Liminal Space, Secrets and Dread: 8 Movies Like Backrooms

The most similar recent movie to Backrooms has to be Exit 8, a Japanese horror that premiered at Cannes last summer to great acclaim. Based on a chilling 2023 video game called The Exit 8, it follows a man who walks into a subway station and finds himself in a seemingly endless loop. 

The movie, much like the game, makes use of our same irrational fear of liminal spaces and of getting lost in them, but it still feels very much like a game—and I mean that in the best way. Like Backrooms, it also adds a similar dash of terror with the gradual realisation that the protagonist is not alone.

Before Backrooms, there was Skinamarink, a YouTube-to-cinema phenomenon that walked so that Kane Parsons could run. Skinamarink was the brainchild of Kyle Edward Ball, who ran a YouTube channel named Bitesized Horror where fans submitted short stories. Ball then essentially collaborated with them, both financially (using crowdfunding) and creatively, by writing a script using only elements that popped up more often in the stories he received.

The resulting movie has elements that Backrooms fans will immediately recognise, especially in terms of the environment that the two young protagonists find themselves in: it’s essentially their own home, but most of the doors and windows have disappeared and, of course, there is something else there.

If you want an idea of how the internet inspired Jane Schoenbrun (director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and I Saw the TV Glow) to become a filmmaker, consider that they began their career with a detailed documentary (titled A Self-Induced Hallucination) on the phenomenon of Slender Man. 

All of Schoenbrun’s movies so far have been original, spectacular and more than worth seeing, but if one shares more DNA with Backrooms than the others it has to be their 2021 narrative debut: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The story centres on a lonely teenager who does an online horror challenge and documents the effects it has on her.

We don’t quite get the liminal space aspect of Parsons’ movie, but in terms of horror made by and for the terminally online, it’s still one of the best we've seen.

If the giant pirate monster from Backrooms has been haunting your dreams for the last few weeks, you’ll find an earlier version of him in what is perhaps the most horrifying jump scare in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. 

This modern cult classic follows a group of teens who learn that one of them is being slowly chased by a shapeshifting entity, and that the only way to pass on the curse is to have sex with someone.

It’s a stylish, inventive and terrifying horror movie. And despite making only $20M at the box office at the time of release, it has gone on to become one of the most influential horror movies of the last 20 years.

For something with a similar setting to Backrooms, you could do worse than to check out Cube—a low-budget sci-fi horror from back in 2000. The story is deceptively neat and simple: a group of strangers wake up in a square room that turns out to be boobytrapped. Only by working together, and moving from one cube to the next in what appears to be one big endless escape room, do they have any chance of survival.

We don’t quite get the psychological dread of Parsons’ film, but Cube offers a blend of the liminal space horror of Backrooms with the traps of the Saw franchise and the techno-gleam of science fiction.

If we're on the subject of long, carpeted and decidedly haunted corridors, it would be wrong not to mention Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. This is a movie that creates an incredible amount of fear from its uncanny use of space, especially the seemingly endless hallways of the Overlook Hotel where young Danny rides his tricycle, and where you’re never quite sure what terrors are lurking around the next bend.

This grand dame of liminal space horror, of course, stars Jack Nicholson as a blocked writer who takes a job looking after the Overlook during the off-season. While there, he starts to lose his marbles, which turns out to be not great news for young Danny and his mother.

In Lorcan Finnegan’s recent movie Vivarium, a couple end up trapped in an endless housing development where all the buildings are identical, and all roads seem to return them to their new home. The movie premiered in Cannes in 2019 before going on to a small release in the first COVID summer of 2020—which, if watched then, made its themes of domestic imprisonment all the more potent and unsettling.

Like Backrooms, Vivarium (which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) touches on aspects of liminal space horror and similarly leaves you with the sense that someone is watching over the characters—but it's probably a little more Black Mirror-coded than straight-up horror.

It’s more famous these days for its fraught production story and commercial shortcomings, but Barry Levinson’s Toys—an unintentionally scary movie that looks like the Teletubbies by way of René Magritte—is long overdue for some critical reassessment. In fact, with everything going on in the world (not least the rise of liminal horror), it could really be the perfect time for one.

The Robin Williams movie—which imagines what might happen if the military wanted to start using remote control toys instead of actual human-operated vehicles (god forbid)—clearly wasn't designed to be horror, but many of the incredible set designs deliver a weirdly similar sense of unease.