Panic Fest 2024: Experimental feature NOCLIP scours the liminal backrooms of Crown Center

This is part of our coverage of local horror/sci-fi’s biggest event of the year, Panic Fest 2024. For more from the fest, click here.

At this year’s Panic Fest film event up at Screenland Armour, dozens of films will see their world premieres—viewed for the first time by live audiences. Co-directors as stars Alex Conn and Gavin Miller-Broomfield will premiere their debut feature, NOCLIP. The Kansas City-based filmmakers, inspired by liminal spaces and the internet’s recent obsession with abandoned locations as a storytelling device, made a found footage horror-adjacent film set in Crown Center.

Filmed and edited in two days, the movie follows Conn and Miller-Broomfield as they traverse Crown Centers corridors, hallways, and maintenance spaces in a loose, casual investigation of the unknown within the familiar. The two dudes present as a couple of stoners slowly working themselves into a panic attack over time lost and directionless existence. There’s a sincerity here that the whole film would fumble without—as the filmmakers have mostly just shown up as themselves. Armed with a phone as a camera, the two explorers find darkness in the fluorescent glow of a shopping center in the middle of the day.

NOCLIP premieres on Sunday, April 7 at 7 p.m. and Panic Fest tickets are available here.

The Pitch sat down with Conn and Miller-Broomfield to discuss liminal spaces, the end of time, and the Reddit-post-to-feature-film pipeline.

The Pitch: So first thing’s first: Crown Center is fuckin’ weird, right?

Miller-Broomfield: That was the jumping off point behind the whole movie. I asked people on Reddit about weird desolate locations in the metro or odd liminal spaces around KC, and the unanimous answer was Crown Center. I’ve been going there since I was a kid, but never really noticed just how bizarre the whole thing is… or perhaps become in recent years? I hadn’t been back recently, and until we shot there, Alex had never been to Crown Center at all.

Conn: I’m from New York and I moved out here in August. We started shooting the movie in late September. I was excited to work with Gavin and we got started immediately. We had some ideas for shorts and features, but this just came together quickly, with the sort of simplicity that it required. You’re just gonna run around Crown Center with your friend, filming it and sort of acting but also just reacting to the space—letting it guide where you’re headed next. I grew up in New York, not the cool parts but Westchester County, and we had so many fascinating, cool malls. I had an affinity for the aesthetic and now malls are becoming more of a space trapped in the past—or slightly out of time itself.

For an older audience that hasn’t grown up with The Backrooms and the online resurgence of being obsessed with liminal spaces, why do you think this generation has brought back this level of interest in the power of empty, abandoned spaces as a storytelling device?

Miller-Broomfield: I have a lot of theories about why the whole liminal aesthetic and the backrooms thing got huge when it did. We were locked in for pandemic and when you left for supplies or whatever, you were occupying these spaces built for masses of humanity, reduced to a few people or none at all. The space itself was essentially toxic as well—this emptiness that was somehow also wildly dangerous. So by nature of just what folks were taking pictures of in life around them, we got a lot of photos where daily life was taking place in these semi-eerie gaps in existence. Certain internet cultures really sprung up around that, because not only were these images of a semi-haunted present, but they also carry a heavy layer of nostalgia for a partially remembered past. Creepy shaded memories mixed with a creeping dread of the future—there’s an implication of horror here on so many levels, and conveying that message leaves a lot up to the viewer’s own imagination and creation.

In documenting Crown Center, the movie stops to linger on a lot of transitional spaces. There’s a lot of different parts of the complex that are used for shops or businesses or theaters, but that also creates a lot of infrastructure required to connect these points. That’s how you wind up with long hallways full of nothing, areas where there’s no attention paid to the visual aesthetics, and wide open spaces or corridors where you have to ask: “Do people even come here? Is there anything for people to do here?”

Conn: Usually you get that deja vu sense when you’re dealing with very unmemorable parts of your life. It makes sense that these empty, nothing, transitory environments would cause that because they’re all interchangeable. It feels very American—this hegemony of architecture everywhere you go. There’s this entire era that, no matter where you are in the country, the shopping spaces are all made of flickering monochrome, buzzing yellow lights, and all of that wraps into a childhood-like memory. We were really influenced by Skinamarink—the recent found-footage-like throwback to the 90s and a kind of childhood haunting, made entirely of memories half-remembered in a dream-like state. It really showed us that you can operate on this kind of vibe for an entire film and do something exciting with very little else.

As the film talks about, you’ve got the these, these spaces that are created that no one ever takes a step back to be like this sort of a function. There’s no reason anyone should be here. There’s no vending machine. And the idea of this sort of Winchester house expansion where you’re just building hallways to build hallways, and the mix of capitalism and corporate culture in that building can do that.

Miller-Broomfield: We shot this in like very late September, over the course of two days. We edited both nights and had most of what we needed there. So much of this came together so organically that there wasn’t much more to add. It’s a little haunting just how easily we could make this? We didn’t have to come back on a lot of days to get such perfectly abandoned large spaces. This is just what’s actually like there. The design, the functionality, it’s all in service of this as a primary mode of operation.

I’d like to know, for something that so much more about vibes than formal structure, how did you decide on this length of an hour long film? I feel like I always want to ask ambient/drone musicians about when they know a song is supposed to end—something that could be 30 seconds long or 30 minutes long. How did you let this guide you into feature length territory? What point did you know this is the end of the movie, for the narrative you wanted to tell?

Miller-Broomfield: We decided this final scene was where we wanted it to end, and just faded out from there. It really fit with the themes we were playing with—to make this sort of timeless and endless and it all bleeds together. It’s an experience more than a narrative. I’m sure some people will not vibe with it, or will find some of it boring, or maybe won’t like it all, but we think there are people that will really connect with what NOCLIP is doing, if they settle in and just come along for the ride.