A car. Four actors. An endless road.
These essential components make up the majority of Gen Z filmmaker Alex Ullom’s debut feature, “It Ends.” The film, which premiered at South by Southwest in March 2025, follows a group of four friends who, fresh out of college and on the precipice of adulthood, find themselves stuck on a purgatorial road that never ends (likewise, they will never starve, need sleep or run out of gas). With a monotonous infinity stretching before them, the group has two options: Get out of the car and become mindless bodies, or keep driving in the hope that something, anything, lies ahead.
“If it’s not clear in the movie, I had a pretty rough transition into adulthood, at least mentally and emotionally,” Ullom told TheWrap. “When I first wrote the movie when I was, s–t, like 21. I was coming from a lot more of an emotional, physical place, feeling like, Damn, is this the rest of adulthood? Is that what my life is going to be like?”
Ullom, now in his late 20s, captures a feeling of generational ennui in his debut feature, a film that’s distinctly youthful and modern while also feeling universal. It arrives in theaters at a time when some of the year’s biggest and buzziest titles come from filmmakers of a similar generation — your Curry Barkers and Kane Parsons of the world — translating their own modern anxieties into tales of scares and thrills. As the world turns to hell, they turn to horror.
“As I got older, I kind of realized that what I was really pulling from was more of a universal experience of not having set tentpoles of structure that used to unite young people forever, whether it was starting a family or buying a home or religion or whatever the f–k,” Ullom said. “I was just more downtrodden from more of a systemic thing than it was specifically my own depressive youth. Or I guess depressive adulthood.”
Ullom doesn’t view himself as being from the same school as Barker and Parsons (“I keep getting compared to them and I’m like, ‘You guys realize I haven’t even had a movie come out yet, and they both grossed like $200 million,’ so probably don’t,” he laughed). Though certainly a part of the new school of horror, Ullom took a far more traditional path to getting “It Ends” made.
After years of reshoots, post-festival purgatory, a surprise streaming debut and only around $150,000 for the budget, Ullom finds it hard to believe his little indie that could is finally getting a national rollout — let alone rave reviews.
“I never made it with any sort of marketplace in mind,” he said. “That’s why it’s so f–king insane that anyone’s watching this movie at all.”
“The independent feature is the way out of this”
Like many of today’s young adults, Ullom had the misfortune of being a Covid grad. The young filmmaker graduated from Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts in 2020, leaving him with few options but to move back home. But he and his friends — such as “It Ends” producers Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber, whom he met at FSU — had a plan.
“This whole time, my friends and I just had this belief: The independent feature is the future. The independent feature is the way out of this.”
Though the idea for “It Ends” predated the pandemic, cameras wouldn’t start rolling until 2022. In the meantime, Ullom needed to raise some money. The director took on a series of odd jobs to raise those funds — like, truly odd. At one point, he was paid to generate memes for the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets, saying he was “one of the first members on the forum” that would trigger the GameStop short squeeze. During this period, Ullom also ghostwrote biographical screenplays for strangers on the freelance-for-hire site Upwork for $1,000.
And then there were the investors. Ullom got a few thousand for the film from a “career magician” who commented on one of his Wall Street memes to say, “I’d pay for more of this.” He got some more from CGI artist for “Grand Theft Auto 6,” whom he met when he would “sit in a bunch of virtual reality (high-roller) poker lobbies and just talk to strangers” about his movie. More money came from a film fund called Spark the Arts, started by the parents of a friend of Ullom’s who died during the pandemic.
He also managed to borrow the gear needed to shoot through an FSU alumni initiative. This series of scraping and scrapping eventually helped Ullom accumulate enough funds to start a principal shoot with a budget of $30,000.
“I wrote it as soon as that first $10,000 cleared,” Ullom said. “I’d already been beating it out and learning it, but once it became like this was something we could actually do, I had a really terrible draft in 2019 and then more of a production-focused, in-scope draft in like 2021.”
Ullom pulled a lot of different elements into the story of “It Ends,” drawing from his real-life experiences with depression and dissociation in a deeply existential horror movie. He also wanted to incorporate elements of hangout films. While much of the movie deals with the terror of the situation the characters find themselves in, Ullom also finds time to slow down and focus on the characters’ day-to-day chatter and joking as they accept the reality of their situation.
“I also think it’s pretty akin to how young people experience the world now,” he added. “One second you’re watching a dude’s head get blown off and then the next you’re watching the Geico lizard twerking. They live in a detached state, and that routine that the characters create is exactly the way that modern young people process terror — by making memes and stuff. But overall, out of all of that, past the detached state, the fact that the only thing that you really have is just holding the people that you love that are in your life really close.”
Of course, Ullom would also need to find his car — a used 1990s Jeep Cherokee that belongs to the character of Tyler, meant to “represent a bit of an older generation.” Ullom said the crew put more miles on the car than they care to guess, but that didn’t stop them from somehow turning a profit.
“It was cheap and it was an SUV. We went and got it and then resold it for a little bit more than we bought it for, which makes no sense. Just like Nolan selling the corn, right?” he said, a nod to how Christopher Nolan planted corn for the cornfields seen in “Interstellar,” then sold the corn for a profit after they were done filming.
And then there were the actors. Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth and Mitchell Cole made up the four friends forever condemned to the open road on a wooded highway. All four of them had connections to Ullom’s time at FSU in one way or another.
Jackson had done a student film with Zoë DeLeon, who taught Ullom as a TA at FSU, when she was just 13 years old. Years later, DeLeon DMed Jackson to say she should audition for “It Ends” — though Ullom had no clue how she stumbled across the casting call. Toth auditioned for Ullom’s thesis project and was told that they were “going in another direction, but I’d love to work with you some day” — not believing that he’d ever actually reach back out with a new opportunity. Yoon was told by Chase Davis, the first AC on “It Ends,” that Ullom was “possibly looking for a guy that was possibly Asian and possibly a smart alec, and Chase Davis went, ‘I thought of you for it!’”
And Cole?
“I used to buy Alex beer before he was 21,” Cole told TheWrap with a smile. “He was like, ‘You want to be in my movie?’ and I said, ‘Sure!’ No but seriously, we worked on a project when he was in film school, and we never finished it before COVID, and I didn’t hear from him for like two years, and then one day he hits me up out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to read for Tyler.”
Pretty soon, the cast was set. But none of them knew how long of a journey — the real journey, not the fictional drive — was ahead of them.
“The Endless Shoot”
The “endless road” featured throughout “It Ends” was discovered in Florida. Where exactly in Florida it is, Ullom can’t say.
“We’ve been asked to no longer say what park it was because apparently a bunch of kids were drag racing on the endless road — which is cool, you know, that they’re supporting the movie,” Ullom chuckled.
It’s a shame that Ullom can’t talk about the film’s central road. It was on that road that he and his crew spent years working and reworking through “It Ends,” using extensive reshoots to get the movie across the finish line.
“Once we shot our last round, which was 2024, as we were getting back into the Jeep, I said to everybody, ‘I feel like the amount of time that it’s been from when we started filming to right now with us sitting in the car would probably almost equate to how long our characters have been sitting in the car,’” Toth said.
After wrapping the principal shoot in 2022, Ullom called everyone back for a round of reshoots in 2023 (“Because I f–ked it up the first time”) and another in 2024 (“Because I also didn’t get it right that time”). In the end, he estimated that around 75% of the film that made its way to theaters came during these reshoots.
“Look, I mean, I was just a delusional 21-year-old, you know? I had never paced for longer than 20 minutes,” Ullom said. “I’d say the thing that changed the most that the whole movie’s kind of like a hangout movie battling with a horror movie. The genres are kind of antithetical to each other. Originally, there was a lot more hangout. There would be full scenes where the kids would just be trying to remember, like, You ever hear about the Russian brick video? and they would talk about nothing for a long time. All of that stuff had to get killed and get cut from like two hours and 30 minutes to 90 minutes.”
Toth called the repeated shoots “arduous,” with the cast and crew working through the muggy, buggy Florida summer heat. But those reshoots, he noted, came with their own benefits. With about a year between each shoot, the cast were able to watch through their old performances, discovering what worked and what didn’t — a process Toth compared to football players watching game tape.
“I iterated with them. The only reason this movie works is because of them. They breathe life into the words and punched up my dialogue,” Ullom said. “It was a full collaborative effort between the both of us. There was a tight script or whatever, but they were the ones that would make it sound organic.”
Cole found other benefits in the repeated reshoots. He said they gave each year the feeling of a “family reunion,” with the actors reuniting annually to get their microbudget indie across the finish line.
“It was to the point where it wasn’t the endless road, it was the endless shoot,” Yoon said. “When we wrapped up the final reshoot, we were like, ‘Same time next year?’”
“The best round of filming was when I finally turned 21 and we could all go out together,” Jackson added.
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Of course, these reshoots significantly added to the budget of “It Ends.” After an initial $30,000 price tag, Ullom estimates that production eventually ended up costing around $80,000 or $90,000. After post-production, he thinks the budget ended up around $150,000.
“I will say we’re already in the green,” Ullom said. “That’s crazy.”
Those reshoots paid off, coalescing in a tight 90-minute feature with a razor-sharp screenplay. But one massive challenge still laid before Ullom.
He still had to get “It Ends” in theaters.
“Theaters are like the last religious experience Gen Z has”
After a successful South by Southwest premiere, “It Ends” found itself in a situation that many festival releases find themselves in: Distribution purgatory.
Ullom spent the better part of a year after the film’s March 2025 premiere looking for a distributor that would be willing to carry “It Ends” across the festival finish line. It wasn’t until a chance meeting at Universal that he really started making progress.
“They were like, ‘Nice movie! Obviously we’re not buying it, but we liked it,’” Ullom said of his Universal meeting. “Then I was on the way out and they were having a ‘Jurassic World (Dominion)’ press event, and I saw Nic Curcio and a bunch of the horror community online. I had recognized them, and between me and them was security and a fence, and I was like — whatever. I snuck in there and I got free dinosaur merch, but I talked to Nic and I was like, ‘Yo, thank you for telling kids about movies,’ and a lot of people in there had heard of the film and they were like, ‘Why can’t we watch it? What’s going on?’ I’m like, ‘We are fully dead in the market.’”
This was months before “Obsession” and “Backrooms” made every studio start looking for “The next Curry Barker” or “The next Kane Parsons.” So Ullom started passing screening links around to Curcio (a horror influencer and filmmaker) and other members of the online horror community. Eventually, their positive reactions got the attention of Letterboxd, which was preparing to start a streaming service of its own with a special section dedicated to films that had yet to find distribution.
“We saw (‘It Ends’) bubbling up in the community, and the team on Journal (Letterboxd’s online magazine) as well actually had it as one of their crew picks at SXSW when it premiered there,” Courtney Mayhew, head of programming and content for the Video Store, told TheWrap in April. “It’s important to give kudos to the community first because they’re the ones that started that bubbling up. It wasn’t us.”
Prior to its appearance on the Letterboxd Video Store, membership logs indicate that roughly 2,500 Letterboxd users had seen the film. After its one-month rental window ended, that number jumped to more than 40,000. Eight days after “It Ends” debuted on the Video Store, Neon swooped in to pick the film up for its theatrical distribution.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to the point where, grinding as an actor, you get to a point where you get used to things not really finding a larger audience. I got to a point in my career where I couldn’t have any expectations of any kind,” Toth said. “I forced myself to just stay completely neutral and work my ass off and have hope and some faith, but not really have any expectations because I knew that it could just lead to disappointment. Now it’s funny because the first time I did have that mindset, I’m here talking to you.”
Other members of the cast were a bit more hopeful from the beginning that “It Ends” would eventually find a home.
“Maybe this is just me being super-duper optimistic about stuff, but this entire process for me has felt so serendipitous that I was like, ‘There’s no way we can fail,’” Jackson said. “Even when we were in distribution purgatory, I was like, ‘No. There’s going to be a Hail Mary. I can feel it.’”
Neon also acquired the rights to Ullom’s sophomore feature, “4 X 4: The Event,” which wrapped production the same week that the distributor released “It Ends.” Neon announced the cast of “4 X 4” in a teaser Wednesday, including Sophia Lillis, Dylan Minnette, Jaden Smith and Jacob Tremblay. Cole will also reunite with Ullom in the film, which sees eight contestants join a livestream where they must kill or be killed using only what they can purchase online.
“It’s the exact opposite of ‘It Ends’ — not thematically, but ‘It Ends’ is a lot of minimalism and ennui, and this next one is complete stimuli overload, full-on disclaimers in the theater, gore, genre, super, super, super intense escalation,” Ullom said. “I got to really play around and have a real budget. Hopefully I won’t have to reshoot that one twice. Every single lesson I learned in ‘It Ends’ I took into that film.”
Ullom finds himself heartened by the new wave of horror that’s starting to crop up, with studios realizing the value of finding unknown voices and giving them the resources to take their talents — honed through the internet and film school — and use them on a larger scale. The filmmaker compared horror today to the crime genre of the ‘90s, which launched the careers of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.
“I was really sheltered as a kid. I was only allowed to watch ‘Veggie Tales’ until I was like 10. Then one day my dad was just like, ‘F–k it, you’re a man now. Here’s ‘Reservoir Dogs,’’ and I remembered being like, ‘What the f–k?’ I was blown away. You know, crime in the ‘90s was kind of like what horror is now, just a commercial genre to play with, and he brought in some hangout elements to that that probably impacted me in a serious way. Definitely did.”
Ullom hopes the trend that’s spawning out of “Obsession” and “Backrooms” continues into other genres.
“If this is new Hollywood, then we’re coming up on the dramas getting more institutional support without famous people. But the whole movement, I’m incredibly f–king grateful for what’s happening right now. Are you kidding me? Theaters are like the last religious experience Gen Z has.”
“What I really hope ‘It Ends’ stands for next to (‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’) is like when I watched ‘Slacker’ for the first time and I was like, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ I want a bunch of film kids to see ‘It Ends’ and be like, ‘I can just get some actors and a camera and go make a movie.’”
“It Ends” is in theaters now.
