---
title: 'Why BACKROOMS’ Visual Style Drives You Insane'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=e8B6tJoPAio'
video_id: 'e8B6tJoPAio'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 778
---

# Why BACKROOMS’ Visual Style Drives You Insane

> Source: [Why BACKROOMS’ Visual Style Drives You Insane](https://youtube.com/watch?v=e8B6tJoPAio)

## Summary



## Transcript

Why does the backrooms look like this?
I've noticed every review talks about
the same thing. It's a mood or it's the
aesthetic. Maybe it's just the vibe.
It's transcendent, atmospherically
haunting, but so were all these other
movies like The Shining, Exit 8, Escape
Room, 1408, Asbow, So Below, and even
Cam. The thing is, every creative and
technical choice in the back rooms
actually builds that feeling that made
us call it a vibe or atmospherically
haunting. It kept us talking about the
movie long after we've seen it. And with
a film like Backrooms, a project that
began as a single image slowly growing
into its own lore over decades, the goal
for the movie wasn't really to define
what this world is, but to expand on it
without closing it off. In the director
Kane Parson's own words, the horror of
the back rooms isn't in the space being
explained, it's in how much of it gets
filled in by us. If the horror comes
from what we project onto this space,
then every visual decision has to
support that feeling. That's where the
architecture, the lighting, the
cinematography, and sound design come
in, which we'll get into in this video.
There's a lot of different movies to
check out in regards to liinal horror or
liinal spaces. And the concept of it is
nothing new, of course, but I find that
most of these movies always have to
bring a lot of existential dread and
never fully balance between reality and
fiction, which wasn't hard for a
franchise like this one that found a lot
of footing during the pandemic when in a
way we were also trapped in our own
spaces. So, the vibes familiar, but our
relationship to it is already personal.
As humans, liinal spaces naturally
trigger anxiety. Part of that is learned
through horror movies, but it also comes
from our everyday lives. We read empty
parking garages or abandoned offices as
potentially dangerous because spaces
without people, without rules, can be
places that are ultimately very
dangerous. So, we don't need a monster
necessarily to make this movie feel
wrong. It helps, but it really starts
with the environments that already sit
really close to memory. It taps into our
fascination with the unknown while
appealing to a younger audience. Unlike
other creepy pasta movies like Slender
Man, The Backgrounds draws from a very
Gen Z anxiety. The battle against AI,
where things that look almost right are
completely off. And in a world
experienced through our phones, we're
surrounded by endless choices. is
curated by algorithms we don't fully
control, kind of like the back rooms. At
the same time, it taps into a nostalgia
for that Y2K vibe of design and
aesthetic that younger people have
become very fascinated by in the recent
years, while preserving a bit of genuine
memories for us older millennials. The
result is a world that feels both new
and remembered, a perfect basis for that
kind of uncanny horror that The Back
Rooms really thrives on. The team behind
The Back Rooms was a full army. However,
I do want to highlight director and
co-composer Kane Parsons, who worked
with the cinematographer Jeremy Cox. Cox
previously shot Keeper and Mile and
Kicks and also worked as second unit DP
on Long Legs and the Monkey. He's also
worked on the 2024 psychological horror
series The Edge of Sleep, where
Markiplier starred as the lead. And
given Markiplier's jump into feature
film making with Iron Lung, this isn't
Jeremy's first time working with
YouTubers, moving into fullscale
cinematic productions. Cox has also been
working with a Vancouver based
production company called Oddfellows,
the same company behind Back Rooms,
Longlegs, The Monkey, and Keeper. Chris
Ferguson, who has been running
Oddfellows for over a decade, originally
introduced him to Kane after working on
Keeper and seeing how well they did on a
small budget. So, they saw it as a nice
fit. And that's when Kane showed him his
YouTube series. And unlike most projects
where world building is something
developed in like pre-production, this
world already existed. So, it wasn't
being constructed. So, that took a lot
of work off their plates. A lot of their
visual inspiration came from things like
1 hour photo. And you can see in 1 Hour
Photo and the blocking and how they use
the space how that really inspired back
rooms. but they also pulled from bigger
references in general because this is
already an established world, just not a
traditional, you know, cinematic one.
So, they spent a lot of time studying
Reddit threads of liinal space
photography, looking at what
specifically made those images feel off,
and how to recreate that sensation in
live action. It also is important to
remember that this is Kane's very first
liveaction feature, and Cox has
mentioned that Kane approached it very
directly and happily, even while
acknowledging that translating something
so fully done in Blender into physical
production came with a steep learning
curve. Kane has always been drawn to
film, but the shift from total digital
control to real world constraints meant
negotiating scale. In contrast, and to a
traditional cinematic sense, no one on
that team wanted the back rooms to feel
glossy or pristine. The goal wasn't to
create something overly cinematic, but
to build a film that kind of resists
those expectations while also still
functioning as like a coherent film
piece. So, a lot of the process became
about figuring out a simple question.
How do you make something that refuses
rules still feel like a film? And how do
you take something familiar and make it
feel unfamiliar? And that answer
actually starts with the architecture.
Production designer Danny Verette and
director Kane Parsons built more than
30,000 square feet of backroom sets
across four sound stages. Even their
crew needed signs to navigate this maze.
Parsons had already spent years building
these spaces digitally in Blender and
created even more for Verette before
building a single set. That was because
this movie wasn't meant to give you a
new version of the back rooms, but to
build off his original work published
all those years ago. So, this honors the
fan base and expands upon it for the
movie. But recreating the back rooms
isn't enough. The movie still has to
trap us in that same way that Kane's
videos did, but for 2 hours. And it
needs that same locked in pressure. So,
the spaces aren't just here to look like
the back rooms. They start supporting
the story itself. It isn't just a maze
where Clark wanders through. The film
suggests that the space is constantly
absorbing fragments of the people who
pass through it. Their memories, their
anxieties, their architecture. Thus, it
becomes a world that feels familiar
without ever being identifiable. Every
corner, every hallway feels like it
belongs somewhere but nowhere at the
same time. Kane has talked about how
liinal spaces remind us of fragments we
barely remember. The texture of a
wallpaper in a relative's house, the
shape of an archway, a waiting room, a
strip mall, a carpet pattern you've
forgotten but somehow still recognize.
Tiny details that aren't important
enough to remember consciously but never
fully disappear. And the original
backroom's image kind of works for the
same reason. It's not a haunted house.
It's an ordinary space photographed
poorly. The white balance is off. The
colors are distorted. Nothing about it
is intentionally designed to be scary.
However, it's still very unsettling.
Vertt has said that they're creating a
world where rules don't apply. And so he
was very careful to make sure that they
weren't just doing things because they
could. And the goal always was to
establish recognition first, then it
unravels and you start to realize then
everything's off. And that's where The
Back Rooms differs from something like
The Shining. The Overlook Hotel was
built to feel disorienting. It creates
anxiety in a controlling and impossible
way. While back rooms creates anxiety
through recognition, it isn't asking you
to enter a strange place. It's asking
you to wonder if you've already been
there before. So the architecture feels
less like a location and more like a
collection of memories. is just stitched
together. And once the film convinces
you that the space belongs somewhere in
your past, it becomes much more easier
to get lost in it. And while the
architecture creates that anxiety, the
camera really traps us inside of it.
It's June. There's a lot going on from
graduations to Father's Day and big
summer plans. It's easy to look around
and feel personally diminished because
it looks like everybody else is having
the time of their lives. And that's not
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here with you. The camera work continues
to behave like the architecture where it
becomes part of the story, supporting
the story visually and just trapping us
at the same time. And Jeremy has spoken
about how the back rooms forced him to
rethink his own instincts as a DP. The
back rooms allowed him to have framing
deliberately offc center, slightly
short-sighted and asymmetrical. Because
there's so much uniformity to every
location in the movie, you instinctively
want to deviate from that. So, there's a
visual imbalance as well. There's a lot
of wide angles that make the characters
feel and look smaller while
simultaneously allowing their
environment to like dominate the frame.
So, it's a weird visual where the space
is massive and still somehow feels
claustrophobic at the same time. Even
when characters are standing directly in
front of us, the environment feels like
the real subject of the shot, which
feels important to the heart of the back
rooms where exploring the space has
always been encouraged, but you would
never actually find answers to them. The
camera will at times move like it's also
another character in the movie, peeking
around corners before our characters get
there. It lingers on empty rooms, and we
get to see and study the place before
they even enter it. Cox shot the film on
a Sony Venice using a Rialto extension
system, which separates the sensor from
the camera body and allows it to fit
into incredibly tight spaces. That meant
that the camera could move through
impossible corners and awkward angles
inside that maze, making you feel rooted
in that environment. And that makes
sense because the camera often feels
subjective, as if we're kind of
remembering a place rather than
physically exploring it. And despite
being a studio film, the movie never
completely abandons the found footage
that made Kane's original video so
great. They remain wide, the camera
remains curious, and our attention is
constantly pulled towards the
environment rather than the people
inside of it. The found footage is
arguably the best part of the YouTube
series, and Kane keyframed all the
movements for handheld in Blender. And
according to Jeremy, some of the hardest
stuff to operate was the handheld work
because you had to act as if it was an
accident, but also hit the key beats.
They were shot in Red Komodo, and
there's additionally VFX in these
segments. And after all the VFX was
done, they printed it onto VHS. So
everything feels just as aesthetically
viby as the original image in the
YouTube series delivered. Yet,
architecture and cinematography aren't
alone in making the back rooms feel oh
so wrong. You might have noticed a
stinky putrid tone and smooth varnish
that would put smooth Spongebob to
shame. Across every version, from that
single image to the YouTube series with
Blender to the big screen, color and
lighting have been really important in
shaping its atmosphere across all forms
of media. But what makes it really
unsettling is just how profoundly flat
it is to me. There's no contrast, no
shadows in the traditional sense, of
course, and it's not that cinematic
lighting that you might be used to, but
it's also very common in A24 movies. It
feels designed to look not designed and
the color grading pushes that even more
and is perfectly just imperfect in the
same sense. Where it's normal for movies
to use color theory to reflect different
atmospheric changes or maybe a character
state of mind, backroom uses its colors
to be more disorienting and just very
uncomfortable. Outside in the real world
in the movie, there's this cold or like
blue tone over everything, which isn't,
you know, unheard of. It's showing a bit
of detachment from the world that we're
about to enter. Inside this new world is
sickly yellow and fluorescent and the
opposite of inviting. The warm tones
throughout the movie from the occasional
lamps should feel comforting. Instead,
they appear during moments of confusion
and feel more rancid than warm. They
went as far as to test different shades
of yellow and photos of different skin
tones to find the right balance. So,
we're seeing how color wasn't even only
an aesthetic bonus, but where they began
fine-tuning that distortion vibe. And as
most fans know, watching the original
work, Kane really succeeded in building
a great sound design around his videos.
On top of creating music for the
original short films, Kane had also been
expanding the soundsscapes for back
rooms into a standalone albums that
weren't shared in the series, but still
allowed fans to pull more information
from. The score helps you identify the
area and works like a compass in a way.
It doesn't only support emotionally like
most scores do. It helps guide you. It
reorients you in a way where the music
isn't just here on top of the picture,
it's helping you see it. Kane
co-composed with Ido Venman, who also
composed the score for Keeper, which he
worked on with Back Room's DP, Jeremy
Cox. Arguably, this movie sounds more
like just regular sound design than a
score. It's at all times responding to
what's happening or how people are
reacting. It was less about creating a
thematic score and just maintaining a
consistent like sonic environment that's
very fluid and behaves in its own way.
And that blur between sound design and
score is really interesting in this
movie because it's full of like
atmospheric audio cues and it feels so
constant. You don't know whether it's
playing to us or just living in the
movie. And there's no clear separation
of what is real and what is not.
Essentially, we stop tracking what is
music versus what is the environment
because both are operating under the
same kind of logic. So, when you look at
all of this together, the architecture,
the cinematography, the lighting, the
sound, it starts feeling like a system.
It takes so many moving pieces to
control and support any film. But
technically, there's so many reasons for
the back rooms being different from
traditional movies of its like caliber.
Nothing in the back rooms is designed to
fully disorient you immediately. It
starts with familiarity. Spaces that
feel almost real, frames that feel
almost balanced, lighting that feels
almost natural, and then piece by piece,
that familiarity slips. And that's what
makes it work. Because the film isn't
asking us to understand the back rooms.
It's asking us to move through it the
same way the characters do. Constantly
searching for something that confirms
where we are without actually ever
getting there. So, when you ask, why
does the Back Rooms movie look like
this? The short answer is it's designed
to be disorienting, but in a way that's
built on familiarity. and that comes
from a series of very specific technical
and sometimes psychological choices that
create unease and discomfort and
ambiguity. Together, they preserve the
original feeling of discovering the back
rooms online for the first time while
also expanding it into a world you can
actually explore and get lost in.
Comment down below with your thoughts on
the movie and how you felt about the
vibe because I know it's very alluring
and I know it's very cool. And a special
thanks to one of our YouTube members,
Paulo Bianca, who supports us at the
executive producer level. A big thanks
to Studio Tech Brian Kim behind the
cameras. New Rockstars editors Joshua
Steven Herd and Abby Fel and all the
other supporting editors for their work
on this video and all of our videos.
Follow me at Lulu Clement. Subscribe to
all the channels in the New Rockstars
Network for breakdowns and news coverage
of everything you love. Thanks for
watching. I'll see you guys later.