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Director Ken Parsons is ready to do just that Back rooms From YouTube to the big screen.
The 20-year-old Parsons, who will become A24’s youngest feature director when the studio releases his horror film in theaters May 29, took the stage at CCXP Mexico on Saturday to share insights into his process. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Rainsef, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Luketa Maxwell star in the film, which features James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins as producers, and has a screenplay by Will Sudek.
Back rooms It adapts a YouTube series that Parsons began uploading to YouTube as a teenager in early 2022. With origins in urban legend and various web publications, the videos center on an endless maze of rooms with buzzing fluorescent lights and yellow wallpaper. In the film A24, Reinsve plays a therapist who must track down a missing patient in a strange dimension.
Parsons explained that the film uses the current series and lore as a starting point to examine its characters. “It takes a more specific approach, where you see it through the lens of these specific characters — these individuals who live these scattered, isolated lives,” he said. “In a movie, there’s rarely a moment when more than one or two characters are on screen at a given time. It’s a very lonely movie.”
The director recounted that he taught himself how to use the free, open-source 3D graphics program Blender to create the world of his YouTube videos, which he continues to use for this feature. He and the team, including cinematographer Jeremy Cox, were keen to maintain the continuity of the web series.
“I was working in Blender, designing the sets, and then we were literally building them in real time,” Parsons said of making the film. “We did a lot of testing there to make sure we got the overall tone that people expected [from] Back rooms. “We did 50 wallpaper tests to get the yellow look just right.”
Parsons shared behind-the-scenes footage of the massive set being built, and noted that he eventually had to step away from directing the construction process to start filming the exterior scenes. When he returned two weeks later to see the finished collection, it was “the strangest and most wonderful moment of this project for me.”
“The set was huge. We built 30,000 square feet of actual back rooms that we could walk around in. Some people were actually getting lost. It felt like I was there, which was really weird,” he added.
Throughout the making of the film, Parsons was careful to maintain his initial logic for this world: “I’m always trying to get away from the idea that the back rooms are somehow a dreamy thing in vertical space, where if you turn, the room can change. It preys on the human brain’s ability to map spaces and make sense of them. And the hard part about that is, if you go back the way you came, you go back the way you came, but it keeps moving and going and going. And that’s where the confusion sets in and the warp eventually goes away. All you have to do is stop trying to draw Map it, whereas if it’s constantly changing, you’ll give up on it much faster.
For Parsons, who described first posting videos on YouTube at age nine or 10, Back rooms The series struck a chord with audiences because of “the collective anxiety about the system—economic, industrial, or otherwise—that has been building up over the past few centuries.”
After praising his film’s cast, the director went on to explain: “For me, Back Rooms resonated with what happens when someone goes through sensory deprivation on an individual level – and you walk out into an empty room – and the body and nervous system need to be stimulated so badly.” [when] He is deprived of it. He begins to find noise and information in the pattern of the walls and begins to take this noise more seriously than usual. “It opens his threshold to what he is willing to accept.”
