‘Backrooms’ director lifts lid on mind-blowing 30,000-foot set
A24 signed its youngest-ever director, horror influencer Kane Parsons, to direct its upcoming horror movie, Backrooms. Now, Parsons has lifted a lid on the mind-blowing scale of the ambitious, highly anticipated project.
Last June, it was announced that Parsons is set to bring his YouTube series to life, a passion project of found-footage horror content that amassed hundreds of millions of views online across 22 videos.
Now, 20-year-old Parsons addressed crowds at CCXP Mexico to share an update on the upcoming feature, fronted by Chiwetel Ejiofor of 12 Years a Slave and Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World.
The filmmaker revealed that he taught himself how to use the free, open-source 3D graphics software Blender to create the world of his YouTube videos.
From there, “we would literally go and build them in real time,” Parsons said of making the movie.
He added, “We did a lot of tests there to make sure we were getting the general tone that people expected [from] Backrooms. We did 50 wallpaper tests to get the right shape of yellow.”
Parsons experienced “the strangest, coolest moment on this project for me” when he returned after two weeks to check out the finished set. “The set was huge,” he shared. “We built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms that we could walk around in. Actually, some people were getting lost. It felt like being there, which was really weird.”
During his discussion, he also deemed the film “lonely”, explaining, “In the film, there is rarely a moment where there are more than one or two characters on screen at a given time. It’s a pretty lonely film.”
Alongside Reinsve and Ejiofor, the film will feature Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell will star in the horror.
Backrooms is slated for a May 29th cinematic release in both the UK and the US.
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