5 Best Creepypasta Stories That Need Movie Adaptations After Backrooms

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"Backrooms" blew everyone away at the box office, becoming the first A24 film to make over $100 million domestically and registering the biggest ever opening for an original horror movie. However, while the box office numbers have been staggering, the fact that the "Backrooms" movie has been successful isn't that surprising. The creepypasta (a term for horror-related legends that have gained popularity online after being widely shared) has spent the past few years garnering a passionate following — and it's far from the only one out there.

The lesson that Hollywood needs to learn from "Backrooms" — directed by 20-year-old debutant Kane Parsons, who made a web series of Backrooms videos on YouTube before helming the hit feature — is that it's vital to foster young, emerging talent. There are plenty of great filmmakers out there honing their craft on social media, and many of them are taking inspiration from online horror stories. If it worked for "Backrooms," there's no reason that other creepypasta tales can't make the jump to the big screen. Here are five that we'd love to see get the movie treatment.

A horror film about an abandoned Disney park where untold terrors await is a slam dunk movie idea. The basic story of the "Abandoned by Disney" creepypasta involves an urban explorer who sets out to find a Disney attraction known as Mowgli's Palace that has since become a ghost town. They encounter many creepy things, including a skull inside of a mascot head and the words "ABANDONED BY GOD" emblazoned on a wall. It culminates in a photo-negative version of Mickey Mouse moving all on its own. 

Manipulating childhood images into horror is a popular idea at the moment. Some of the scariest moments from "Five Nights at Freddy's" come from how pizza restaurant animatronics have been corrupted to kill humans. The same could apply to Disney, especially since urban exploring actual abandoned Disney parks, like Disney's Discovery island, has become quite popular in the real world. 

Naturally, the hardest part of this adaptation would be getting the rights to Disney intellectual property. There have been several horror movies based on Mickey Mouse due to the expiration of the copyright of 1928's "Steamboat Willie," in which Mickey debuted, but attaining the rights to make "Abandoned by Disney" as it's written could be tricky. Of course, the concept could still work without the Disney connection, but that's a big part of the appeal.

Written by Redditor u/bloodstains (an appropriate name for a creepypasta writer), "Correspondence" follows a series of emails from two friends. Everything seems normal until one of the friends goes to a party and encounters a creepy old woman on the drive back home. His emails then become concerning, as he claims he's no longer in control of what he types, and soon, no one's able to contact him. It's a genuinely disturbing story, made all the eerier based on the fact that it's told through emails. You always feel as though there's some part of the story being kept hidden, so you never quite get the full picture ... until it's too late.

There have been some great computer screen movies in recent years, such as "Searching" and "Host," and "Correspondance" would lend itself well to this increasingly popular style of filmmaking, which has become known as "screenlife." It's a great approach for horror, and this creepypasta seems tailormade for it. Everything could be told from the perspective of one of the friends' computer screens, so we only see him messaging his pal. CCTV video footage could also get incorporated when the one friend is trying to figure out what happened, but just reading some of the emails he receives after his friend disappears should be enough to send shivers down the audience's spines. 

This frightening creepypasta has the potential to be a fantastic psychological horror-thriller in the vein of the Darren Aronofsky movie "Black Swan." It involves a figure skater named Annora Petrova who discovers a Wikipedia page about herself. The only problem is that the page contains details about her life that haven't happened yet — and then they begin happening. There are some details in the future she likes, and others that she doesn't like. When she tries to change them, something even worse takes its place. 

"Annora Petrova" is like a modern, online spin on the Ancient Greek tragedy "Oedipus Rex" and other stories of people who tried to alter their fates to disastrous consequences. Like "Correspondence," it's framed through emails (the story is told via a message that the titular character is sending to a former friend named Bree) and could therefore also work well as a screenlife story, but there would be plenty of opportunities to bring things into the real world as well. In the hands of the right filmmaker, this could be the next creepypasta movie hit.

There's something about a good campfire story that chills you to the bone. That's effectively what the "Anansi's Goatman" creepypasta is, despite it originating online. It's about a large group of teenagers who go camping in a remote area. They hear the legend of the goatman, a man with the head of a goat who can shape-shift into anyone. At one point in the story, the teens realize there's one extra person in their midst who no one noticed since a lot of them don't really know each other too well. When people start going missing, they fear that the goatman is already among them. 

It's a chilling story that could feed on viewer paranoia like "The Thing," the greatest sci-fi horror movie of all time. An "Anansi's Goatman" adaptation could follow a similar structure where the teens are isolated from civilization and they can't be certain that the person sitting next to them is really who they say they are. The key to getting an "Anansi's Goatman" movie right is leaning into the psychological aspect. Sure, it would still work as a straight-up monster movie, but that would be doing a disservice to the seriously unnerving source material.

The "Penpal" creepypasta, which originated on the r/nosleep subreddit, has already transitioned into another medium: The story has been compiled into a novel by original author Dathan Auerbach that manages to piece together this non-linear story about someone realizing that all of the creepy occurrences they experienced as a kid were the result of one stalker. For example, there's an incident from the narrator's childhood where they wake up in the woods, and when they return home, their mother was worried because they left a note saying they were running away. The thing is, they didn't write the note.

All these creepy childhood scenes could be intercut with scenes from the main character's adulthood where they're trying to put all the puzzle pieces together. It could take a similar approach to Christopher Nolan's confusing but ultimately satisfying thriller "Memento," using a non-linear format to keep viewers on their toes. The fact it's already been turned into a novel means there's already a solid structure for a potential film to follow, so this could be a great opportunity for studios looking to jump on the creepypasta bandwagon. But the main reason for adapting "Penpal" for the big screen is that it gets under your skin and blurs the line between fiction and reality like all the best creepypasta stories.