As Lukita Maxwell appears in one of the biggest horror movies of the year, she was hesitant to dive into the film’s online lore.
The Backrooms actress recently explained why she wanted her character Kat to “have a fresh perspective” in the Kane Parsons-directed A24 film, based on his 2022 web series, resisting the urge to immediately binge the episodes.
“I was immediately wanting to dive into them, and I watched the first couple of episodes,” she admitted to DiscussingFilm. “And then I realized I was starting to go down the rabbit hole, and I wanted my character to have a fresh perspective. I didn’t want to know what the mold meant, and I didn’t wanna know about the number eight, I wanted to keep those out of my head for while we shot.”
Maxwell continued, “But then, I was doing a deep dive into his music. I was listening to a lot of Kane’s music and kind of getting a feel of his world-building, outside of The Backrooms. But then afterwards, yeah, total deep dive. I watched everything, again, and again, and again.”
In Backrooms, now in theaters, Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as furniture store owner Clark, who stumbles into an otherworldly dimension of never-ending office space that hides chilling secrets, only for his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), to come searching for him.
Originating as a 2019 creepypasta on 4chan, Parsons adapted The Backrooms into a YouTube web series when he was 16 in 2022, prompting A24 to give him a feature adaptation.
Parsons previously spoke to Deadline in our ‘Disruptors’ issue about the success of his web series and its creepypasta origins.
“Backrooms is obviously weird because that one originates from a 4chan post referring to another 4chan post that is just not easily traceable, actually, as far as to say just not traceable at all,” said Parsons. “But I think they’re just urban legends really, they’re just in a different medium. I think there’s elements that appeal. I think it’s just the same thing that we’ve always been doing as a species, little folk tales, except now the medium just happens to be a little more reliant on digital or analog devices as a way to fuel the story, just because it’s convenient and it’s more mysterious.”
