From viral shorts to a24 horror: how 'backrooms' became real
What started as a teenager's eerie YouTube series about endless beige hallways has morphed into a full-blown theatrical horror film, Backrooms, now premiering from A24. The challenge? Production designer Danny Vermette had to translate a digital ghost story—inspired by a “creepypasta,” a digitally native urban legend—into a tangible, terrifying reality across four soundstages.
The digital blueprint that crashed a computer
The seeds of Backrooms were sown in a simple online rumor: photos of a damp, beige basement and the unsettling possibility of an infinite maze of similar spaces. When director and co-creator Kane Parsons (who, at just 20, initially conceived the shorts in 2022) shared his vision for the film's spaces with Vermette, the sheer scale of the concept proved overwhelming. “It crashed my computer,” Vermette confessed to ELLE Decor, describing the digital mockup Parsons provided. The original YouTube shorts, while captivating, presented a unique obstacle: how to faithfully recreate the intangible feeling of endlessness in a physical space?
The team leaned into the surreal. Vermette drew inspiration from video game “clipping,” where objects appear distorted and spliced due to glitches in the game’s physics – a particularly fitting aesthetic for a film exploring fractured realities. “We really wanted to have as much practical as we could,” Vermette explained, emphasizing the importance of immersing the actors in the unsettling environment. This meant constructing elaborate sets in the Toronto area, doubling for San José, California, and creating a tangible sense of disorientation.
Frankensteined furniture and a child's playground
The film's aesthetic progresses from drab and depressing to utterly bizarre, culminating in what Vermette describes as piles of “Frankensteined ottomans and chairs,” a visual representation of the characters' increasingly fractured mental states. But the sets weren't solely reliant on traditional construction. Vermette skillfully integrated VFX to enhance the unsettling atmosphere, but the core of the Backrooms experience came from the tangible, physical world he meticulously crafted.
Surprisingly, the chaotic set wasn't as daunting as one might imagine. Vermette even brought his children—aged nine and six—to the set. “They just ran around on the ramps; it became such a fun place for them,” he shared, highlighting the unexpected playfulness amidst the unsettling design.
Backrooms isn't just a haunted house; it’s a reflection of the characters’ inner turmoil, a visual manifestation of their anxieties and despair. The film’s success speaks to the power of embracing the unexpected, of transforming viral digital ephemera into a compelling and deeply unsettling cinematic experience. And as audiences step into the Backrooms, they'll find themselves questioning the boundaries between reality and the digital world, and the unsettling spaces that lie just beyond our perception.