Film

Backrooms

Backrooms takes the internet's most viral horror image — the endless, hospital-lit, carpet-smelling non-place behind a door that shouldn't exist — and gives it a real budget and a proper cast. What starts as a furniture-showroom oddity unravels into slow, architectural dread: no jump scares, just wrongness accumulating room by room. For anyone who's ever felt spooked by an empty mall at closing time.

TMDb rating7.0

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Annihilation2018

Same slow-dread architecture: a team walks into a zone where reality stops behaving, and the horror comes from wrongness rather than monsters. Garland's visuals are extraordinary and the ending will rattle around your head for weeks.

But Ambiguous to the point of frustrating if you want your mysteries solved by the credits.

Annihilation poster

The Endless2017no page yet

Mark Duplass, who's in Backrooms, co-directed and stars in this one too — a cult, a time loop, and a creeping cosmic wrongness on a tiny budget that makes the dread feel handmade and personal.

But The scrappy production values and slow burn will test patience if you want polish.

Cube1998

The original trapped-in-shifting-geometry nightmare — strangers wake in an endless grid of booby-trapped rooms with no memory of how they got there. Claustrophobic, mean, and the direct ancestor of every escape-room horror since.

But Dated effects and acting that's more functional than great; it's a concept film first.

Cube poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Last Year at Marienbad1961no page yet

Backrooms turns architecture itself into the monster — endless identical corridors, no way to get your bearings. Marienbad did that six decades earlier, minus the horror label, using a chateau's mirrored halls to make disorientation itself the plot.

A gorgeous, maddening French art film where characters wander repeating corridors and gardens that may or may not be memories, dreams, or lies. It invented liminal dread as an aesthetic, decades before anyone had a word for it.

But Deliberately plotless and repetitive by design — this is arthouse cinema at its most demanding, not a horror movie.

More like this (8)

The Platform2019

A different shape of the same idea — an impossible structure that reorders the people trapped inside it, turning social horror into a genuinely upsetting descent. Brutal, blackly funny, unforgettable.

But The metaphor is laid on thick, and the violence is genuinely hard to watch at points.

The Platform poster

Jacob's Ladder1990

A Vietnam vet slips between realities through corridors that don't add up and hospitals that feel wrong, with a dread that's existential rather than jump-scare. One of the great purgatory horrors.

But Deliberately confusing structure — this one asks you to sit in uncertainty rather than hand you answers.

Jacob's Ladder poster

Stranger Things2016

The Upside Down is basically the Backrooms with a marketing budget: a mirror-world stapled to a familiar town, all spores and dead light. Hugely fun, hugely comforting genre television.

But Increasingly a blockbuster machine rather than a horror show — the scares thin out as the seasons go on.

Stranger Things poster

Event Horizon1997

A rescue ship follows a vessel that's been somewhere it shouldn't, and what comes back isn't right. Gory, gothic, and genuinely unsettling once it stops being a space movie and starts being a haunted house.

But Uneven pacing and some very dated CGI in the back half.

Event Horizon poster

Devs2020

A tech-mystery miniseries where a quantum computing project starts bending what's real, told with the same patient, dread-soaked control as Backrooms. Gorgeous, cold, and quietly terrifying.

But Glacially paced — this rewards patience, not scares.

Devs poster

Twin Peaks1990

David Lynch's return proves liminal dread doesn't need a monster: empty motels, buzzing electricity, rooms that exist outside time. The most unsettling non-horror thing you'll ever watch.

But Willfully bizarre and eighteen hours long — not a casual watch, and not for people who want closure.

Twin Peaks poster

This Place Rules2022no page yet

It's the real-world version of Backrooms' central feeling — familiar American spaces gone eerie and depopulated, filmed during a genuinely uncanny stretch of actual history rather than invented for one.

A gonzo documentary shot during the pandemic and the run-up to January 6th, capturing an America that looks like itself but feels subtly, dangerously wrong — liminal space horror as lived experience, not fiction.

But It's political and chaotic rather than scary in a conventional sense — go in expecting essay-film, not thriller.

Coraline2009

Same premise, opposite register: a door in an ordinary house leads to a version of home that's almost right but isn't, and the wrongness is the whole horror. Backrooms for kids, and nearly as unsettling.

Stop-motion animation this beautiful and this creepy is rare — a button-eyed alternate world that's charming until it very much isn't. Genuinely frightens adults as much as children.

But It's a family film at heart, so the horror stays muted compared to whatever Backrooms is willing to show you.

Coraline poster

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