HBO Max’s Unhinged Thriller Masterpiece ‘Backrooms’ Deserves Kudos for Being Bold and Experimental

“We went in knowing this was a lean budget film with quite an expansive vision,” production visual effects supervisor Edward Douglas says. “We also knew that much of the aesthetic was driven by what Kane Parsons had done in his YouTube shorts, which were all 100% him in [computer graphics software program] Blender, other than a few little live-action bookends. One of the first things we set about doing was figuring out how we can take advantage of that kind of process and pipeline in a cinematic feature film environment. If we could do long stretches of CG backrooms the same way Kane did in his YouTube series, that would set us so far ahead. If I phone up a VFX vendor and say, ‘We have five minutes of full CG,’ there goes our entire movie budget.”