Sapphire Sapphics

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🦋Arcane: Season 1 + 2

🎪The Amazing Digital Circus

🚪The Backrooms

The actual Captain Clark’s store was a real abandoned store that they set-dressed to look like a furniture store. It is now a golf store in real life.

While the office Clark has in the store is the real office, the store did not have a basement. They just built a facade to look like it goes downstairs and then everything downstairs is a set. Kane says the actors got really good at pretending to go down the fake steps.

The basement of the furniture store set is physically right next to the backrooms set. There are two “doors” in the wall that are hidden with “plugs.” These can be inserted or removed as needed for the actions, and the reason there are two is so that the camera could pan with the actor (like Mary) through the other door onto the backrooms set. So whenever you see Clark going in and out of the backrooms into the furniture store and vice versa… that is actually happening on set too.

While many of the sets were designed to be filmed in 360 degrees, fire codes demanded that there be “escape” holes and walls that could be removed at any time. This is what contributed to actors getting lost on the sets, because one day you’d come in with a wall there, and the next the wall would be gone and replaced with blue screen and a door that once was open would be blocked off.

All of the found footage was produced at movie quality HD and then was run through a real VHS tape machine and digitized back. This was done so they could do any visual effects work without having to find ways to seamlessly blend it with 480p interlaced garbage video quality. Which means that somewhere out there exists the entire found footage sequences viewable in HD without the VHS filter effects.

Bobby looking at himself holding the camera in the mirror was done by simply angling the mirror and filming with the real camera right next to him out of frame.

The wallpaper for the original location the backrooms photo was based on is actually white. It turned yellow on camera due to bad white balancing tech of the early 2000’s. This resulted in a challenge trying to get the right tint of yellow wallpaper for the sets, especially since a lot of the film would be run through a VHS and color saturation would be lost. The wallpaper they ended up using was a light yellow that allows them to adjust the contrast and color balance in the editing bay without affecting the skin tones of the characters.

Kane is reluctant to speak about why Kat’s head is in the refrigerator during the dinner scene, but he clarified that Clark’s motivations were ultimately not malicious. That Clark was hopeful, given how he’s seen the backrooms “remember” things and bring stuff that has been forgotten back, that maybe... maybe keeping her head in the refrigerator might one day result in Kat coming back to life somehow.

A number of the sounds and sound effects were pitched down. The still life groaning as it walks towards Clark in the Christmas room is a pitched down baby. Some of the groans of Pirate Clark are pitched down sounds of camels. And the sounds in Mary’s memory are pitched down too, which is why her mother has such a deep sounding voice.

Pirate Clark is an actor in a suit. The actor is 7 feet 7 inches tall and only his peg leg was digitally added. The actor previously played the alien/human hybrid in Alien Romulus.

Ironically a seagull got into the final screening of the film, and it made a loud screech when Mary is wandering through the backrooms looking for Clark. This caused the editor and sound mixer to freak out because they were convinced that was a sound effect they accidentally left in by mistake and it was too late to change anything for the film going to theaters. Luckily it was a false alarm, just a wayward seagull in a location it’s not supposed to be… just like the seagull in the movie!

As mentioned in a previous post, the alleyway Mary runs into was filmed in a real alleyway at night. They used large light balloons hovering over the alley to give that diffused lighting effect of being in the backrooms, and then all the night sky was replaced with CGI walls and ceilings.

Kane Parsons did a lot of the visual effects and music himself on his own computer. The entire opening sequence was done in blender. Many of the found footage shots in the middle of the film when no actors are being used and the camera is just running through environments were also done in blender. And Kane created and included a lot of musical motifs and sound effects himself.

There are a lot of Portal references in the film. The door opening sound effect from Half Life is used a couple times. The painting Clark does on the wall is meant to be evocative of the paintings Ratman made in Portal. And going through the walls to escape the monster were direct references to escaping the chambers and going through the backrooms of Portal.

I dislike people complaining about how slow Mary is climbing up those stairs because… like… come ON! There is NO support there! Put too much weight on the wrong step and that staircase is snapping IN TWO!

Mary and Clark are foils. They reflect one another. Both characters have deep personal traumas, but they choose to deal with them in very different ways. Clark chooses resentment and deflection. Mary chooses introspection and an attempt to help others not suffer the way she has suffered.

Clark starts off the film with a nicely buttoned up shirt. As the film progresses and he gets more and more sucked into the backrooms, he starts opening up his shirt and his color palette gets darker.

Mary is the opposite. She starts very conservatively dressed with skirts, long sleeves, dark colors, and tied up hair. By the end of the film she sheds all those layers and she’s essentially in a light tank top with hair down.

Both Clark and Mary run TV ads. You could even say that both are in some ways trying to scam the audience. Clark in trying to get people to buy his shitty furniture, and Mary for selling her self help book series. Both of them seem ashamed of having to debase themselves to get by. And both of them are lonely and alone.

Clark can’t live in his own house, whereas Mary is stuck in the memory of her house. You see multiple times through the story that for all of Mary’s bluster about “opening the window” she can’t do it. Not even after Clark visits her in a frenzy and storms off. It’s like she’s still trapped in that moment from her childhood.

Throughout the film we are shown many times how the characters handle their mental loops and how they keep ending up back where they were. That’s the narration that Mary gives in the opening monologue. Incidentally… The first and last thing Clark says is that he hurts people, because it’s “just the way he’s wired.” How appropriate that Clark is SO unchanging in his mind and SO ready to follow those loops down to his own destruction that he starts the film admitting violence only to end by being destroyed by his own violence through Captain Clark.

And let’s talk about Captain Clark. He too is a foil for Mary. He’s the exaggerate version of Clark personified. Captain Clark walks around on a peg leg, and during the final confrontation Mary sprains her leg. It’s even the same leg.

I would even say that this is the final confrontation between Mary and Clark, even though it’s through Pirate Clark. The film begins with Mary being the one in control in the therapy session. Then we get the moment where Clark is crazed and Mary loses some control over him. Then we have the insane dinner scene where Clark physically has control over Mary’s autonomy. And then we have the final confrontation between Mary and the worst version of Clark.

You could even say that at the beginning of the film Clark is trapped with Mary in her therapist office, and by the end of the film Mary is trapped in a warped version of Clark’s furniture store.

And the solution is for Mary to escape is to literally use her past trauma that she’s been physically holding on to her whole life (the concrete handprint and one of the last good memories she has of her mother) to BASH THE SKULL of the Backroom’s manifestation of Clark’s ego and aggression.

And through it all…. Mary is back where she started. Even though she tried to help others and move on from her trauma, she still ends up being trapped by A-Synch. And the film ends on a distorted sad catatonic memory of her stuck in the backrooms… forever.

The reason they were an anti in the first place was because they thought that being smart was acknowledging the bad. So in the example given, they were a Steven Universe Anti, and they felt that they would appear smarter to others if they were vocal about pointing out all the bad things they saw in Steven Universe.

And the cure to stop being an anti for them was simply… growing up. They grew up and realized they were being unduly harsh for no reason and that people don’t actually view JUST pointing out the bad as being “smart.”

But that’s the ignorance of youth isn’t it? That’s the problem. They don’t have the experience and they want to be seen as more important and smarter than where they currently are, so they resort to these weird tactics to appear smarter. “Smart people are people who can analyze and pick apart a movie, so I guess that means pointing out all the flaws makes you smart.” Of course this doesn’t help when CinemaSins is still a fucking thing and reinforces this mindset…

Pointing out the mistakes doesn’t make you smart because a lot of the time the mistakes don’t matter. Genuinely and wholeheartedly they DO NOT MATTER. We used to point out mistakes for FUN, because we knew they don’t matter. That’s why it was called nitpicking.

Real smarts is being able to analyze media and understand that despite the flaws the values it can bring to the table is more important. No piece of media is objectively good or bad. There’s no metric to measure badness. And even the worst baddest movie has SOME value to bring if you look deep enough.