Horror filmmakers also tend to be rabid horror fans—obviously—so it makes sense that Insidious: Out of the Further director and co-writer Jacob Chase made a point of watching Backrooms. And while Kane Parsons’ blockbuster hit is designed to make the viewer feel deeply unsettled, Chase had that feeling for another reason other than spooky-movie vibes: he was worried it might contain a scene too reminiscent of what he had coming in Out of the Further.
That’s because Out of the Further has its own liminal-space moment in which Gemma, played by Amelia Eve, gets lost in a seemingly endless pillow fort. Backrooms’ yellow-hued dimension has a lot of weird stuff crammed into its infinite rooms, but it didn’t have one of those, to Chase’s great relief.
When he was watching Backrooms, he told Variety, he kept thinking, “‘Please don’t go into a pillow fort, please don’t go into a pillow fort.’ Luckily they did not.”
The idea actually came from Chase’s own list of phobias. “I find places that are repetitive and confusing quite terrifying. I was just leaning into my own fears. The Descent is a film that always terrifies me. And there’s that sequence where they’re crawling through really tight tunnels where they can’t turn around. I was trying to capture that feeling of claustrophobia and that feeling of never-ending ‘Where am I?’ We all truly got lost in there making the movie.”
The pillow fort’s placement in the movie was important, Chase explained. “It set the stage for these are the kind of scares we’re going to have in the film, as it’s fairly early in the movie. I was leaning into my own fears of claustrophobia and really Gemma as a character: what’s the worst thing that could happen to her in this moment, that specific character? And this felt right.”
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