Inside the Endless Yellow Hallways of Backrooms, Where the Set Is the Real Villain

For seven years, it was just a photograph: an endless stretch of fluorescent-lit yellow office hallway, empty of the desks and people that would normally be there. This summer, it became the biggest movie A24 has ever released. Directed by the 20-year-old Kane Parsons, Backrooms is the result of years of work imagining what horrors might lie within the empty liminal spaces of the mind (and in the film’s case, an abandoned office).

The backrooms lore began as a single photo posted to the message board 4Chan in 2019 as part of the creepypasta (user-generated horror story) subculture; the original image was taken in 2002 at an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. A teenage Parsons started making his own YouTube shorts series based on the image, which then became Backrooms, released to the tune of $81 million for its opening weekend and replacing Marty Supreme as A24’s highest-grossing worldwide release ever (a sequel is reportedly in the earliest stages of development).

Production designer Danny Vermette (whose credits include Longlegs and The Monkey) was tasked with creating the visual look and feel of a horror film in which the setting itself is as much the villain as the actual monster lurking in its shadows.

“I was drawn to interesting spaces and stuff that seemed out of place from a pretty young age, long before the term ‘liminal space’ really existed,” Vermette tells W. His knowledge of the backrooms mythology and its relevant terminology, however, was less readily available. “I knew very little but dove in online and realized I’d seen it before, then I did a crash course in the wider phenomenon and why it was such a large movement, rabbit-holing into the idea of liminal spaces.”

The discomfort of the original backrooms is mirrored throughout the film, which leans into the disquieting sensibility of liminal spaces, longtime bedfellows of the horror genre (see The Shining’s infinite corridor, or, more recently, the sterile offices of the psychological thriller Severance). Most recently, they have been adopted by online forums and social media, with numerous Reddit threads unpacking mysterious analog photographs, and Instagram accounts that solely champion the eerie oxymoron of the unknown but familiar, characteristics associated with abandoned malls, empty parking lots, and former offices—environments now out of touch with a culture largely replaced by the internet and working from home.

In 1990-set Backrooms, co-written with Will Soodik, Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a failed architect and alcoholic living in Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire—the big-box furniture store he manages and, generally, loathes. One night, he discovers an endless corridor of mono-yellow wallpaper—the titular backrooms—via a portal in his store’s basement. Returning with his lone employee, Kat, her boyfriend Bobby, and a camcorder, he eventually gives in to the backrooms, leaving a cryptic voicemail for his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve. Concerned, Mary arrives at the store and follows him into the vast labyrinth, where she’s confronted by her patient and terrorized by a 7-foot, peg-legged reproduction of his image.

With so much imagery already floating around, Vermette had a lot to work with. He also had a great partner in Kane, who had used the 3D computer graphics software Blender to make his YouTube shorts. “Very early, I knew he was special as far as his intelligence and his passion, and just how articulate he is,” Vermette says. “And seeing his work, the 16-year-old kid building these Blender shorts, we had a really strong foundation.”

When Parsons initially shared his homemade ideas with Vermette about what a studio production of the backrooms might look like, the mammoth file size crashed Vermette’s computer. On set, the scale only grew, with the production designer printing 30,000 square feet of yellow wallpaper and laying an additional 27,000 square feet of carpet across four soundstages.

Feeding the deeper corners of the backrooms is the film’s real world, as the architecture of Clark and Mary’s lives gets swallowed up and reconfigured, becoming abstract, distorted versions of the characters' environments, many part-consumed by the carpet, the wall, or the ceiling. Marrying the two realms was central to Vermette’s approach. “I wanted to relate the stuff out of the backrooms to the world of endless wallpaper and carpet. That world was Kane’s, and it was second nature for him. My [own] research imagery was very liminally interesting neighborhoods, thinking about how we would tie in everything that exists out of the backrooms and make it cohesive and beautiful.”

“It was no small task finding mint condition ’90s [furniture] that could be for sale in a furniture store,” he shares. Anchored in an era before smartphones or even digital cameras, this layer of separation between the film’s design and present-day influencer-fuelled interior trends further heightens the discomfort already prevalent in the concept. Indeed, the shaking, grainy footage and disconcerting sounds of the film’s opening sequence underscore Backrooms’ affinity for the ’90s, sharing DNA with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

“We wanted to really latch on to nostalgia. Kane had images tied to his childhood with a very simple aesthetic, containing interesting fabrics and patterns in neutral tones,” says Vermette. “From there, we developed the visual story and some really key stuff for Mary [Reinsve], like the couch she watches TV on. It was an opportunity to sell the ‘90s, and that couch became a favorite piece for everybody.”

Clark’s furniture store was another favorite, and a key vehicle for storytelling through design. “Upstairs was a practical space that we painted and altered to feel a little bit sad, to tie in with Clark. In the basement, you can see the palette shift from the sad greys and blues of upstairs, introducing almost a neutral beige, before we transition into the yellow world. That was a lot of fun, the concept, finding all the furniture, and playing with the palette.” And did he keep any furnishings or wallpaper remnants as a souvenir? “Me personally, no. I used to bring a lot home, and my wife would be like, ‘There's no room, but we did end up wallpapering our edit suite. That's enough nostalgia for me.”