Backrooms Movie Facts from the director’s commentary.
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.
The threshold that the A-Synch workers pull Mary through at the end of the film was a real set. They took Kane’s original blender files, scaled them up to human proportions, and then just built the set accordingly. There is some set extensions on the sides, but for the most part that room is accurate to the YouTube series. Kane did a lot of pre-visualization with Blender for the entire film and would hand off the files to the construction crew to build the sets.
