Kane Parsons on the Backrooms’ birds, sets, and portal

Kane Parsons answers three specific questions about Backrooms: why there are dead birds, how the endless rooms were realised, and why the film’s portal behaves differently. In the movie, furniture-store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds a basement portal into yellow-walled, irrationally irregular rooms; he and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) encounter a couple of seagulls and the fly that leads Clark through.

Parsons says seagulls were chosen for the imagery they evoke, but notes that logically anything that can pass through a wall could end up in the Backrooms. He cautions against firm assumptions — the film implies the birds came from outside, yet it also leaves open the possibility that they could be native to that space.

Although his original Backrooms videos were made in Blender, Parsons prioritised physical sets for the feature: any time an actor touches something it was real, and much of the film was built on four stages totalling 30,000 square feet.

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