Architects will "cringe a bit" at design horrors in Backrooms says production designer

Production designer Danny Vermette talks Dezeen through the exacting work of building liminal spaces for Backrooms, a new horror film that follows a frustrated architect-turned-furniture salesman.

Produced and distributed by indie film powerhouse A24, Backrooms expands on the eerie universe created by director Kane Parsons in a series of YouTube shorts, themselves based on a photo of a desolate yellow room that has circulated on the internet since 2019.

Enclosed by drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, beige carpets and a haphazard maze of walls, the image became a well-known "creepypasta" – or horror meme – and helped popularise the idea of liminal space, where empty rooms or transitional spaces like corridors or dead malls are read as conveying a surreal spookiness.

Architects and designers are likely to get a particular thrill from watching the feature unfold.

Not only is the architecture of "the backrooms" universe that Parsons developed at the very heart of the horror, but the protagonist who discovers it, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is an architect himself, reduced to running a big-box furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire.

Production designer Vermette worked with the director to realise the backrooms for his debut feature, and acknowledges it could hold a unique appeal for people in the design and architecture industries.

"I think they're gonna cringe a little bit," he said.

After months of being immersed in liminal spaces, Vermette told Dezeen that he thought the phenomenon arose partly due to "bad design, lazy design" and partly due to context, where familiar environments take on new meaning through emptiness.

"I think developers are more conscious now about what sort of space they're creating, to an extent," he said. "Whereas in the 70s, 80s and 90s, it was more about volume, and I think that's sort of where the expanses in our world grew from."

Backrooms' production team was equally as voracious in its world-building, constructing a labyrinthine 30,000-square-foot set across four sound stages, mostly in the liminal space aesthetic of hallways and askew rooms – sometimes with doorways halfway up the wall, sometimes with raked floors, sometimes with an incongruous piece of furniture sinking into the carpet.

Although Parsons' original Backrooms shorts were entirely computer-animated – he started making them aged just 16 to test out the open-source software Blender – the director was clear from the start that he wanted the feature film to be based on physical sets and practical effects.

He used the same software to design his own 3D models of set diagrams, lighting schemes and camera movements, which he shared with his department heads to fine-tune each element.

"I chatted with Kane and said: 'hey, what is your dream scenario? What would that look like? How much would you want to build?" Vermette remembered. "And when he sent the Blender file over, it crashed my computer. It was massive. So we had to be very strategic on what we wanted to build."

In particular, the team focused on building sets for scenes that featured verticality or required actors to interact with their environment.

"We ended up building a lot of the more finite sets on 20-foot risers with the actual slopes, and allowing the actors to interact with it uncomfortably, whether that was squeezing through a tight crevasse or crawling through a tunnel," said Vermette.

A crucial scene, in which Clark slips through the wall of his showroom's basement to enter the backrooms, was one such practical effect. The rooms truly adjoined on the sound stage, with two portals built in their shared wall – one for the actors and one for the camera – allowing realistic movement between them.

While the backrooms set may look deceptively simple given the mostly empty rooms, much attention to detail went into elements such as the lighting, wallpaper and carpets, which were designed to recreate the look of the short films – in turn a faithful recreation of the notorious creepypasta.

"It was a process to figure out: how are we going to light this massive space and have the tone match a Blender file," said Vermette. "There's a certain quality in there."

"You can print out a yellow and put it in front of the camera thinking that it's going to be fine, but it won't read the same way."

Vermette describes testing 30 wallpaper and carpet combinations along with several lighting setups to get the right tone and pattern scale, and stop the patterns from striating on camera.

For other settings, such as the Ottoman Empire store and the office of Clark's therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), set decorator Trevor Johnston, Vermette's frequent collaborator, carefully brought together some of the 1990s' most unaesthetic fabrics, fashions and furniture.

While these spaces are outside of the backrooms, they are not completely outside of the liminal space aesthetic. The headquarters of Async, a shadowy research company, is inspired by 90s data centres and their drab beige-ness. The Ottoman Empire is more lived-in, but with its vast space, floating furniture and chaotic sale signs, it still feels off.

"We adopted this really awkward colour palette," Vermette said of the Ottoman Empire. "Chiwatel is struggling, and we wanted to really drive that home with the store, and I think the colour palette helped that."

For architects, particularly those based near Vermette's home city of Vancouver, there is also at least one easter egg to look out for in the set dressing – specifically, the technical drawings in Clark's office, borrowed from Vermette's father-in-law, who is a local architect.

"He's done some pretty cool buildings," said Vermette. "There's some pinned up on the wall there that if they were to pause the screen and look, they might recognise."

Other films with striking production design recently featured on Dezeen include Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee and Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme.

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