The surreal plot involves Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), furniture store owner who finds secret doorway that leads him to seemingly endless series of nondescript rooms. Once he goes missing in them, his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), enters these Backrooms to find him, and her reality starts bending.

I’ve never done any of these before, so it’s a lot of new experiences, consistently, every day of every week. I’m just excited for it to hit the internet, and on May 29th, I’ll probably just be staying in monitoring the fallout..

Original genesis

I’d been doing The Backrooms as a series online for only a month when this conversation started. I put out that first short at the beginning of 2022. I had immediately connected it to this other abstract story with some broader thematic ideas that I wanted to touch on, kind of like an itch or an engine of a story. I combined those and it became the series that people know. I designed it to work where I knew the ending when I started it. I’ve grown up where a lot of my favorite IPs are all serialized, so, yes, I love film, but I think I’m biased to enjoy stories that are more than just one singular piece of material and pace themselves out over a period of years or time, and that feverish audience who’s waiting for more and trying to put something together. That informed the desire to have a meticulously crafted story, as best as I could.

I was doing the found footage stuff because Blender [an open-source 3D modeling and animation design program] is free, and I know how to use Blender. I can put the character behind the camera, so I don’t have to deal with character animations, and when I do have to deal with characters, they don’t have to look uncanny, because they’re in hazmat suits. So I played to what I could, and but the hope would always be to approach the Backrooms concept from a more intimate, human-driven perspective, where rather than doing things that change the way the Backrooms presents itself, or the way the mythology works, or the history of that narrative, it would be just allowing the interior lives of these characters to more specificity dictate and imply a deeper meaning to the space. The humanity of the characters and the intimacy of it ends up coloring the space a little bit more than you can do alone, when it’s just purely observing the space from an analytical perspective.

People reached out within the first month. Lots of companies were emailing me. I had no reference of the industry prior to that point. I was 16 at the time, and I was very skeptical and assuming that it would fall apart in some way, shape, or form, just because … What the fuck? It wasn’t that it was too good to be true, I think it was just that I’ve grown up seeing so many properties get butchered by suits and whatnot, that I assumed that there would be some kind of catch here, something’s gotta give. I didn’t want to end up with nothing, and I didn’t want to end up not being able to work on this series, and letting the series fall apart in some way. I was just very careful of that, and eventually, I got managers, I got a lawyer and we found a way to safely go into a handshake deal, initially with Atomic Monster and 21 Laps. We just developed a version of the film that would work for new audiences and fans of the series. It wasn’t the version we ended up making, exactly. It was an iterative process, but we pitched that to A24, along with a few other studios, and we’ve made a deal with them, and it was a deal that I felt good about, and still maintain that I do. I think it ended up getting to a place where the fears that I had all subsided.

Protectinf yourself and your vision?

A lot of it was a gamble. I feel as though, in the early days, when I had the ability to walk away, I would have walked away with the IP. If it was up to me, I would hold on to that thing and not abandon it, because I want to work on it. I make it because I want to make it, not because it’s just a job for me to do. The specifics of it matter to me, and I don’t think anyone else in the entire production of the thing really even has a handle on a lot of the engine of it, so I do think I’m still invaluable to that. I like to think unless they’re training a fucking Grok model on my brain or something without me knowing … I think I was just, at a certain point, either we’re making the movie or we’re not making the movie, and if I stand in the way of too many pivotal moments with my personal asks, which are maybe not maintained or felt by all the other parties involved, who are going to be spending this kind of money and time on this project, I feel like I had to kind of find the right balance of letting it move forward, even if it wasn’t 100% where I wanted. It was knowing that I would have a chance, if I really worked hard, to get in there within a limited window, and fix the things that I wasn’t liking.

If I didn’t touch anything, it would drift continuously, and it would continue getting made, but it would just take extra added effort on top of the normal production that goes into a film to continually adjust it to my liking. It was an obsession for me for most of the production. It was not uncommon to have 20-hour, 21-hour work days sometimes, just really cramming to get everything that needed to be done, done. So I think that’s kind of the honest answer: It was a gamble. We wanted to make this film, and we wanted to make sure that we could get there, and I found great creative partners with [producer] Chris Ferguson up in Vancouver, who understood exactly where I was coming from, and he got it. And [“Longlegs” director] Oz Perkins was a really good defender, and he played great creative defense on this, and he’s just fun.

Liminal spaces?

I feel as though liminal space, that whole world, is very much connecting with people on the level that it’s referencing uncurated little fragments of memories that are lacking context. Moments in your life where the primate mind has learned its environment, and has a specific relationship with the way it memorizes its environment. You’ve got little abstract flickers of a location you went to when you were a kid that you have no idea where it was, or when it happened, or what happened there exactly. You just have information that floats around in the brain sometimes, and a lot of these little space photos evoke the feeling of people who had childhoods in the early 2000s and ’90s, and I think that’s partially just due to the medium of a lot of the stuff being digicam.

With “Backrooms,” I take it in the sci-fi direction, but it’s a tangible version of that idea and exploration in the form of this place that is either exploiting or using, probably not consciously, but I think people find it and come into contact with it, and they find that most of the horrors to be found are them projecting their own interior world onto it, like a person in sensory deprivation, grasping at random noises, using what’s in their own mind subconsciously to try to make sense of it. I think it’s a phenomenon used to break down the conscious experience of an individual person, and highlights the systems that we put up as a species that push us to that breaking point, but also highlight how arbitrary it all is in the first place. It’s cosmic horror. It all goes in that direction.

Relationship with the audience?

One million percent. I’ve grown up as a part of a feverish audience. I am waiting every day for the “Half-Life 3” announcement to come. I am a very eager consumer of the things I enjoy. I’m a fan of things, and I like to make things for people who like to be fans of things. I don’t like to do it in such a way that is isolating to people. I think you can easily create lore bloat with a project, where you go way too far in terms of overemphasizing the wrong puzzle-building details of a narrative, and you lose sight of the actual engine that engages people emotionally and intellectually. And some indie IPs get that wrong, especially when going to film adaptation and whatnot. I won’t name names.

The outside world stuff, some of the inspirations we talked about were “One Hour Photo,” “Better Call Saul,” “Breaking Bad” — that look. When we were doing sky replacements, we used some “Pluribus” references, a little more California, a little more South. We are actually shooting up in Vancouver, so slightly different clouds and whatnot. We did a lot of sky replacements, and it was very deliberate to get that — I won’t outright say that feeling of unreality, because I don’t want to imply anything narrative — it’s more of an artistic choice of tone. But I would say there’s also the painterly feeling of “The Truman Show” skybox. I grew up in Petaluma, California, which is right by the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper, where that photo was taken. It doesn’t quite look like that anymore in that exact spot, but the hills and that environment are the same as San Jose, the same sort of hillscape.

Those rolling green hills were a crucial part of the feeling in my mind, and it’s that whole environment of the California suburbs surrounded by these looming green mounds, with a blue sky. It’s focusing on the filtered childlike qualities of things I remember from my own childhood growing up in that area. You’ll hear the mourning doves and the wind chimes are obviously a piece of audio. I tried to blend in a lot of things that I recognized from my own childhood, and go a little oversaturated with it in some ways. We had fun referencing a whole bunch of miscellaneous liminal space photography collections, stuff that is maybe hard to pin down off the top of my head, but it’s a lot of one-offs that we can’t even identify who made. They’re just random JPEGs from Reddit and whatnot that people have come to expect when discussing liminal spaces. We wanted to pay homage.

I don’t want to leave YouTube behind. I enjoy the work I’ve done there, and I feel creatively fulfilled by it in a way that’s proportional to what I’ve done with this film. I personally think there’s merits, because there’s a lot of projects that I just could never do outside of YouTube, or outside of a more free-form internet multimedia container. So I wouldn’t limit myself just to one spot, but I do think it’s a way of saying that I’ve got a bit of a good thing going right now that I want to utilize with the energy and positivity around this film. Without a doubt, “Backrooms” has always been planned to be more of a series that goes outside the confines of this film. If anything, I would say this is a bit of a foot in the door that would lead to more of a progression towards the true root of the narrative, which has been set up online for years. But a version that maintains accessibility and lets this be the way in. For people who are into it, I’ve got a contract, and I got a hold at my end, and that means I am definitely not done with “Backrooms.” I’ve got very specific things that I’m working on, things are in the works right now that I am eager to be able to talk about, but, currently, it’s still in a secret mystery world.

Watch the “Backrooms” trailer below.