'It Ends' Director Alex Ullom Reveals the Movie's Meaning and His Surprising Sequel Plan
Overview & Key Takeaways
The director of It Ends talks liminal spaces, Gen Z horror, the 3-hour cut he had to scrap, and his plans for a sequel
Six years ago, Alex Ullom wasn't the young director behind one of 2026's buzziest horror movies. He was just a recent film school graduate with a trippy script about four kids like him who drive off from college to start their new lives — and instead wind up stuck on an endless road that defies the laws of space and time.
This was 2020, during COVID quarantine, and Ullom was spending a lot of time playing online poker in a virtual reality Oculus app. He wasn't just killing time, though. He was looking for investors.
"I would just sit in virtual reality anonymous poker lobbies online for hours on end and hang out with people and shoot the shit," Ullom tells Polygon via a Zoom call from his apartment. "A small part of me was like, I definitely could meet an investor."
Incredibly enough, that's exactly what happened.
"Eventually someone was like, 'Hey, what are you doing?' And I'm like, 'Oh, I'm shooting a movie in the fall.' I didn't have the financing. I absolutely was not doing that. But he was like, 'Oh, really? If you're ready to go, I did a bunch of VFX on Guillermo del Toro's movies. I've always wanted to produce. Here's $10,000.'"
Gen Z's next great horror director?
Ullom filmed the first version of It Ends in 2022, then brought a rough cut to some early investors and asked for the cash to reshoot most of the movie. It Ends premiered at SXSW in 2025 and released digitally on the Letterboxd Video Store that December. Then, it was picked up by Neon, which saw potential for the movie to be the latest installment in a recent string of industry-defying low-budget, high-profit horror flicks. It Ends debuted in theaters on Aug. 21.
Image: Chris Violette
Ullom mostly rejects the comparisons to other recent breakout Gen Z horror directors like Obsession's Curry Barker and Backrooms' Kane Parsons.
"I don't see this film as something next to Obsession or Backrooms at all," he says. "Kane and Curry both honed their craft for years on YouTube. All that stuff was their It Ends. That was their trial and error process. It Ends was literally this thing that took us six years to scrap together. It's more like Curry's first movie, Milk and Cereal. That's why it's so crazy that it's coming out of theaters. It honestly blows my mind. It makes no sense."
There's almost a comfortability in liminal spaces.
The other big difference, according to Ullom, is that It Ends isn't primarily a scary movie.
"I learned very quickly that this is a hangout movie battling a horror movie," he says.
Without giving too much of the plot away, It Ends traps its four main characters — James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole) — together in a car for most of its 89-minute runtime. While they spend plenty of time and effort trying to figure out what's happened to them and why, the group also finds ways to distract themselves.
Early on, the group debates a meme that asks you to pick two of the following four options to protect you from the other two: 10,000 rats, 50 hawks, five gorillas, or one man with a gun. Later, with no internet connection to entertain themselves, they make their own memes. ("I never should've smoked that shit. Now I'm stuck on the endless road," reads one, paired with a distorted selfie of Jackson.)
Image: Neon
According to Ullom, the movie originally featured a lot more of this kind of stuff, including references to some pretty niche internet culture.
"There used to be an eight-minute scene where they just talked about the Russian brick video, and it had nothing to do with the fucking movie," he says. "I loved that scene, but I had to cut it, which sucked. There used to be a three-hour cut of It Ends. It was much worse, by the way. It was much, much, much, much worse."
So what does It Ends actually mean?
Image: Neon
Again, no spoilers (this is a film best experienced with as little information as possible), but Ullom does offer some thoughts on both a metaphorical and literal level.
More generally, he sees It Ends as a reflection of the many issues facing Gen Z as they graduate from college and stumble into a world that seemingly no longer works the way it once did. At this point, he says, young people are just looking for any viable path to follow. The film's endless road turns that desire into something surreal and sinister.
We've been given directions to destinations that don't exist anymore.
"The structures that used to hold young people together, whether it was the nuclear family or buying a house or religion, have all kind of dissolved," Ullom says. "Something's off, and something else is coming. We've been in this kind of transitionary state for a long time. Not to use the buzzword of liminal, but liminality is a transition between one thing and another. There's almost a comfortability in liminal spaces."
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Image: Neon
Image: Neon
Image: Neon
Movies like Backrooms, Exit 8, and It Ends all weaponize the concept of a never-ending liminal space, whether that's a fluorescent office building, a subway station, or a quiet country road.
"We've been given directions to destinations that don't exist anymore," Ullom says. "I guess maybe the true state of nature is just driving on a back road or a corporate office room."
You will find out when I make the sequel in 15 years.
Ullom isn't ready to reveal what's literally happening in It Ends just yet, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have the answer.
"I definitely think there's a higher power on the road," he says, confirming that something (or someone) is watching and controlling what happens to the characters in It Ends.
There are other clues woven into the movie as well. Even the characters' names help explain the story.
"There's meaning in all their names, too," Ullom says. "Every character represents a different philosophical view — like meaninglessness and dealing with that, especially as a Gen Z person."
That's about as much as he's willing to reveal for now, but Ullom promises he'll eventually explain exactly what's happening in It Ends. You may just have to wait a little longer than you'd like.
"You will find out when I make the sequel in 15 years," he promises. "This is going to be my Before Sunrise. I'll revisit the characters and talk about late-stage adulthood instead of early adulthood."
One more question
In the meantime, though, there's one question I still need to ask Alex Ullom: 10,000 rats, 50 hawks, five gorillas, or one man with a gun?
"It depends on the environment," he says. "If they're all spawning directly in front of me, it's obviously the rats and the gorillas. If they're in my apartment, the guy's fucked. The hawks are fucked. The environment is really very important for this process."
It Ends is in theaters now.
