Portal Dreams Inspired the Backrooms Movie, Director Says

"I frequently have dreams where I'm just in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center." That's Backrooms director Kane Parsons explaining, in an interview with Letterboxd, just how deeply Valve's Portal has shaped his creative work. Not as a passing reference or a mood board pick, but as what he calls "the strongest influence over everything I've done in my entire life probably."

For anyone who's spent time in Portal 2's crumbling test chambers, the connection clicks immediately. Parsons described the game's "eternal indoors" quality, its vast gray-and-blue corridors stretching in every direction, as something directly mirrored in the Backrooms' infinite liminal hallways. He singled out Portal 2 as the bigger inspiration, pointing to its refined art direction and the murals left behind by previous test subjects as a thread he carried into the film. "You can clearly see traces of another human being in this place," he said. "And there's some specific moments in the film with these murals." The parallels go beyond aesthetics, too. The film's Async Research Institute, an unregulated corporation responsible for mapping the backrooms, reads like a direct cousin of Aperture Science.

As someone who's replayed Portal 2 more times than I'd admit in public, I find this exciting. It's rare for a filmmaker to name a specific game as their single biggest creative influence and then have the resulting movie actually reflect that in its world-building and visual language. The film, which A24 released with an estimated $10 million budget, currently sits at 79 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Parsons was only 15 when he directed the original Backrooms short films on YouTube, and he's 20 now. If Valve ever gets serious about a Portal adaptation, his name should be at the top of the list.