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A 20-year-old director’s low-budget film based on a YouTube series crushed the box office in its opening weekend, it’s $80 million+ take representing the biggest opening weekend for an original horror movie ever. (Meanwhile, psychological horror movie Obsession came in second in its third weekend of release—actually making more money that it did in weekend two!—beating the latest Star Wars film.)
What’s most notable here is that neither Backrooms nor Obsession are exactly conventional, audience-friendly horror. Backrooms in particular is a deliberately paced meditation on modern existence that makes the blandest possible environment feel like at least one circle of hell—much the same way The Shining turned a cozy, snowbound hotel into a living nightmare. Its success offers up a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, the movies are back. And if you want to keep chasing that feeling of existential dread, here are 10 more horror films and TV shows that find the unsettling within the mundane.
Exit 8 (2025)
This recent film is a pretty perfect companion to Backrooms: it’s based on an indie walking simulator game in which you just kind of wander through an endless and surreal (but mostly banal) Japanese metro station; your only possible way out is via your ability to spot small anomalies in the manmade landscape. From that short game and simple premise comes this impressively realized thriller that finds the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) in the same setting, trapped in a Danetan nightmare of endless repetition and spirals that only lead back to where you started. The proximity of Exit 8 and Backrooms feels a bit like the zeitgeist trying to tell us something about our current cultural mood—we all seem to feel trapped in mundanity that feels nebulous but increasingly threatening. Rent Exit 8 from Prime Video and Apple TV.
Skinamarink (2022)
An instant cult classic that remains wildly polarizing (more so than Backrooms will be, I daresay), Skinamarink is a similarly shoestring horror movie set in a weird liminal space—it’s even also based on a popular web series. Kyle Edward Ball’s horror film began life as a YouTube channel devoted to recreations of the childhood nightmares submitted by users, and it follows a 4-year-old named Kevin who injures himself while home alone with his 6-year-old sister, Kaylee. There’s no plot, just the unsettling vibes of a child’s twilight world. In the same way that Backrooms had me thinking about every stiflingly banal office space I’ve ever been in, Skinamarink perfectly evokes a child’s mixed senses of wonder and fear of even everyday spaces. Stream Skinamarink on Tubi and Shudder.
In Fear (2013)
This British indie explores two of life’s great, interrelated terrors: getting lost, and taking a road trip with someone you barely know. After having dated for barely two weeks, Tom and Lucy (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Iain De Caestecker and Star City‘s Alice Englert) decide to head off together to a music festival. Tom has booked a cute, out-of-the-way hotel off some backroads in the Irish countryside. That’s a horror movie setup right there, but In Fear goes in a bit of a different direction—or, more precisely, in no direction at all, as the two soon find that they can’t get a signal, and that every possible path they take leads them back to the same spot. Things get worse when Tom hits the only person they’ve seen (Allen Leech, Downton Abbey), a guy who turns out to be less of an innocent victim than he at first appears. Stream In Fear on Prime Video and Tubi.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Many of these films play on a deeply relatable fear of getting lost, and they’re particularly effective if you, like me, have absolutely no sense of direction and often manage to get lost within your own neighborhood. That’s where indie sensation The Blair Witch Project excels: The spooky stuff is fine and effective, but at its heart, this a movie about how scary it is to get lost in the woods. Film students Heather, Mike, and Josh (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard) set off to Burkittsville, Maryland to document what is surely just a myth about a local hermit who murdered a bunch of children, but was perhaps influenced by a much older entity. Stream The Blair Witch Project on HBO Max.
As Above, So Below (2014)
Another plucky found footage horror movie, this one takes us to a more overtly spooky location: the Catacombs of Paris, a network of underground ossuaries containing the remains of around six million people (the filmmakers were among the first ever to gain permission to film there, adding some neat verisimilitude). Perdita Weeks stars as Scarlett Marlowe, a young scholar convinced that the legendary philosopher’s stone is hiding deep under Paris. She assembles a team that soon discovers their mythical quest involves existential weirdness. The setting doesn’t necessarily make the horror more effective, but certainly adds a level of novelty that has made this one a minor cult classic. Rent As Above, So Below from Prime Video.
Vivarium (2019)
A young couple (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) check out some cute little houses in a quaint little neighborhood, only to find that they can’t leave: All roads through the charming, endlessly repetitive area lead back to house number 9. Food is dropped off for them, but they can never figure out by whom. Eventually, they’re given a baby to raise—with the suggestion that, if they do what they’re supposed to do, maybe they’ll get to escape the mind-numbing labyrinth of a neighborhood in which they’re being forced to live out the lives they never asked for. Feels like there’s a metaphor here… Stream Vivarium on Tubi.
What do you think so far?
Channel Zero: No-End House (2017)
Each season of Nick Antosca’s horror anthology is based, like Backrooms, on some bit of viral creepypasta, but it’s the second season that fits the bill here most closely. Teenagers Margot and Jules learn that the No-End House is coming to town; it’s a haunted attraction that goes from town to town, a building of interlocking rooms, each scarier than the one before. Margot is grieving the recent loss of her father, so the distraction seems like a good idea…at least until the house goes a bit weird. The girls and their friends leave, but Margot finds her supposedly dead father at home, and not really sure what the fuss is about. It feels, at first, like the house has left some things behind, or maybe it’s that they never really left. While grounded in a story of grief, weird and surreal imagery abounds; the image of a man ripping the arm off of his wife to eat the gooey seed pods inside of her will likely bring to mind a moment from Backrooms. Stream Channel Zero: No-End House on AMC+ and Shudder.
Timecrimes (2007)
In a rural town in Spain, a man named Héctor (played by the writer and director, Nacho Vigalondo) is fiddling with a pair of binoculars when he spots a woman being attacked in the nearby woods. His investigation leads him into the heart of a time travel experiment that he’s already been a part of more than once. It’s not that he’s caught in a time loop, strictly speaking; it’s more like Héctor is retracing his steps in order to clean up a mess he made before he realized he was making it. Like Backrooms, this is literally a movie about someone caught in a closed loop of his own making, and the only way out is through—at whatever cost. Stream Timecrimes on Prime Video and Tubi.
Severance (2022)
Late-stage capitalism encourages “work-life balance” while simultaneously making it impossible, and then makes us feel guilty about it. In Severance, biotechnology giant Lumon Industries has a solution: It will split your consciousness between your life at work and your life outside of it. For our lead characters (among them, Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, and Britt Lower) the work- and home-based consciousnesses grow apart to the point that they become entirely different people. The show blends the conventions of office-based dark comedies with movies like Brazil and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, diving into the dangers of modern American-style totalitarian capitalism while providing a reminder that technology often promises to improve our lives while only making them worse. In addition to the thematic similarities, the aesthetic is very much a match for Backrooms: the endless, mind-numbingly dull corridors and hallways of Lumon Industries are, if anything, even less stimulating to look at. Stream Severance on Apple TV.
The Deep House (2021)
Perhaps more clever than terrifying, French production The Deep House is nonetheless an effective, satisfying genre mash-up that’s genuinely unique. Ben and Tina are a couple of YouTubers who like to livestream tours of purportedly haunted houses (we’ve seen that bit before); the rub here is that their latest target has been submerged beneath an artificial lake for decades. What else to do but throw on some diving gear and head to the strangely preserved underwater mansion? Things get weird quickly, which doesn’t stop them from cracking open a door blocked by a large crucifix (in for a penny, I suppose…). Soon, they find that every exit is blocked (was that brick wall there before?), leading them deeper into the house that was probably submerged for a reason. Stream The Deep House on Prime Video.
