It Took 32,000 Sq Ft Of Unsettling Yellow Wallpaper To Bring 'Backrooms' To The Big Screen

In A24’s “Backrooms,” failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds a portal to a mysterious realm in the basement of his furniture store showroom. When he attempts to explain his discovery to his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), he cannot quite find the words. “I found a place…” he falteringly begins.

This place is the titular backrooms, a seemingly infinite succession of rooms filled with monochromatic yellow walls, absurd architectural design choices, and a pervasive sense of dread. If the concept feels eerily familiar, there are a few reasons. The first is that the film expands on a series of popular shorts that director Kane Parsons began posting to YouTube in 2022. These were themselves based on “creepypasta”—viral online horror content—that began with a widely circulated photo of a dingy yellow room and accompanying text that transformed the mundane space into something sinister. The resulting internet folklore plays on the idea that expansive transitional spaces—such as offices, corridors, indoor playgrounds, and malls—feel disquieting once stripped of the people and activities that usually fill them, at the same time, twisting the nostalgia collectively felt for these spaces from childhood experiences.

The devil may be in the details, but the horror is firmly imbued in the architecture when it comes to “Backrooms” and we have set decorator Trevor Johnston, as well as production designer Danny Vermette and art director Alan Derksen, to thank for that. The trio, who previously worked on producer Osgood Perkins’ “The Monkey,” spent four months getting lost in the world of “Backrooms”—quite literally. The set build required four enormous soundstages, laid with 27,000 square feet of the film’s nauseating yellow carpet and decorated with 32,000 square feet of a wallpaper chosen to match that of the original backroom image. “It was a monumental build,” Johnston tells The Set Set. “And because every single one of them was filled and they were so huge and far away, people were getting lost in them.”

A crucial part of Johnston’s role was furnishing the world of “Backrooms,” and that meant not just what we see in the labyrinthine world below Clark’s store but the real one above it. While many pieces of furniture were made by him and his team, he also sourced a significant portion, abiding by one key rule: nothing post-1990s. That meant scouring Facebook Marketplace listings and estate sales in British Columbia, Canada, where filming took place for perfectly preserved ‘90s living room pieces to fill Mary’s home as well as Clark’s store. When he exhausted those avenues, Johnston dispatched his team to look further afield. "Anywhere there was a gold mine of untouched ‘90s furniture, we were going,” he says of his early days of pre-production on the film. “We were just constantly finding these amazing pieces of furniture spread out all throughout BC.” For items to populate the backrooms, a hotel liquidator sale was “a great score” as it allowed Johnston to pick up 20 identical and well-preserved upholstered sofas and more than 40 of the same oak, slat back dining room chairs.

Fusing some of these pieces together in unexpected and nonsensical ways added to the uncanny nature of the backrooms, but there were instances when the art department worked hand in hand with VFX to bring Parsons’ vision to life. ‘No-clipping,’ a video game concept in which physical items can be pushed through walls and other solid objects, was something the filmmaker introduced in his earlier iterations of “Backrooms” and wanted to carry over into the movie. To achieve this most effectively, pieces that Johnston had either sourced or built were brought in and 3D-scanned, which then allowed the VFX department to digitally distort them in post-production. “We wanted to do that practically, but with VFX you could play around with it a lot more and repopulate it in mass quantities and I think that that element is really important. It does add to the eeriness." 

The most important thing for Johnston to get right, however, was the wallpaper. The unsettling yellow pattern is the visual signature of “Backrooms,” and getting it wrong would not only cost the production financially—Johnston admits it was one of their “biggest budget lines”—but also ran the risk of coming under scrutiny from a dedicated fan base. “Knowing it has such a massive online following made me almost a bit nervous, but it also made me work even harder,” Johnston admits. Together with Parsons, he designed the vertical chevron graphic, then partnered with Vancouver company Wabi Sabi Wallpaper to print it as self-adhesive rolls. "We worked on samples for a good few weeks because we wanted to make sure that the tone of the yellow was appropriate once all the lights and the carpet and everything were in," Johnston says. If Johnston was still under any doubt as to whether he nailed the design, a week after the movie's release, A24 began selling replica rolls of the wallpaper on its online store, starting at $60, much to the delight of fans who have bought it in droves.

The devotion of the "Backrooms" online community was something Johnston felt throughout the production, and continues to feel now, having now seen the film in a packed-out theatre in Vancouver, where he's based. "I can't even explain it; it was electric. It was really special to be in that moment and see how popular the movie has become," he says. "I've been working at this for 10 years, you know, I've done some pretty cool stuff, but it definitely feels surreal."

Backrooms Wallpaper

A24

From $60

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