5 Movies To Watch If You Like Backrooms

From a creepypasta to a series of unsettling internet videos to a movie that blew everyone away at the box office and pushed a "Star Wars" entry out of the top spot, "Backrooms" is impressive for a variety of reasons. The fact that it was directed by a 20-year-old — making Kane Parsons the youngest director in history to have a movie open at No. 1 –  might top that list. 

Now that "Backrooms" has become a massive mainstream property, there is a wide variety of responses to its various mysteries. Some have been content to let much of it stay unexplained and would rather let the secrets slowly unfold over a long period of time. Meanwhile, others want to immediately dig into everything — such as what the lifeform in the Backrooms looks like in real life – and aren't as interested in preserving the mystique. Either way, the movie's use of the inherently unnerving concept of liminal space to mine horror is an extremely effective one — but it's definitely not the first film to do so.

From a movie based on a game that was directly inspired by the Backrooms web series, to one that came out before Kane Parsons was even born, liminal horror has taken on many forms. And these are the ones that would appeal most directly to fans of "Backrooms" in particular, including the two that we teased in the previous sentence.

One of several low-budget horror movies that flew under the radar in 2021, "Come True" follows a teenage girl named Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) who doesn't get much sleep thanks to her unstable home life. What little sleep she manages to get is typically accompanied by a recurring nightmare about being stuck in a maze and pursued by a man who hides in the shadows and has glowing eyes. As a way to both fix her insomnia and also earn a few extra bucks, Sarah joins a sleep study.

Unfortunately, Sarah's nightmares only get worse, and people involved in the sleep study are revealed to have ill intentions toward her. Sarah increasingly loses the ability to differentiate between being awake and being in a dream, as what she thinks is the real world slowly begins to take on the same slightly surreal and off-kilter vibe of her nightmares — complete with appearances by the shadow man with the glowing eyes.

As mentioned, "Come True" was overlooked upon release, and the movie's 58% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests that many of those who did see it weren't particularly impressed. But critics loved it, praising the movie's use of the familiar uneasy feeling of dreaming to create a captivating horror experience. Perhaps "Come True" was a bit too ahead of its time; with liminal horror really having a moment, it might be much better appreciated by people who check it out now. 

While people sometimes think that the whole Backrooms thing is nothing but endless, yellow-walled corridors and empty, '70s-style offices bathed in flickering fluorescent lighting, there is also sometimes an outdoor component. One of the visual signatures of outdoor areas in the Backrooms are generic-looking, non-descript houses in neighborhoods full of identical-looking — but very dull and lifeless — homes. Each one is the same color, has the same roof, is landscaped the same way, and so on — and needless to say, there is something extremely unsettling about that.

If that particular aspect of liminal horror makes your skin crawl, "Vivarium" is the movie for you. Both one of the best horror movies and also one of the best sci-fi movies of 2020, "Vivarium" stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as Tom and Gemma, a couple who are looking to buy a home. They end up in a creepy subdivision — called Yonder, which should have been their first red flag — full of identical houses with no defining features or any sense of character. After being shown one of the houses, they find themselves unable to leave — every time they attempt to do so, they just end up back at the home they were shown.

Just being stuck in a seemingly inescapable copy-and-paste suburban nightmare is scary enough, but Tom and Gemma soon discover that Yonder does in fact have inhabitants. And, not surprisingly, they aren't just regular, well-adjusted humans that you'd want to have over for a dinner party. 

What "Backrooms" does so well is play on concepts that most people are familiar with and already find creepy. Much of that is built around the same types of liminal spaces that everyone has inhabited at one point or another. While not everyone has necessarily spent a lot of time in badly-carpeted, musty-smelling office buildings, it's a pretty universal experience to be a child and to have your home become an eerie place at night when the lights are off — and that's what "Skinamarink" zeroes in on.

In fact, "Skinamarink" is a movie we regret watching because of just how effectively it portrays so many unsettling experiences many of us have as children. But we regret watching it in that good way that applies to those horror movies that really get under your skin like few other films. It depicts two young children who wake up in the middle of the night and are unable to find their parents. Not only that, but the vanishing doors and windows make leaving the house impossible, while the disappearance of other items suggest some sort of sinister force at work. 

Critics praised "Skinamarink" for not only how scary it is, but the way it so adeptly taps into our shared universal experiences of childhood nocturnal dread to elicit those scares. But many of them also pointed out that you need to be willing to meet the movie halfway and dial into its slow, sometimes unorthodox pacing — but that's also true of "Backrooms" and pretty much any liminal horror film.

In our introduction, we alluded to a movie based on a game that cites the original Backrooms web content as its inspiration. That game is "The Exit 8," a 2023 psychological horror title that places the player in a series of same-y corridors in an underground Japanese train station. The player needs to try and spot things that don't seem quite right within the game's environment, as well as with the mysterious man walking through the station. Successfully finding these "anomalies" is the only way to advance. Failing to do so leaves you stuck in the looping station forever. The game's developer, Kotake Create, specifically named the Backrooms as one of the inspirations behind the game.

In 2025, "The Exit 8" was adapted into a feature-length film, "Exit 8," that follows the same basic premise. A man known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) steps in to fill the role the player played in the game, stuck in a seemingly looping subway station and needing to find anomalies that allow him to pass through each exit — until he ideally reaches the eighth and final exit. 

While the removal of player agency and the first-person perspective takes some of the inherent fear out of the enterprise, the "Exit 8" film does a phenomenal job of translating what worked so well about the game into a passive cinematic experience. And with an impressive 93% Certified Fresh from Rotten Tomatoes, it's the best-reviewed movie on this list, even higher than "Backrooms."

We are talking about the original 2001 Japanese horror film "Pulse" (aka "Kairo") here, rather than the 2006 American remake of the same name. Not only is the American version vastly inferior, it is truly one of the worst movie remakes of all time, in any genre. Luckily, 2026 is a much different world than 2006 was, and we are not only far more aware of international cinema these days but have much better access to it. So there is no reason to settle for a terrible version of a fantastic movie just because it's the easiest one to watch.

Meanwhile, the original "Pulse" is a sci-fi horror cult classic that utilizes the idea of liminal horror in very interesting ways. Sinister otherworldly spirits have harnessed the power of the internet to convince people to take their own lives all over Tokyo. Three individuals — who have each seen people close to them disappear — eventually come together to try to get to the bottom of the spectral invasion and see if they can stop it.

While that sounds closer to a techno-thriller rather than "Backrooms," the liminal horror of "Pulse" is found in the way the victims become trapped in an unsettling space between the living world and the afterlife. Liminal space isn't just about creepy office buildings or abandoned malls — it's also about being stuck in that threshold where two spaces intersect. And "Pulse" absolutely nails that.