Inside the Backrooms Set: How a Crew of Filmmakers Got Lost in 30,000 Square Feet of Pure Dread
There are horror films that rely on darkness, jump scares, and orchestral stings to unsettle their audiences. And then there is Backrooms, the internet-born horror phenomenon now being adapted into a feature film by young director Kane Parsons. His weapon of choice is something far more psychologically disturbing: endless fluorescent-lit hallways, stained yellow carpet, and the suffocating hum of a world that shouldn't exist. To bring that vision to life, production designer Danny Vermette constructed one of the most immersive and disorienting film sets in recent memory — a full 30,000 square feet of what the internet calls "liminal space."
What Are the Backrooms? The Internet Legend Explained
Before diving into the set itself, it helps to understand exactly what the Backrooms are — and why they have captured the collective imagination of millions of people online. The concept originated in 2019 from a single anonymous post on a paranormal forum. The post described "noclipping" out of reality and finding yourself in an endless network of office-like rooms: monotonous yellow walls, damp carpet, buzzing fluorescent lights, and absolutely no exits. The idea was terrifyingly simple. It wasn't a monster that scared people. It was the place itself.
From that single forum post, a mythology exploded. Fan-made videos, found footage clips, elaborate wikis, and nested lore all fed into a sprawling internet universe. Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, became the most celebrated contributor to that mythology with his eerily realistic YouTube series that racked up tens of millions of views. Now, backed by a major production, he is translating those pixelated horrors into a full-length cinematic experience — and the set had to match every expectation his audience already carried in their heads.
Danny Vermette and the Challenge of Designing Nowhere
Designing a set that represents a place with no defined geography, no logical architecture, and no discernible purpose is an unusually complex creative challenge. Danny Vermette, the film's production designer, was tasked with making the Backrooms feel simultaneously familiar and completely wrong. That cognitive dissonance — the sense that you have seen this place before but cannot place it — is the entire engine of the Backrooms' horror.
Vermette drew from a wide range of real-world reference points: abandoned shopping malls, decommissioned office parks, the fluorescent underbellies of institutions that were built for function and stripped of humanity. The goal was never to build something fantastical. The goal was to build something mundane to the point of madness. Every design decision, from the specific shade of yellow on the walls to the particular acoustic deadness of the carpet underfoot, was calibrated to produce unease rather than spectacle.
The result was 30,000 square feet of constructed space — a footprint large enough that even cast and crew reportedly lost their bearings while filming. That detail alone speaks to the success of the design. When the people building and lighting and operating cameras within a space start to feel genuinely disoriented, the environment has done its job.
The Psychology of Liminal Space on Screen
Liminal space as an aesthetic concept has enjoyed a remarkable cultural moment over the past several years. The word "liminal" refers to thresholds — transitional zones between one state and another. In architectural and photographic terms, liminal spaces are the places that exist between purposes: empty swimming pools, school hallways at midnight, parking garages at dawn. They feel wrong because they feel abandoned by the human activity that was supposed to fill them.
The Backrooms takes that concept to its logical extreme. It is a liminal space with no before and no after — just the threshold itself, stretching into infinity. On screen, capturing that feeling requires more than clever set dressing. It requires controlling how a camera moves through a space, how light falls, how sound behaves, and crucially, how much the audience can see at any given moment. The horror is not what is around the corner. The horror is that there is always another corner.
Building at Scale: Why 30,000 Square Feet Matters
Most horror films work in tight spaces. Claustrophobia is a reliable tool, and small sets are economically practical. The decision to build 30,000 square feet for the Backrooms film represents a significant creative and financial commitment — and a deliberate philosophical one.
- Performer authenticity: Actors navigating a genuinely vast and repetitive space will react differently than actors pretending to be lost on a forty-foot stage. The scale produces real disorientation, and real disorientation produces genuine performances.
- Camera freedom: A larger set allows cinematographers to plan longer, more complex takes that move through space in ways that reinforce the sense of endlessness.
- Sound design opportunity: In a large physical space, ambient sound behaves naturally. The hum of fluorescent tubes, the soft compression of carpet, and the near-silence between those sounds can all be captured authentically rather than manufactured in post-production.
- Audience credibility: The Backrooms fanbase is deeply familiar with the aesthetic. They will notice shortcuts. Building at genuine scale communicates respect for the source material and the audience that grew up with it.
From Internet Mythology to Mainstream Cinema
The Backrooms film represents something genuinely new in horror cinema: a franchise born entirely from collaborative internet storytelling making its leap to the multiplex. Kane Parsons did not adapt a novel or a short story. He is adapting a living, collectively authored myth that millions of people feel ownership over. That creates an unusual creative pressure and an unusual creative opportunity.
The pressure is obvious — disappoint the existing fanbase, and the internet will notice immediately. The opportunity is equally significant. There is a built-in global audience who already understand the rules, already fear the space, and are already curious to see what a proper cinematic budget can do to the place they discovered in a forum post years ago.
With Danny Vermette's meticulously constructed 30,000-square-foot labyrinth as its physical foundation, the film has at least answered one of the most important questions an adaptation like this can face: does the place feel real? Based on early reports that even the crew got lost while filming, the answer appears to be a resounding, unsettling yes.
What to Expect from the Backrooms Film
While full plot details remain limited ahead of the film's release, the combination of Kane Parsons's intimate understanding of the Backrooms mythology and Vermette's remarkable physical production suggests a horror film built on atmosphere, dread, and spatial anxiety rather than conventional genre mechanics. If the set is any indication, audiences will not just watch characters trapped in the Backrooms — they will feel, if only briefly and safely, what it might mean to be trapped there themselves. And given the scale of what has been built, that feeling may linger a little longer than expected.