INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER Director Was Nervous BACKROOMS Would Steal His Pillow Fort Scare

The director of Insidious: Out of the Further, Jacob Chase, had one very specific thought running through his head while watching Backrooms: Please, for the love of horror, don’t have a pillow fort.

Chase was already familiar with the unsettling appeal of Kane Parsons’ liminal nightmare, but his anxiety while watching had less to do with whatever was lurking around those endless yellow rooms. He was worried Parsons might suddenly introduce a pillow fort.

Insidious: Out of the Further features a memorable sequence involving Gemma, played by Amelia Eve, who becomes trapped inside what appears to be an endless pillow fort. It takes something associated with childhood comfort and turns it into a claustrophobic maze where the usual rules of space no longer seem to apply.

Chase knew Backrooms was playing with similar ideas involving infinite, repetitive spaces, so watching the movie became a nerve-racking experience for him.

He told Variety: “‘Please don’t go into a pillow fort, please don’t go into a pillow fort.’ Luckily they did not.” He really didn’t have anything to worry about.

For me, Out of the Further was a much better horror movie than Backrooms. I found Backrooms boring as hell. Its visual concept is interesting, and Parsons certainly understands why liminal spaces can make people uncomfortable, but the movie never grabbed me.

Chase’s pillow fort sequence, on the other hand, worked incredibly well. It had the horror intensity and scares that you want form a horror movie, and it took the concept of being trapped in an impossible space and made it terrifying.

Rather than simply wandering through weird architecture, Gemma is stuck somewhere that should feel completely harmless. It a place that she be fun! That contrast makes the whole thing more effective.

The idea came directly from Chase digging into things that scare him personally. He explained: “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.”

You can feel that influence in the sequence. The Descent remains one of the great claustrophobic horror movies, and those tunnel scenes are brutal because the environment itself becomes the threat. You don’t need a monster when simply trying to move forward feels impossible.

The pillow fort taps into a similar fear while giving it an Insidious flavor. A pillow fort is supposed to be small, cozy, and familiar. Making it impossibly large yet horrifically claustrophobic, immediately screws with your expectations. Every turn takes Gemma farther from safety, and the deeper she travels, the more oppressive the space becomes.

Chase also knew exactly where he wanted the sequence to appear in the movie and what he wanted it to communicate about the horror ahead.

“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.”

The scene establishes early that Out of the Further is willing to play around with space and find scares in unexpected places. More importantly, the nightmare is tied directly to Gemma and what would frighten her in that particular moment.

That’s also where I think Out of the Further succeeds more than Backrooms. Both movies use liminal spaces and the fear of being lost, but Chase gives that concept a stronger emotional and horror-driven purpose.

Backrooms had plenty of strange rooms for its characters to wander through, but I eventually found myself checking out because there was no real story or purpose.

Chase may have spent part of Backrooms hoping Parsons wouldn’t steal his pillow-fort thunder, but there was no reason to sweat it. Backrooms never went there, and even if it had, Insidious: Out of the Further delivered one of the more memorable horror sequences built around the idea.