To build the world of Backrooms, Parsons packed up his life in California and moved to Vancouver—where, for the better part of a year, he did what he’d always done: modeled every environment in Blender. But this time he handed the files to an art department, which built them into a 30,000-square-foot maze of a movie set.
“Before we even were greenlit, I had conceptualized the whole environment for the pitch deck…[which was] inherently one of the biggest selling points of The Backrooms as a project,” he explains.
If there were any edits in the set-design process, Parsons “didn’t have to put pen to paper at all. I could go spend 15 minutes [in Blender] and have an actual tangible thing to…give actionable directions for.”
The bigger challenge for Parsons, it turned out, was the script, and “finding an engine that was viable for people who don’t quite understand this world I’ve been creating for a while and where my audience is at.” He and screenwriter Will Soodik landed on a plot centered around psychology, which to Parsons is “one of the most obvious conversations that comes up in regard to the Backrooms.”
That balancing act became central to Parsons’s approach.
“The film is just an episode of the YouTube series,” he says. “It is one hundred percent congruent…. I sort of have made a contract with the audience, and I like to do everything I possibly can to hold myself accountable to that…regardless if we’re medium hopping.”
Turning an internet-born idea into a feature film isn’t exactly new. Many creepypastas have made their way into film and television before, particularly within horror; Slender Man and Channel Zero are prime examples. But unlike many internet-horror adaptations, Backrooms isn’t built around a villain so much as a feeling.
At its core, Parsons says, the film asks audiences, “What is our relationship with the spaces we inhabit?” The answer unfolds across 105 minutes of mounting anticipation—intimate and disorienting in equal measure, less concerned with jump scares than with the particular horror of a space that never ends.
