ADMIT ONE · Late Show · Seat: Level 0, Row Unknown
Kane Parsons took a creepypasta about endless yellow rooms and made Backrooms, and as of October 23, 2026 it has grossed $400 million worldwide, making it A24's highest-grossing film to date (Wikipedia)). Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture-store owner, and Renate Reinsve plays his therapist Mary. Together they find a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces through the store's basement (Wikipedia)).
If the hum of those fluorescent lights is still in your head, these nine horror movies scratch the same itch. Each one puts people in a place that is wrong, with nobody around who can tell them how to leave.
Backrooms (2026) isn't on goodrecmovies yet. Everything below is.
Tear the stub: horror movies like Backrooms
Strangers wake up in a labyrinth of identical cube-shaped rooms, some of them rigged with traps. The numbers stamped on the hatches might be a map. Might not. Same rooms over and over, nobody in charge, 25 years before Parsons uploaded his web series.
A winter caretaker, his wife and their son, alone in the empty Overlook Hotel. Long hallways, a room you're told to avoid (237), a ballroom with a bartender who shouldn't be there, and a hedge maze for the finale. Too many corridors, not enough people.
A suburban family's youngest daughter gets pulled through a portal inside a closet, and the only trace left is her voice coming out of the TV. Backrooms opens its door in a basement. This one uses a closet, 44 years earlier.
Six women go into an uncharted cave system and find out they are not alone down there. Swap fluorescent tubes for headlamps. There's no map, the way back is gone, and something is hunting in the dark. Heads-up: this one gets bloody.
A mist rolls over a small Maine town and a crowd ends up trapped inside a supermarket while creatures move around outside. Backrooms starts in a furniture store. This one spends most of its runtime in the grocery aisles.
A TV reporter and her cameraman ride along with firefighters to a Barcelona apartment building, then the authorities seal it under quarantine with everyone inside. It's shot as found footage, the only pick on this list that is.
An insurance investigator goes looking for a missing horror novelist, ends up in a small town that shouldn't exist, and starts losing track of where fiction stops and reality begins. John Carpenter directs, and the map lies the whole way.
A Vietnam veteran back in New York keeps sliding into nightmares. A subway exit is locked, a hospital says he was never a patient, and faceless figures wait in the corners of the frame. Reality as a building with missing floors.
A paranormal investigator brings a small group into Hill House, where the walls were built at skewed angles and doors open and close on their own. The house's geometry is the threat. Made in 1963, with no gore at all.
---
Two sci-fi cousins (not horror)
These share the idea of a place that rewrites the rules, but they aren't horror movies, so they sit outside the main list.
** A guide leads a writer and a professor across a forbidden wasteland called the Zone, toward a room said to grant your deepest wish. Slow and strange. Sci-fi drama.
** Eight friends at a dinner party lose power the night a comet passes, then spot a lit-up house down the street that might be another version of their own. A sci-fi thriller that will make you double-check your front door.
Find your next one: Get a recommendation on goodrecmovies