3 Must-Watch Creepypasta Movies, Shows, and Web Series to Binge Before Backrooms

A24 drops a dread-soaked trailer for Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old VFX phenom Kane Parsons, now the youngest filmmaker in the studio’s history. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as a furniture-store owner who finds a hidden basement doorway to something far more terrifying.

Well, this is happening: A24 just rolled out the first trailer for Backrooms, and it looks exactly like the kind of precise, skin-crawling horror the studio loves to flex. No cheap jump scares. Just humming fluorescents, moist carpet, and the kind of beige nightmare that makes your stomach drop for reasons you can’t explain.

The movie

Backrooms is the feature debut of Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old VFX whiz who now also happens to be the youngest filmmaker A24 has ever hired. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a furniture store owner who finds a door in his building’s basement that should not exist. On the other side: an endless maze of sickly yellow rooms that seem to stretch past reality. Renate Reinsve plays his therapist, who winds up having to follow him into that same in-between dimension. Will Soodik (Westworld ) wrote the script, expanding ideas from Parsons’s own YouTube series, and the producers include James Wan and Shawn Levy — which is the studio way of saying: yes, they’re going big on this.

Where this all came from

The Backrooms started life in 2019 on a 4chan thread, centered on a single photo of a vast, yellow, empty office space. The internet collectively decided it felt like getting lost behind the wallpaper of the universe, and the myth took off. Parsons turned that vibe into a found-footage YouTube saga in 2022 that’s stacked up more than 190 million views so far, and the game Escape the Backrooms pushed it even further into the mainstream. The connective tissue here is that weird liminal dread — the sense you’ve slipped into a dead mall dimension and can’t quite name why it feels wrong.

What the trailer nails

The footage leans hard into unsettling architecture and the sick fluorescence of nowhere. It’s eerily calm, which is worse. This is very much an atmosphere play, not a loud one. If that tone holds for two hours, we might actually get a theatrical creepypasta that doesn’t flatten itself.

Why I’m cautiously optimistic (emphasis on cautious)

Turning internet horror into a start-to-finish narrative is where a lot of these things die. The track record is… bumpy, with a few genuine successes. Backrooms at least has the right ingredients: a director who understands the aesthetic, a writer used to puzzle-box storytelling, and producers who know how to build scares with craft instead of volume. That doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s not nothing.

Want a primer before this hits theaters?

If you want to see how stories like this actually work when they’re treated with care (or, in one case, how they crash into the real world), here are three essential watches:

• Marble Hornets (YouTube series, 2009–2014)
  Created by Troy Wagner, Joseph DeLage, and Tim Sutton, this is the granddaddy of online found-footage horror grammar — the same language Parsons draws from. It plays as the video logs of film student Jay Merrick (Wagner) digging into why his friend Alex Kralie (DeLage) ditched a project after crossing paths with a faceless suited entity called The Operator. Ninety-two episodes over five years, more than 125 million views, and the launchpad for the Slender Man icon that spawned countless ARGs and games. What made it work: absolute commitment to the bit — glitchy tapes, side-channel uploads, and gaps that your brain can’t stop trying to fill.

• Beware the Slenderman (HBO documentary, 2017)
  Irene Taylor Brodsky’s doc digs into the 2014 Waukesha, Wisconsin case where two 12-year-old girls stabbed a classmate 19 times, saying they did it for Slender Man — a character born from a 2009 Photoshop contest on the Something Awful forums. Shot over 18 months, with interviews from both families and input from academics, it looks at adolescent mental illness and digital folklore without sensationalizing. It also pulls extensively from Marble Hornets clips. Not a horror movie, but somehow more unnerving than most of them.

• Channel Zero (SyFy series, 2016–2018)
  Nick Antosca’s four-season anthology is still the smartest translation of creepypasta into TV. Each season runs six episodes and adapts a different story: Candle Cove follows child psychologist Mike Painter (Paul Schneider) back to his Ohio hometown as a skeleton-pirate kids’ show from the 1980s starts airing again; The No-End House turns a traveling haunted house into an existential trap; Butcher’s Block spins urban-forest staircases into a disappearance machine; The Dream Door finds a newlywed couple with a door in their basement that shouldn’t exist. Antosca’s trick is extracting the emotional core and building new logic around it, with creature work that actually sticks to your ribs.

The date to circle

Backrooms opens in theaters on May 29, 2026.

What do you think — does this one have a shot at breaking the curse, or are we headed back into the beige maze to get swallowed whole again?