[Ed. note: Minor spoilers ahead for two details about Backrooms’ setting, and one question about practical vs. digital effects.]
1
Why are there dead birds in the Backrooms, but no other animals?
When furniture-store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a portal in his basement, leading into a mysterious space full of yellow-walled, irrationally irregular rooms and objects, he keeps searching for other people, and not finding them. But he and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) do encounter a couple of seagulls in dire straits. Why seagulls, and why no other animals, apart from the fly Clark follows through the portal in the first place?
“I would say there’s a significance to picking seagulls,” Parsons tells Polygon. “Birds evoke a certain kind of imagery that we wanted to be evoking. But without explaining the thought process fully — logically, there’s nothing that would prevent anything from getting in there. Logically, literally anything that could walk through a wall could end up in that place. Birds and flies and humans just so happened to be some of the more unfortunate ones in this film.”
Does that mean all the seagulls in the movie came through portals, and aren’t native creations of the Backrooms? Parsons warns against making assumptions.
“We don’t know that for sure,” he says. “But yeah, the implication inside the film — I’m not going to be cute about that for a second — the implication when we see the birds is yes, they came from outside. But I appreciate the way of thinking, because it very well could be [a Backrooms bird].”
2
Are the Backrooms in the movie real, physical spaces?
Parsons’ Backrooms videos on YouTube used Blender to create the endless mazes of Backrooms spaces. In an A24 podcast with Backrooms producer James Wan, Parsons talks about building the original Backrooms spaces digitally, but prioritizing real physical sets for the film.
But are all the spaces we see in the movie real sets, even the proto-neighborhood Mary runs through?
“A good majority of it’s physical,” Parsons says. “Anytime the actor touches or interacts with something, it’s physical. A good portion of the sets — like the basement leading into where he passes through the wall, the furniture pile, the stop-sign room where he finds the bird, when he goes through the door — all of that’s on a single stage. We filled four stages with sets. It’s 30,000 square feet. So it’s most of it.”
He says he did use Blender for some “obvious” effects, “like the giant chasm,” which felt comfortingly familiar to him.
“It’s a ripe opportunity, I felt. I think there’s a skepticism around effects, historically, with film. Obviously, we appreciate when things are done practically. But I can’t help but feel, given that by necessity, I’ve been doing this stuff in Blender for so long, that it was a healthy, nice homage to [use] the exact same method for the film. Given how I really appreciate what The Blender Foundation does with their program — I’m pro-VFX in that regard. I can appreciate why you would want to go practical for the whole thing, but I think it was a pretty nice tactile blend of the two. Everything felt pretty built up from the ground.”
3
What makes the movie version of Backrooms’ interdimensional portal different?
Unlike the technologically created portal to the Backrooms in Parsons’ YouTube videos, the one Clark finds seems to be spontaneously generated, completely stable, and invisible to the naked eye. It just looks like a wall until someone moves through it.
From the moment Clark first steps into the Backrooms, I was expecting the ol’ horror-thriller cliché where he tries to leave, and the doorway isn’t there anymore, so he’s trapped. When that didn’t happen, and Clark started inviting other people into the Backrooms, I expected the other common horror-thriller cliché, where he invites other people to try it, and it isn’t working, leading everyone else to decide he’s a lunatic.
It’s admirable that Parsons and Soodik avoid both these familiar story devices. It’s also a little surprising, especially since spontaneous portals in Parsons’ YouTube videos seem to open briefly and close abruptly.
“Yeah, we certainly thought about [having Clark’s portal close and leave him stranded],” Parsons says. “It’s kind of dictated in most of the early forms of Backrooms [stories]. I’ll try to give my thinking, rather than just saying, ‘I did this in the movie because I did it in the YouTube series.’ The YouTube series has this open doorway to the Backrooms. It’s very fixated on [Async], this group of people in San Jose, California — same setting as the film, in the same year pretty much. The YouTube series focuses on their relationship with the Backrooms. They have an open, consistently accessible entrance, [but] they know very little about what’s happening outside of that area.
Meanwhile, there’s a less consistent, less visible crackling presence all around, where things open and close abruptly and arbitrarily. Clark has an opening, but we don’t know how long it will be open. I think there’s this feeling that it just is inherently a little unstable. Maybe it’s not fair to expect people who aren’t familiar with Backrooms to have that in their head, but I think given how esoteric and generally unexplained that entrance is, there’s not a lot of confidence that it’s going to just stay fine.”
At the same time, Parsons says the overall metaphor of the Backrooms — a space that copies and re-copies real-world objects and rooms until they lose all fidelity and rationality — references the current state of self-referential popular culture, which is a constant. So in a way, access to the Backrooms has to remain stable for the characters in order for that metaphor to accurately reflect the real world.
“Generally speaking, I think it had to have been maintained that way, for all the deeper societal messaging we might be doing about where we’re at with some industrial trends, and with this level of atomized society that is looking for a way out by the species role-playing as itself, and becoming very derivative,” he says. “Culture is continuously falling into these derivative spirals of self-referencing. You can experience the whole world from a single room on a device. None of these things are novel, but they’re all happening at once. It’s not being dictated by any specific people, really — even though you can point to individual parties that are involved with the propagation of these systems, they didn’t build the world. It’s more of an evolutionary drift.”
For him, that means portals like Clark’s have to stay open, and be outside his control, in the same way cultural shifts and endlessly repeating franchises are out of consumers’ individual control.
At the same time, though, from a narrative standpoint, Clark’s portal has to remain stable and open to make his choice to stay in the Backrooms meaningful.
“He could leave at any point,” Parsons says. “We will leave the door open for him. But for Clark especially, it’s that he’s making the deliberate choice to be in there. This place has pulled on a sort of manipulated, twisted version of nostalgia, or hope for being able to re-enlighten some lost core self or something. I think the Backrooms manipulates the idea that there is something profound and meaningful to be discovered in that chaotic random noise, without implying it’s a conscious being that wants that. It just so happens that people find it, and they let it pull them too far down, out of a human desire to interact safely with the world. And if there’s a gaping hole in their understanding like that, it really does not work well for people.”
Backrooms is in theaters now.
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