A24’s Backrooms is a psychological thriller where the villain is bad architecture — the aging, empty offices and tragic McCafés that populate online forums devoted to liminal space, though architects might prefer the term junkspace. One particularly grim example — a photo of an emptied furniture showroom under blazing yellow lights — made it onto a 4chan thread in 2019, where commenters started riffing, spinning out a new genre of horror that plays on the idea of being lost, endlessly, in a soul-sucking corporate maze, where the odd flash of darkness might be a light buzzing out or a ghoul. The form’s auteur is Kane Parsons, a teenager when his short film got millions of views and now, at 20, is A24’s youngest director.
Under the name Kane Pixels, he had used visual-effects software to imagine a camera operator lost in the maze. Expanding this into a feature involved making that virtual world physical — a problem that fell to production designer Danny Vermette, who leaned on his art director Alan Derksen and buyer Eric Cairns. They talked to us about translating something created on Blender, the visual-effects program, into a physical build, sourcing 1990s furniture on Facebook Marketplace and creating a dizzying variety of bland wallpaper.
