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It Ends should not exist in a theater. Alexander Ullom wrote, directed and edited it for $80,000, cast it by posting who wants to be in a movie on Instagram, premiered it at SXSW in March 2025, and then watched it sit in distribution limbo until Letterboxd put it in the first batch of titles on its Video Store. NEON saw it there. Now it’s played 36 hours on a loop in a Chelsea screening room, it’s grossed north of ten times its budget, and NEON has already bankrolled and released the follow-up, 4 X 4: The Event, an eight-hander with Sophia Lillis, Dylan Minnette, Jacob Tremblay, Jaden Smith, Quintessa Swindell, Maddie Phillips, Marcel Ruiz and Mitchell Cole.
The film itself is four recent graduates on a late-night food run who take a wrong turn onto a two-lane road with no exits and no end. Ullom calls it hangout horror, a phrase he’s been trying to make stick since SXSW. It’s the right one. The terror in It Ends isn’t the thing in the dark; it’s the Cliff bar, the meme, the fact that the conversation has to keep going because there’s nothing else to do.
We caught him in the NEON office in New York, mid-press day, sitting at somebody else’s computer, two days out from wrapping his second feature and audibly unsure how much he’s allowed to say about it.
I went in expecting a horror movie, and it is one, but a lot of the fear comes from things that aren’t usually in horror films. Did it start out as horror, or did it start out as four friends?
Alexander Ullom: It always started as what I call a hangout horror, and those two genres are kind of antithetical to each other. James represents a prototypical move into adulthood, where you believe there’s this hero’s journey. Horror operates on conquering conflict as quickly as possible, guy with a knife in a kitchen, guy with a knife in a living room. I thought adulthood had those same steps. Then I realized it was a bit of a scrap in the mud for me, and I had to pull meaning out of my day-to-day conversations. The thing that made me stick around was conversations I had on a day-to-day basis. And also eating food.
Is that where the Cliff bar came in?
For sure. When I was in a really tough place, literally looking forward to dinner was the thing. Just the chemical sensation of eating food was enough to give me a little bit of hope. That sounds so grim.
No, I think a lot of people experience that. When you’re at a low point it’s the small things you don’t notice day to day.
I’ve got a bit of a sore throat right now, actually. First time doing press.
The scariest thing in the film for me is a question that I think haunts everybody, or at least haunts people like me who are more OCD about it — is this it? Could I be doing more? These metaphors for life that have no answer. Do you think those questions will always be at the center of your films?
I’m a very thematic filmmaker. I’ve always pitched this film as if Richard Linklater made a horror movie. The draw to liminal spaces, which is kind of what this is, is that there’s a general sentiment among a lot of young people entering the world right now that we’re in an infinite transitionary space. The typical destinations — buying a home, starting a family — don’t really exist anymore, and so we’re in this ever-forward movement toward nothing. I guess the first-time homebuyer is 40 now, but that feels like an eon away. Shout out being 40. That’s the fear underneath the fear on the endless road. So yeah, I’m always going to be pulling from theme. And then it’s a balance of theme and my favorite moments, where the characters are just shooting the shit.
The memes in the car, the way they make memes of themselves — was that written, or did it come out of the shoot?
I always think about my parents watching this stuff and going, oh fuck, do we need to check in on him? There’s something about watching a dude’s head get blown off and then scrolling and seeing the Geico lizard twerking that’s a foundational experience of processing terror nowadays. That’s just Tuesday now. That balance is going to be ever-present in the work.
Liminal spaces are having a moment. You know Kane Parsons, and Curry Barker’s films are getting the kind of hype yours is getting now. What do those friendships mean, as young people all going through a similar thing?
I personally really fucking hate the comparisons. Well — here’s what I’ll say. Kane and Curry honed their craft for years on YouTube. Obviously, Kane’s was his first feature, but they’d made hours of content online and found their voice and dialed it in. That’s why their craft is so dialed. It Ends for me was that process. It Ends is not made for a marketplace. It’s closer to what Curry’s Milk & Serial was, something scrapped together. They’re just different goals. We’re releasing on a few thousand fewer screens. The weirdest part is that we went to streaming first, and going from streaming to theaters is strange. Also, we got pirated. This is all cope, this movie is not going to make a lot of money, by the way.
It might, though. Maybe not like those films, but it might.
Us being in the green at all is crazy. The real through line of all of this is a general sensibility, and it’s kind of what happened in the ’70s: there’s a full generation raised on television and the studios are going, holy fuck, we don’t know how to speak to them anymore, we have to let the kids play. Knock on wood that this is another New Hollywood movement. But It Ends is not in the same ballpark as those two films, which obviously I’ve seen. Duh. They’re great.
I had a conversation recently with an actor who talked about studios excavating things young people felt were theirs — YouTube IP, YouTube creators. On one hand it platforms those artists, on the other they’re touching something that isn’t really theirs to touch. Do you have a take on that?
Anything that gets people into a theater is probably a net positive. It depends on where the money goes, but theaters are one of the last community-building spaces that exist, so something being experienced together is a net positive. Overall, I have no opinion on them taking stuff from online spaces. Hopefully they’re giving more shots to up-and-coming filmmakers. They’re not going to have — shout out being 40 — they’re not going to have an older person directing the Siren Head movie. Hopefully that’s a young kid getting a studio opportunity.
The chemistry in It Ends makes the film. How did you cast it then, versus how you cast 4 X 4 now?
For It Ends, I literally just posted online. I was like, who wants to be in a movie, on Instagram. And I read maybe 300 to 500 people over Zoom. What stood out about the main four, who carry the movie on their backs, was who could make my dialogue sound better than it was written. All of them did that. Mitchell Cole was the only one I actually wrote the role for. He was someone I met in Tallahassee, Florida, he was doing HVAC repair work and living in a trailer park in the Panhandle. The dude is the most authentic. They’re all hidden gems and I hope this movie helps them get discovered. That original casting process was just me scrounging around the internet. I guess the entire movie is me scrounging around the internet to get it made.
Were people DMing you tapes? Was it hard to sift through?
I read basically every person who fit the character descriptions I put out.
And with a casting director?
Completely different. Shout out Automatic Sweat, they were awesome. It’s a different ball game, where a lot of people won’t engage unless they liked my movie or the script specifically. We had an insane amount of tapes come in for 4 X 4. I was very surprised by the level of talent. I was very lucky to find that cast too.
Was there someone you built the rest of the cast around?
I was very open to the process. There were a couple I knew were probably going to be in the movie. But one of the main differences was that on It Ends I was coming from a place of holy fuck, please do my movie, please do my movie, instead of— I don’t know. I can’t. I’m sitting in the NEON office right now. I would love to talk openly about 4 X 4.
“Please do my movie, please do my movie.”
I’m getting the sense they’d be angry.
I’m getting off-camera looks like, yeah, don’t do it.
Then let’s do it this way. With NEON behind you now, on a confidence level, on a personal level — different pressures come with that. How does it affect your creative process?
This is going to sound weird, but we wrapped 4 X 4 and the stakes were much higher, and it was an easier process than making It Ends. The same way that Kane and Curry’s voices were dialed in by their first feature, I think I’ve found mine now. The emotion, the stakes were way higher. I actually went and shot the entire movie beforehand, before we even went into production, with stand-ins, because I was too terrified to fuck it up again and not get reshoots. I was not going to blow that opportunity.
Whose careers are you in awe of? Not necessarily whose films you want to make, but filmmakers whose careers give them a certain kind of freedom.
I’m trying to think of someone who operates in both spaces, because I really do want to make mumblecore DV cam features for YouTube and also studio pieces. Soderbergh’s a good example. His output’s pretty crazy, and he’ll go small and go studio whenever he wants. Also, once he had the pull, he used it to open doors for other filmmakers, that’s something I want to build toward too. Something I’m passionate about doing is starting a Gen Z genre label. I had to really scrap and crawl to get where I am, and I’d love to just hand a million-dollar movie to some hungry kid out of film school. That sounds fucking awesome. Stay tuned. I might actually do that.
I went to USC, then NYU, did all the things you’re meant to do. Do you think you need film school? Did it help you?
Film school education is on YouTube. What film school actually gave me was a group of kids who would put their lives on hold to help me make something. That’s the invaluable asset I had on this set. Also, the school gave us a free camera package, which we couldn’t have done without. I started college in computer science because I didn’t believe film was a real career. I still don’t, at least for myself, knock on wood, we’ll see how the second movie goes. But the education is online. It’s mainly the people. I personally needed the exposure to, like, oh, who’s Tarkovsky.
You’ve described the new film as maximalist, as opposed to It Ends. What does maximalist mean to you?
Visual overload. Overstimulating, like Gaspar Noé. I think it means a Gaspar Noé title sequence stretched out over the course of an entire movie. It Ends is one that gets slower and slower, and I want one that ramps up and continuously overloads. I’m trying to figure out how to talk about it without— it’s much more commercial and internet-native than It Ends is.
There’s humor in It Ends that comes from the way our generation actually talks. Would you ever make a straight comedy?
What I was feeling on this last one is that on larger-scale productions it’s not really a space for discovery, it’s more one of execution, at least when you don’t have a ton of money. But you know what, yes. I would love to do a Dazed and Confused type thing set in 2016. I think we need to age out a little bit more, though. It’s too recent.
It is, but I think we’re aging out quicker than we think. Things are moving so fast that 2016 already feels—
A thousand years ago. Yeah.
And then the A Shot signature question. If you were a shot in a film, what shot would you be?
Why did I not know that was the signature? Give me a second, I want to do it justice. Okay, I’ve got two. There’s a shot at the opening of Slacker where Linklater is sitting in the back of a cab rambling to a guy who’s semi-listening, and that’s probably me.
Just shooting shit out into the void about a dream I had last night. And I really love the push-pull in La Haine, because they’re just posting up hard as fuck, sitting on this bridge, settling into the environment, which is also a hangout crime movie. Let me look at my Letterboxd really quickly. Probably a shot of someone crying. Or maybe the shot in Green Room where the guy is looking at his fucked-up arm going, nah. I don’t know. I don’t know.
It Ends is in theaters now.
