Backrooms began as a one-man Blender project by director Kane Parsons, who at 20 years old just became the youngest filmmaker ever to direct a number one box office opening. The film is based on Parsons' found-footage YouTube series which was inspired by "The Backrooms" creepypasta — a famous image first posted on 4chan. Parsons was fascinated by the image and spent around eight hours a day recreating its feeling in Blender, with the first video taking approximately a month to complete. That original Blender file became the starting point for the feature film’s set - production designer Danny Vermette’s (Longlegs) computer immediately crashed due to the size of the file! Translating the digital environment into reality became a massive construction effort.
More than 30,000 square feet of Backrooms sets were built across four sound stages, using 37,000 square feet of wallpaper and 29,000 square feet of carpeting. Vermette compared assembling the interconnected sets to playing Tetris. Rather than creating endless identical rooms, the production focused on scale, verticality and physical interaction. Vermette researched liminal spaces extensively and argued that many emerged from the design “lazy” priorities of the 1970/80/90s, when architects often emphasized volume.
To make the environments more stressful and unpredictable, the sets incorporated steep floors, furniture protruding from carpets and doorways placed halfway up walls. Many sets reached heights of 20 feet, while actors crawled through tunnels, squeezed through narrow crevices and navigated sloped surfaces. The team tested 30 wallpaper combinations, 30 carpet combos and multiple lighting setups to find the exact shade of yellow that captured the feeling of the original image. Vermette also worked to achieve the right scale and prevent repeating patterns from striating on camera. Parsons has described the desired effect as resembling abstract flashes of locations remembered from childhood.
Outside of the Backrooms, the film drew surprising visual inspiration from Robin Williams’ One Hour Photo. And, the skies were digitally altered to appear larger and more expansive, purposely echoing the clouds in Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Truman Show and where the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper was photographed which was close to where Parsons grew up.
