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Director Kane Parsons says Portal 2 serves as the biggest inspiration for the upcoming horror movie based on his viral YouTube series of the same name.
"Portal would be the earliest influence," Parsons said in an interview with Letterboxd. "It's like the strongest influence over, like, everything I've done in my entire life. It's a two-game series. So, if anything, I would say Portal 2 is the bigger inspiration for me... It's inherently comedic and absurd, and that’s what I like about it. So many bleak creative choices come from an inherent humour."
Portal is a first-person puzzle game that first debuted in 2007. Portal 2 was released in 2011. In both games, you play as a test subject trapped in the Aperture Science Laboratory, taunted as you complete puzzles by an evil (but very funny) computer overseer. The lab seems to be a death trap with no way to escape – until you start finding hidden spaces where you're not "supposed" to go.
You can definitely see the influence on Parsons' viral YouTube series, which centers on a '90s company called The Complex, which is essentially a web of liminal spaces where people go missing after being pulled in.
"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." You can check out the full interview below.
Directed by Parsons, the movie sees a therapist (Renate Reinsve) venture into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The cast includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. The screenplay was penned by Westworld writers Robert Patino and Will Soodik.
Backrooms hits theaters on May 29. For more scares, check out our list of upcoming horror movies.
