Hit horror movie Backrooms was inspired by cult game Portal, says director Kane Parsons.
In Backrooms, store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a mysterious doorway in his basement and becomes obsessed with the endless, liminal office space. His therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) then enters the bizarre, shifting dimension to try and rescue him.
The film will hit cinemas later this week (May 29) but is already on track to make $20million this weekend (via Deadline).
Back in 2022, Parsons (AKA Pixels) created hit YouTube series The Backrooms: Found Footage which was inspired by the 2019 viral 4chan creepypasta – “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”
In a new interview though, Parsons has revealed that the biggest influence on his Backrooms projects is the cult game Portal. In the physics-based puzzle game, players use a handheld tool to create portals between two spaces that can be used to teleport objects or themselves. They’re also taunted by an AI bot named GLaDOS.
“Portal would be the earliest influence. It’s the easiest one for me to pin down as the strongest influence over everything I’ve done in my entire life probably,” Parsons told Letterboxd. “It’s inherently comedic and absurd, and that’s what I like about it. So many bleak creative choices come from an inherent humour.
“The general set construction of the Portal games has been in my brain for so long. I frequently have dreams where I’m just in the [game],” he continued. “By the second game, [the environment] is rotting and totally falling apart but it’s vast. It feels like an eternal indoors that goes on in all directions that is just absurd in its scope. It’s very similar to Backrooms on that front. You can probably tell [those games are] special to me because I won’t stop rambling about them.”
In other news, IO Interactive have confirmed that TikTok star Khaby Lame cameos in 007: First Light and James Bond fans are baffled.