The beginnings of ‘It Ends’

In Alexander Ullom’s unpredictable horror film “It Ends,” four friends driving home from college realize that they’re on an endless road. (Neon)

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

The open road has a grand tradition in American movies. You hit the highway, meet people along the way, see some sights and get where you’re going with a fresh perspective. The future is yours.

This is not how “It Ends” works.

In Alexander Ullom’s unpredictable horror film, four friends driving home from college realize that they’re on an endless road. Worse, whenever they stop the car and linger, terrible things happen. So they keep driving, timing their stops and fending off dread. The future is a matter of survival — though at least they’re with friends.

After engrossing audiences at its world premiere last year at South by Southwest, “It Ends” has made its way to theaters. Variety called it “Jean-Paul Sartre with a Gen Z spin, a hangout horror movie rife with existential anxieties.” Fans from the social platform Letterboxd (where the film was briefly made available last December) vibed with the journey. “A very inventive story with characters that had a true life to them,” wrote one commenter. Another got to the point: “i feel like i just got hit by a truck.”

The four friends in the story — Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth), James (Phinehas Yoon) and Tyler (Mitchell Cole) — are tightly bonded, but the circumstances lay bare their anxieties about their prospects. James has a software engineering career planned out, and Tyler is an Army veteran, but the situation throws both of them for a loop, as it does the easygoing Day and Fisher.

Part killer premise, part personal reckoning, all laced with humor, “It Ends” traces its authenticity to the scrappy origins and personal stakes of its making. Ullom, 28, wrote the screenplay at 22 during a rough patch, which, as in the film, he recalled with irrepressible gallows humor.

“For lack of a better poetic way to say it, I was dealing with depression,” he said in a Zoom interview. “I think because it was coming right when I was transitioning into real life, it felt like: Oh, this is just what the rest of life feels like.”

As a student in the Florida State University film program, Ullom was making movies with his classmates Evan Barber (whom he first met after recognizing him from a YouTube sketch) and Carrie Carusone. They were part of the 2020 graduating class that left for spring break when the pandemic hit and never fully returned. The challenging job market began to feel generational and existential.

“The state of the world that I expected to inherit might not exist,” Barber said in a video interview.

That realization has become a well-documented part of Gen Z identity, but at the time, Ullom and his friends were also desperate to make a feature film with what they’d learned. Ullom raised funding for his script any which way he could. He frequented online poker rooms, reeling in one investor. (“Not that I was actively targeting these people,” he clarified.)

After two long years of fundraising and treading water, an FSU program for alumni gave Ullom access to a studio space and equipment. He could shoot the movie’s many car scenes more easily and cheaply, though this involved disassembling a car to get it indoors.

Casting actors partly through Instagram and calling on friends to pitch in, Ullom shot a version of “It Ends” in a first round of production that cost around $30,000. Carusone and Barber produced the movie while taking on other crew roles (Carusone as the production designer and Barber as the first assistant director). They cooked meals and found vacant houses for crew lodging.

Ullom labored over the edit, then realized more work was needed, and more funding. So he cut together a 20-minute sequence and brought it to someone he knew from online, a magician who had shown interest in his work.

“I drive up to his house in San Francisco and screen it in his living room, and then go back and shoot another seven days with the same crew,” Ullom said. Crucial postproduction help came from three well-connected FSU alumni, and then executives at the production company Snoot Entertainment supported the film with invaluable reshoots.

The long road of the production helped the young cast and crew bond. Jackson, who plays Day, started on the film at age 19 and wrapped at 22.

“I definitely feel like I came of age on that set,” Jackson said in a video interview. “This entire movie is about who you become when there’s nothing to regulate you and there’s nowhere to hide. Those long rehearsal hours really allowed us to dissect each other.”

This directness with one another evokes another Gen Z touchstone for the team of “It Ends.” Like the four friends in the car who push each other to open up, Ullom and his friends dig deep.

“From the relationships we built in college, we are pretty confrontational with one another and always seeking to grow and improve,” Carusone said in a video interview.

“It Ends” now joins a Gen Z horror wave in which “Obsession” and “Backrooms” have earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. They’re all about arduous journeys, according to Peter Kuplowsky, a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival who saw “It Ends” early on and screened “Obsession” in the festival’s Midnight Madness section.

“They end up being Rorschach tests for multiple perspectives to project their own experiences,” Kuplowsky said. He calls Gen Z horror “high lore” rather than “high concept” because of how audiences engage with the lack of a fixed meaning.

Asked about the meaning of “It Ends,” Ullom doesn’t hold back.

“Gen Z don’t have a structure,” he said. “It’s not religion, or the nuclear family, or any sort of unifying thing. And that lack of structure creates this gaping, terrifying, moral black hole. The world they’re being handed was not very interested in the human experience of it.”

The distributor Neon, however, was very interested in “It Ends,” acquiring the film at the end of 2025. Unlike the directors of “Backrooms” or “Obsession,” Ullom didn’t have the same built-in audiences from online work, but his appeal to younger viewers was a draw.

“The cool part of Neon is that there are Gen Z execs that have some power when it comes to acquiring and identifying films that we think will resonate,” said Kate Gondwe, director of acquisitions, development and production at the distributor. “We met Alex and immediately knew that he was speaking to our generation in a way that hasn’t really been done authentically before.”

When Ullom and I spoke, he was in Vancouver already shooting his second feature, “4x4: The Event,” which Neon has also acquired. He described it as “pure maximalism” in contrast to “It Ends,” and mused about how working at a larger scale was in some ways easier.

Has he escaped the endless road?

“I mean, I was sleeping in a walk-in closet literally three months ago,” he said. “The second film still has to work for me not to go back to the closet bedroom. I’m still terrified, for sure.”