Starting with the setting

The recent movie Backrooms made over 100M on its opening weekend (now 200M), which is pretty good for a movie with a 10M-dollar budget. At 20, the director is the youngest to top the charts. The movie is based on a meme that started on 4chan when someone posted a picture of a furniture store in Milwaukie being remodeled. The photo spawned a creepypasta on the internet about an endless set of rooms in a space people would clip into.

The director, Kane Parsons, started posting backrooms videos that he made with the 3D software, Blender. The space itself creates the sense of dread as the viewpoint character navigates the endless halls. The rooms fall into the uncanny valley.

The director’s main contribution was designing the sets that were then built on a 30,000-square-foot lot. The script was made to fit the space. Usually the script comes first and you find or make sets to match the story. This story had the benefit of several years focused essentially on worldbuilding with the director releasing 22 videos that slowly built out the lore of his particular backrooms interpretation.

• The Backrooms The original 9-minute short with 84M views.