Escape rooms are thriving by selling customers thrilling experiences, but we all know we’re going to get out even if we can’t solve them. The movie Escape Room (read our review) cranks the escape room phenomenon up to a deadly extreme. If these six gamers don’t solve the puzzles, they die.
Escape Room has some pretty wild rooms involving flame throwers, frozen keys and an upside down room with a disappearing floor. There was one room that didn’t make the cut though. In fact, director Adam Robitel decided not to film it at all.
“There was one room that we were going to do,” Robitel exclusively told Bloody-Disgusting. “It was in the original script, which was sort of like this factory press thing where all these massive presses are coming down. It was later in the movie. It was the scene that ended up becoming the trippy, hallucinatory scene. I was worried; we were looking at really scary old factories in Cape Town and I just felt like somebody was going to get hurt. To do it right would’ve needed a lot of visual effects. It felt like it was an Indiana Jones kind of gag. It didn’t feel like the right choice. We ultimately ended up going with the more trippy room.”
An industrial factory would also make Escape Room look more like some other popular horror franchises like Saw and Hostel. Those are great, but Escape Room had lavish, colorful rooms. Escape Room was also PG-13 and pressing someone to death might force them to make it R.
“The mandate from my producers was make it PG-13 and not relying on reverse bear traps and so forth,” Robitel said.
“So for me, it was always to really validate why this movie exists, it’s not about gore and shock. I call it a psychological roller coaster ride. It allows some people who don’t necessarily like bloody horror stuff to come in and enjoy more of a thriller I think ultimately than a straight horror film. Those are fun constraints to work on. I certainly love a good vivisection and lopping somebody’s arm off or putting somebody in a bear trap, but we all decided earlier on that that wouldn’t be the tone of the movie.”
Robitel had some reservations about the hallucinatory room too, but by that point in the movie it was impossible to physically top what had come before. So he had to take a different approach.
“The hard part of these movies is you can’t keep outdoing each room,” Robitel said.
“It’s so hard to continuously sustain it. So we were like what’s that unexpected thing? We knew we wanted some sort of mano a mano fight between Ben and Jason and thought what if they had some sort of psychotropic where they were tripping a little bit which would make it a little more fun?”
Escape Room is now on digital and comes to Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday, April 23.
