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With the recent trailer release of Backrooms, we thought we’d look at some other films that could live in a Backrooms-type space. These films feature a reality that seems like it lives in the Twilight Zone. Whether it’s filming style or location setting, there’s just something “off” in these worlds that feels like living in the uncanny valley.
These are movies where spaces feel in-between—not quite real, not quite safe. These are places that should feel familiar (homes, hotels, hallways), but instead feel hollow, suspended in time, and completely wrong.
Skinamarink (2022)
Childhood spaces—bedrooms, hallways, the soft glow of a TV in the dark—become something deeply uncanny in this experimental nightmare. The house feels endless, like it’s stretching beyond its own walls, and the absence of adults turns it into a void rather than a home.
What makes Skinamarink so effective is how it weaponizes memory. It taps into that half-forgotten feeling of being a kid awake at night, when your house suddenly doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Doors disappear, ceilings shift, and the environment itself becomes unknowable, as if reality is quietly erasing itself around you.
The Shining (1980)
The Overlook Hotel is one of horror’s most iconic liminal spaces—vast, empty, and eerily pristine. Its long corridors and patterned carpets create a sense of repetition, like you’re walking through the same place over and over, even when you’re not.
Stanley Kubrick turned the hotel into something that exists outside of time. It’s not just haunted—it feels stuck, like every past moment is still happening all at once. The isolation amplifies that feeling, making the Overlook less like a location and more like a trap you slowly realize you’ll never leave.
It Follows (2014)
Suburban Detroit has never felt so off. Streets are too empty, houses feel too quiet, and time seems strangely undefined—old TVs sit next to futuristic devices, seasons blur, and nothing feels anchored to reality.
That liminal quality is key to the film’s dread. The entity following you is terrifying, but it’s the space that makes it suffocating. There’s nowhere to feel safe because everything feels slightly disconnected, like the world has already ended and just hasn’t told you yet.
Pulse (2001) (Kairo)
In Pulse, rooms, offices, and even the internet itself feel abandoned before anyone actually leaves. Spaces are dim, static, and drained of life, as if something invisible has already passed through and taken all human presence with it.
The film’s brilliance lies in how it portrays emptiness as infection. The more characters try to connect—through computers, through each other—the more isolated they become. The world doesn’t collapse in chaos; it simply fades, leaving behind hollow spaces that feel like echoes of something that used to exist.
Session 9 (2001)
An abandoned asylum is already unsettling, but Session 9 takes it further by making the space feel like it’s waiting. The long, crumbling hallways and peeling rooms don’t just suggest decay—they feel suspended, like time stopped mid-sentence.
As the characters work inside the building, the environment begins to seep into them. The asylum doesn’t need ghosts jumping out of corners—it is the horror. It holds onto the past so tightly that anyone who enters starts to lose their grip on the present.