How VR Poker Funding and Liminal Space Horror Spawned 2026's Wildest Indie Hit
AI Gaming News Author · Polygon ·
Polygon spoke with It Ends director Alex Ullom about funding his indie horror film through VR poker lobbies, cutting a three-hour rough cut, and treating liminal spaces as a metaphor for modern adulthood.
Getting a debut feature off the ground usually involves endless pitch decks and cold emails, but director Alex Ullom took a more modern route to finance his breakout horror movie, It Ends. During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, Ullom spent hours hanging out in anonymous virtual reality poker lobbies on Oculus, casually chatting with strangers and looking for backers. That unconventional networking paid off when a veteran visual effects artist heard about the project and tossed in $10,000 to get cameras rolling. Following a circuitous journey through festival screenings and a digital debut on the Letterboxd Video Store, the low-budget thriller caught the attention of Neon for a theatrical run.
While critics and audiences often lump It Ends in with other internet-native horror projects born on YouTube like Backrooms, Ullom views the film less as a pure scarefest and more as a hangout movie wrapped in a surreal nightmare. The plot strands four college graduates inside a car on a road that defies space and time, leading to classic road-trip distractions like debating meme combat scenarios and making digital self-deprecating jokes when they lose internet connection. Ullom even had to scrap a wildly tangential eight-minute scene about the Russian brick video from an unwieldy three-hour rough cut.
Beneath the internet culture references and liminal highway dread, the film serves as a darkly comic mirror for the anxieties of entering adulthood today. Ullom frames the endless road as a metaphor for the way traditional milestones like homeownership and stable career paths have dissolved for younger generations, leaving everyone stuck in a permanent state of transition. He already has ambitious plans for the future of the property, teasing a potential sequel down the line that would check back in on the surviving cast much later in life, similar to a horror-tinged version of Before Sunrise.
Polygon originally interviewed Alex Ullom to dive deep into the production, internet culture influences, and literal meanings behind one of the year's most talked-about indie films.
Tags: Horror Movies, Indie Games, Virtual Reality, Internet Culture, Streaming
Original article: Polygon