Low-budget horror movie “Backrooms” has been generating “considerable buzz”, said Wallpaper. The unsettling directorial debut from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons is based on a viral web series he made as a teenager. It made $81 million (£60 million) in North America on its opening weekend, a new record for an original horror film.
The inspiration for “Backrooms” came from a discussion on the 4chan message board about slipping through a “crack in reality” and finding yourself in an “infinite maze of identical corridors”. Now, the A24 studio has adapted the chilling series into a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture salesman who discovers in his showroom basement a “fluorescent-lit threshold opening onto an eerie, labyrinthine office space” that looks like it stretches on for ever.
“Backrooms” is the latest success in the genre of liminal horror, based on the unsettling feeling of “in-between” spaces. “The horror here is not a monster or a ghost, but the Backrooms themselves.”
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If that sounds like your kind of scare, here are eight other liminal horror films to lose yourself in.
The Shining, 1980
“One of the great classics of liminal horror,” this iconic film is “arguably one of the scariest” movies of all time, said SlashFilm. Much of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece centres on the “eerie emptiness” of the sprawling hotel Jack (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) are looking after for the winter with their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The long, deserted corridors that lead nowhere helped introduce the idea that emptiness “can, in itself be a character” or unsettling presence that creates a “sense of liminal dread”.
Lost Highway, 1997
“David Lynch can nail the atmosphere of liminality,” said MovieWeb. His surreal, neo-noir thriller follows jazz musician Frank Madison (Bill Pullman), who is accused of murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette). Through a series of haunting “dreamlike” sequences, Lynch builds an “uncanny” world while examining men’s toxic “obsession with women” and the lies people tell themselves to escape the truth.
The Blair Witch Project, 1999
Possibly still the “greatest found-footage horror movie”, this low-budget film is also an “excellent” example of liminal horror, said ScreenRant. The action follows three students who set out into the woods to document the mythical Blair Witch. “It’s a search none of them ever return from.” Space stretches and the “never-ending woods that loop constantly create a suffocating atmosphere”. It’s a must watch.
Pulse (Kairo), 2001
This Japanese techno-horror sees “ghosts invade the world of the living through the internet, terrorising those they encounter along the way”, said ScreenRant. It’s a “testament to the power of liminal horror” how Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s nerve-jangling film steers clear of “blood and gore”, instead exploring the “terror that comes from the corner of a room”.
It Follows, 2015
It “may not seem like it at first glance”, but “the label of liminal horror is a perfect fit” for this supernatural horror, said MovieWeb. The action follows Jay, a young woman who, “after sleeping with her boyfriend, becomes the recipient of a fatal curse” that follows her wherever she goes. “That is, unless she can pass it on.” With the feel of a “dream taking place in a cold landscape not unlike our own”, it’s a frightening watch.
Vivarium, 2019
Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots star as a “conflicted couple” who settle down in the suburbs only to find their new home is a “source of sinister stasis”, said Dread Central. Trapped in a disturbing development where “unlimited versions of the same house” line “roads that lead to nowhere”, they soon find themselves in a living nightmare with a baby boy to raise.
Skinamarink, 2022
Based “almost entirely” around “liminal horror scares”, this chilling film follows two young children who wake up in the night to find their father has gone and “the doors and windows of their house have disappeared”, said ScreenRant. As the hours unfold without him, they “encounter frightening visions in the dark recesses of their home”. Director Kyle Edward Ball brings this nightmare vividly to life, plunging viewers into the “unknowable terror” of murky, unlit spaces.
Exit 8, 2025
Genki Kawamura’s liminal horror is based on a Japanese video game of the same name, said Dread Central. Taking the Tokyo subway as its sinister setting, the busy commuter hub is transformed into an “endless purgatory for the film’s perilous protagonist”. Brilliantly immersive and filled with a gnawing sense of dread, Kawamura expertly makes the “innocuous subway tunnel feel like a layer of hell”.
