The ‘Backrooms’ Production Design Is the Ultimate Game of Tetris

Production designer Danny Vermette tells IndieWire about getting a crash course in the University of Backrooms from director Kane Parsons and building four stages' worth of mazelike sets.

The uncanny nature of liminal spaces and specifically the idea of endless, extradimensional backrooms have been a part of filmmaker Kane Parsons’ life for seven years now — first, through his popular YouTube series and now as “Backrooms,” the A24 film directed by Parsons. When he first started talking with production designer Danny Vermette about realizing the creepypasta launchpad he’s become so steeped in as a feature film, Vermette asked him to blue sky — or perhaps, in this case, yellow wallpaper basement — what Parsons’s ideal scenario would look like. 

The veteran production designer behind horror films like “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” was more than game to spend some time, as he told IndieWire, studying “at the University of the Backrooms,” and take on the challenge of creating uncanny spaces that would thrill hardcore fans of Parsons’ YouTube work and newcomers alike. So, how did Parsons want the backrooms to work? How much of them did he want to build? 

A few weeks later, Vermette received a note from Parsons with a Blender file creating the world in digital space that Parsons would, ideally, like to build out in physical space. The file crashed Vermette’s computer. “It was like 100,000 square feet,” Vermette told IndieWire. 

In the end, “Backrooms” had close to 30,000 square feet, across four stages, in order to create the backrooms spaces explored by beleaguered furniture salesman and frustrated architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), among others. But even within that, Vermette had to be incredibly strategic and flexible about how much space they could use, the demarcation lines between the real world and the backrooms, and how reality and liminal space would relate to each other. 

“We didn’t want it to be flat, endless rooms. We wanted it to be awkward and to throw our actors into a world of discomfort, in a sense, whether it’s crawling through a small space or crawling up a ramp and really sell that we’re in the middle of levels, that there’s multiple levels,” Vermette said. There was a constant dance between the endless possibilities that Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox could shot-list in the Blender version of the “Backrooms” sets, and what Vermette and art director Alan Derksen could realize. 

Vermette translated Parsons’ Blender files into workable schematics for the film’s construction department, ones that would also align with what the pre-riggers for the backrooms’ light-rigging crews could deliver. “It’s a constant stream of [getting] the original files, figuring out what we can and can’t build, how we’re gonna Tetris it onto the stages. We had to go in and measure every square inch of all four sound stages to make sure that we had the room to build and then figure out the Tetris plan of how those sets are gonna fit,” Vermette said. 

It didn’t help the Tetris of the challenge that, instead of being able to get one stage ready first, the schedule and script changes required the production team to have parts of all four stages ready for the start of production. “We were building stuff right to the last day of shooting. Like, we had to be very aware with sound and be really strategic. It was forever morphing and changing and adding details and just sheer volume. It was right to the last shot, I swear to God,” Vermette said. 

 But even during the shoot, the production designer could see his team’s work paying off. The largest section of backrooms built out in the film is the divide between the basement of Clark’s furniture store and the entrance to the backrooms, with the “clipping” of entering that extradimensional space done practically through craftily placed cutouts in the wall. 

“We have a portal for the camera and a portal for the actor [and] we have a plug that goes back in, so once the actor’s through, the wallpaper plug goes back up with a seam. It’s fixed in post, there’s seam repair there — and to rotoscope that, when their hands are going through, moving at a slow pace, that’s incredibly challenging, but they did such a great job with it,” Vermette said.  

The entrance to the backrooms turns into such a cavernous space, too, that the “Backrooms” cast and crew needed maps to navigate it. “We had to name all the sets. We’re on Stage 2 at Mary’s Run B, things like that, just to make sure people go to the right stage and the right set on the day,” Vermette said. “Because on some of the stages there’s five or six sets. So, it was day to day. It wasn’t just the first day people getting lost.” 

And the main backrooms entrance set was so big that some people got lost anyway. “They’d been out shooting in the real world, and then they come in [on the sound stage], and the sound guy hadn’t been there, and the camera crew hadn’t been there. And sure enough, you hear “Hello? Hello?” Like, the sound guy’s lost, and he went in the wrong entrance,” Vermette joked. 

But life imitating art imitating backrooms was key for Vermette’s take on Parsons’ world. He was interested in the oddly poetic ways that the backrooms would come to echo the exterior world, or vice versa. 

“It was important to create an understanding for a first-time viewer that they get a sense of maybe how this world works, just a little bit. To pull real furniture from Clark’s Ottoman Empire and his throne and certain elements into the backrooms, to see that whatever it is, is getting its influence from somewhere,” Vermette said. 

But from that baseline, the goal was to create both the reality and the illusion of volume in the set design. “Kane and I were always talking about how deep are we going into the backrooms? There’s so many variations within Kane’s world, and levels,” Vermette said. “Where is our endgame? What’s our end point? Basically, how fucking crazy do we want to get?” 

To really know how far Vermette and the production design team pushed the backrooms, though, you have to see the film. 

“Backrooms” is now playing in theaters.