10 Movies That Capture the Same Unsettling Vibe as Backrooms
The Backrooms, a sci-fi horror film directed by Kane Parsons and written by Will Soodik, was released by A24 on May 29, 2026. It is based on Parsons’ viral YouTube web series and inspired by the internet “Backrooms” creepypasta.
The plot follows a therapist who ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient. A strange doorway is discovered in the basement of a furniture showroom, serving as a portal to another dimension.
The film has been a massive financial success, obliterating box office expectations with $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend alone! The film crossed $100 million domestically in just six days. That’s a record pace for an indie/arthouse release, made even more astounding by the fact that at the time of release, Parsons was just 20 years old!
While many films explore haunted houses, monsters, or supernatural threats, Backrooms taps into something more specific: liminal horror. Empty offices, endless hallways, forgotten waiting rooms, and similar empty places that feel oddly familiar and wrong at the same time have become a major internet horror phenomenon. The film leans heavily into that unsettling aesthetic of spaces that feel abandoned mid-thought.
That’s why the best companion films aren’t necessarily about monsters. They’re about spaces that seem to exist just outside of reality, and the unsettling feeling that you were never supposed to find them.
If the film left you craving more liminal horror, surreal architecture, and reality-bending dread, these movies should be next on your watchlist.
10 Movies Like Backrooms (2026) Every Liminal Horror Fan Should Watch
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If Backrooms feels like getting lost in a nightmare, Skinamarink feels like being trapped in one. The film transforms an ordinary house into an impossible maze of darkness and half-seen corners.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: liminal spaces, dream logic, minimal storytelling, and overwhelming dread.
A group of strangers wakes up inside a gigantic structure made of interconnected rooms. Nobody knows who built it or why.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: endless architecture, existential horror, and the terror of being trapped in an unknowable place.
A young couple becomes trapped inside an endless suburban neighborhood where every house is identical.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: uncanny familiarity, impossible geography, and a growing sense that reality has broken.
Two brothers return to a cult they escaped years ago and discover something impossible is lurking beyond their understanding.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: cosmic horror, mystery, and the feeling of encountering forces that operate outside normal reality.
An internet-age horror masterpiece where empty rooms and abandoned spaces become deeply unsettling.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: isolation, loneliness, and the sense that another reality is bleeding into ours.
Set almost entirely inside a decaying mental asylum, this slow-burn horror film makes architecture itself feel threatening.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: abandoned spaces, creeping unease, and psychological horror.
A scientific expedition enters a region where the laws of reality have begun to unravel.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: strange environments, impossible phenomena, and cosmic mystery.
A found-footage descent into the catacombs beneath Paris where the tunnels seem to stretch far beyond what should be possible.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: labyrinths, exploration horror, and reality-distorting spaces.
A hypnotic, surreal film filled with strange corridors, retro-futuristic architecture, and dreamlike imagery.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: atmosphere over plot and a constant feeling that something is deeply wrong.
The godfather of found-footage horror still delivers one of cinema’s most effective examples of becoming lost in an environment that shouldn’t be able to trap you.
Why Backrooms fans will love it: disorientation, minimalism, and terror born from uncertainty.
Honorable Mentions
- The Shining
- 1408
- YellowBrickRoad
- Coherence
- The Langoliers
Whether you’re looking for movies like Backrooms, liminal horror films, or horror stories built around impossible spaces, these movies capture the same sense of disorientation and dread. From the endless rooms of Cube to the nightmare suburbia of Vivarium and the dream logic of Skinamarink, each film explores what happens when familiar places become terrifyingly wrong.