past,” he said of going to the cinema. “Growing up with YouTube, it’s like there’s a lower requirement to go out and consume through a cinema.” He added, “sorry, I’m a rambler,” before returning to the point that he knew he wanted to make the film and understood the kind of direction it needed. “I was there, and I know I wanted to make the movie, and I knew how to make what I make online,” he said. “And I feel when it comes to the actual creative direction, knowing what’s wanted, that’s there.”
The Backrooms concept itself began with a single photograph taken in 2003 of a vacant shop space in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It became an internet phenomenon after being posted in May 2019 on a 4chan message board that invited users to submit disquieting images that just feel off. What started as a strange online image is now a studio horror film, and Parsons’ first feature is the bridge between those two worlds.
