It Ends Director Alex Ullom Discusses the Film’s Meaning and Sequel Plans

Six years ago, Alex Ullom was not yet the director behind one of 2026’s most talked-about horror movies. He was simply a fresh film school graduate holding a surreal script about four college graduates setting out for their adult lives, only to find themselves trapped on a road that bends time and space.

During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Ullom passed the hours playing poker inside an Oculus virtual reality app. The card games served a dual purpose, as he was actively searching for potential film backers.

“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 over a Zoom call from his apartment. “A small part of me was like, I definitely could meet an investor.”

That gamble ended up paying off.

“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 shot the initial version of It Ends in 2022, presented a rough cut to early financiers, and secured additional funds to reshoot the bulk of the picture. The completed feature premiered at SXSW in 2025 before arriving on the Letterboxd Video Store that December. Distributor Neon subsequently acquired the title, seeing an opportunity for another low-budget horror success. It Ends arrived in movie theaters on Aug. 21.

Ullom resists easy comparisons between himself and other prominent Gen Z horror filmmakers, including Obsession director Curry Barker and Backrooms creator Kane Parsons.

“I don’t see this film as something next to Obsession or Backrooms at all,” Ullom 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.”

Ullom also points out that scares are not the primary focus of It Ends.

“I learned very quickly that this is a hangout movie battling a horror movie,” he says.

The 89-minute story confines four central characters to an automobile: James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Tyler (Mitchell Cole). Between attempts to comprehend their bizarre predicament, the passengers pass the time with casual distractions.

Early in the drive, the group argues over an internet hypothetical asking whether two choices among 10,000 rats, 50 hawks, five gorillas, or an armed man could defeat the remaining options. Cut off from cellular data, they also craft offline memes using distorted photos of Jackson.

Earlier cuts of the project contained far more internet subculture references.

“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,” Ullom 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?

Without spoiling the narrative twists, Ullom connects the film’s premise to the broader social realities facing younger generations as they leave school and step into an uncertain world. The endless highway exaggerates their hunt for stable footing into a sinister, surreal trial.

“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.”

Features such as Backrooms, Exit 8, and It Ends explore infinite intermediary settings, turning mundane environments like subway stops, office corridors, and empty roads into sources of dread.

“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.”

Ullom keeps the exact mechanics of the highway mystery guarded, though he confirms that definite answers exist behind the scenes.

“I definitely think there’s a higher power on the road,” Ullom says, acknowledging an unseen force overseeing the group’s journey.

The character names carry specific meaning as well.

“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.”

Full narrative explanations will have to wait for future work.

“You will find out when I make the sequel in 15 years,” Ullom 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

Before ending the discussion, there remains the hypothetical matchup of 10,000 rats, 50 hawks, five gorillas, and one gunman.

“It depends on the environment,” Ullom 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.

Source: Polygon