It’s been six years since the idea for It Ends entered writer-director Alex Ullom’s brain. The “hangout horror” film played the festival circuit, where it generated considerable buzz. It then went on to be one of the first films available on the Letterboxd Video Store. Neon subsequently scooped the film for theatrical release, which brings us here.

You can check out our full interview with Alex Ullom below. (SPOILER WARNING FROM 4:03 – 5:31)

The timing feels perfect. 2026 seems to be the year of Gen-Z filmmakers leaving their mark on the horror genre with smash hits like Backrooms and Obsession shaking up the industry. For Ullom, it’s an exciting time.

“First off, it’s awesome,” he says. “I don’t want to jinx it, but it feels like a new Hollywood movement where the studios are saying, ‘Okay, our model is not working anymore.’ Like the same thing where it’s like in the seventies where they were like, ‘Okay, there’s a whole generation raised on TV, and we cannot speak to them anymore, so it’s time to let the kids play.’ You know, it’s like Gen-Z is inheriting the economy. You know, it’s awesome. Admittedly, I wish it came fucking eight months earlier where I was dead in the market and living in a fucking walk-in closet, but, you know, timing.”

The timing does easily clear the pathway for comparisons between Ullom, Kane Parsons, and Curry Barker, but Ullom affirms that they’ve all had different, but equally valid, paths. 

“Both of them have honed their craft for years on YouTube,” Ullom explains. “I…would put [It Ends] more like [Barker’s] Milk & Serial (2024), which he scrapped together over tons of years. You know, that’s what this movie was…it took from beginning inception to now like six years. I’m very grateful for it, but I have a very different path than them, you know, they’re coming off of YouTube, which I love YouTube by the way, but I came from…film school.”

Ullom has dubbed It Ends as “hangout horror,” blending suffocating horror with the heart of a summer coming-of-age story.

NEON

“I mean, I think that…horror specifically is the most distinct version of…overcoming conflict and then learning from it, overcoming conflict, learning from it, guy with a knife, learn, you survive, he’s over here now,” he explains. “You know, it’s an immediate pressing conflict at all times…. And I think what this movie specifically is like, that’s not what adulthood really is. It’s more of a scrap in the mud where you pull your meaning from your everyday…malaise, and it’s very easy to be lost in that, like the characters. I think that it’s more that these two genres, the horror and the hangout, are completely antithetical to each other.”

The film was born from a very personal place for Ullom, diving deep into the existential dread that comes from entering adulthood. However, all these years later, Ullom sees the film with fresh eyes.

“Originally when I made the film I was coming from a very physiological place…like I have to get this out of me,” Ullom says. “I have to articulate what it felt like to be in that dark place. But also I got older, and I was like, ‘Oh, he was really dealing with a lot of more systemic structural issues and being downwater from the fact that…the tent poles of structure that used to exist, like buying a house or having a family, et cetera, don’t really exist anymore….’ As I grew older, I realized that it’s such a universal experience, like the thing that I experienced, and I was actually articulating the broader themes and emotions than even I was aware of at the time…. It’s almost like a time capsule to watch me and my friends in that thing.”

It Ends is now playing in select cities and will be playing everywhere August 28.

Interview & Analysis Courtesy of Adam Patla

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Feature Image Courtesy of Alex Ullom