“Backrooms is not – and never has been – something that I think about as an internet trend or a meme,” director Kane Parsons told Dazed back in 2024, when he was just getting started on the feature-length A24 adaptation of his wildly successful YouTube series. “It’s just a story I genuinely care about, with characters I genuinely care about.” Nevertheless, it’s hard to really talk about the liminal space horror film without acknowledging its roots in spooky internet lore.

By now, you’re probably quite familiar with the story. Throughout the 2010s, an image of a nondescript, windowless, sickly-yellow room circulated on message boards across the internet. Then, in the comments of a 2019 4chan post, it finally got a proper backstory. “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” wrote an anonymous commenter (“no-clip” drawing on the logic of video games, where players can phase through walls and other solid objects). Over time, the lore of these “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms” was built out by other posters, and so the Backrooms were born.

As someone who enjoyed urban exploration videos and wandering the deserted wreckage of Portal 2, which “took over” his life for a time as a child, it’s no surprise that Parsons latched onto this uncanny universe. He’s not the first to mine internet creepypastas for the big screen either. What is more surprising, given the track record of this still-dawning sub-genre, is the success of Backrooms. The critical response to the film has been overwhelmingly positive, and with an $81.4 million opening, it’s broken multiple commercial records too, including the biggest opening for an A24 feature and the youngest director to top the US box office.

Why is this surprising? Well, the history of films adapted from creepypastas and other snippets of internet lore has been hit or miss, to say the least. As Backrooms continues to sweep cinemas around the world, we revisit some of the best, worst, and weirdest examples below.

SLENDER MAN (2018)

Slender Man was once dubbed the “first great myth of the Web” – an urban legend conjured from the internet’s collective consciousness – so it’s no surprise that it also conjured a slew of adaptations. Early on in the 2010s there was a video game, in-depth Wiki entries, and a number of YouTube mockumentaries, but it would take a few more years for a full-fledged film with major studio backing to hit cinema screens. In fact, many of the people involved probably wish it had never seen the light of day. The 2018 film received negative reviews across the board (on Rotten Tomatoes, it scores an abysmal 8 per cent) as well as a Razzies nomination for worst supporting actress. It was also pulled from some cinemas due to a real-life, Slender Man-inspired stabbing that occurred years earlier. Nevertheless, it did help kickstart a whole horror sub-genre. Like many pioneers, maybe it was just misunderstood. (No, I just revisited the trailer – it was really that bad.) (TW)

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S (2023)

Anyone under the age of 25 will remember just how inescapable low-budget horror game Five Nights At Freddy’s was when it was released in 2014. It wasn’t a good game, strictly speaking, but it did lend itself to viral clips on YouTube, soon cementing itself as one of the first viral games as it became popular among reaction streamers online. FNAF (as the kids called it) quickly became a meme of itself, with spinoff games and imitations rapidly proliferating in the years since – this film being the latest in the lineage. File the Five Nights At Freddy’s film under the low-brow brand of internet lore that also gave us the Minecraft movie (chicken jockey meme included) and the horrorcore Winnie the Pooh flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. (SPM)

NORMAL PORN FOR NORMAL PEOPLE (2020)

The short film Normal Porn for Normal People takes its title and starting point from a 2011 creepypasta essay about a man who receives an email chain directing him to normalpornfornormalpeople.com, a website seemingly dedicated to “the eradication of abnormal sexuality”. In the original story, the writer, CosbyDaf, discovers a page of disturbing and bizarre videos, ranging from voyeuristic surveillance footage to ominous fetish content. The film uses its premise to build a satirical commentary on the romanticisation and normalisation of violent imagery, drawing parallels between gore, consumer culture, and the exploitation and demonisation of sexuality. Its interview segments further underscore the impact of glorified violence within American culture. (RD)

DEMONLOVER (2002)

Whether you believe that ‘red rooms’ actually exist or are just a particularly dark chapter in online lore depends on your faith in humanity. Either way, you’re in for a really unpleasant time. Oliver Assayas’s Demonlover takes inspiration from the alleged dark web phenomenon – which involves chat rooms where people pay to watch people get tortured – in a twisted tale about a corporate espionage among the ruthless world of 3D hentai. Gaining a cult following since it premiered in the early 2000s, it’s been touted as an example of a particularly violent turn in that era of French cinema. See also: the aptly-named French thriller Red Rooms from 2023. (TW)

THE VALLEY WHERE LOAB LIVES (2026)

Unlike most of the entries on this list, Loab is a cryptid unique to the age of AI. Spawned by an innocent experiment into image-generating software back in 2022, she takes the form of a woman with long, dark hair, withered and discoloured skin, and sunken eyes. What’s even weirder though is that when Loab’s image was fed back into the machine, it generated gory images – “borderline snuff” – that seemingly went against all AI content restrictions at the time. The creature has been haunting internet forums and text-to-image models ever since. This AI-generated horror short (or “Promptus”) explores the unique conditions of her existence, interpolating horror classics like Nosferatu, Psycho, and The Shining with a nod to the technology’s cannibalising nature. It debuted at this year’s Berlinale. (TW)

THE SOVIET SLEEP EXPERIMENT (2019)

Depending who you ask, The Soviet Sleep Experiment is a passable thriller or a ridiculous work of anti-communist propaganda. It draws on a long-running creepypasta (turned urban legend) known as the Russian Sleep Experiment, which recounts the tale of several test subjects in Soviet Russia, who were exposed to an experimental gas that kept them awake for 30 days. Over time, the subjects are transformed into zombie-like, violent beings based on an image shared to an online Wiki around 2010. The photo actually shows a Halloween animatronic that was sold in the mid-2000s (which slightly blunts its fear factor) and only shows up as a one-dimensional easter egg in the film itself. (TW)

WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR (2021)

The story of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair isn’t based on existing internet lore, but it has the feel of a creepypasta (director Jane Shoenbrun’s first full-length film was a documentary about Slender Man, and she’s drawing on that kind of modern mythmaking in her fictional debut, as well as her own experiences as a teenager on online forums.) It’s about a teenage girl, Casey, who takes part in a viral internet challenge which involves repeating the phrase “I want to go to the world’s fair” three times, pricking her finger and smearing blood on her laptop screen. What happens next is ambiguous: she exhibits an series of unsettling behaviours, from sleepwalking to destroying a beloved childhood soft toy, but it’s never clear whether she is being possessed by a malign force – as a stranger in a chatroom warns her – or simply playing along with a fantasy and losing herself in the process.

While Casey isn’t explicitly trans, World’s Fair has been widely interpreted as representing dysphoria and repressed transness (a reading which Shoenbrun has confirmed), but it’s far from being a straightforward allegory, and the dissociation at its core will likely resonate with anyone who has spent a lot of time on the internet. It’s a disturbing but oddly beautiful film – thanks in part to Alex G’s haunting, poignant soundtrack. (JG)

ALWAYS WATCHING: A MARBLE HORNETS STORY (2015)

Slender Man has spent the last 15 years lurking around creepy internet culture like a ghosted ex still watching your Instagram stories, but he still awaits the film adaptation he deserves. Released three years before the 2018 adaptation, Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story follows a trio of local news reporters investigating a missing person case. Before long, they find themselves targeted by Slender Man – or “The Operator” – and the mystery gradually spirals into paranoia and supernatural horror. The group stumble from clue to clue with an approach that would seem amateurish even to the Scooby gang. Despite drawing inspiration from one of the internet’s most influential horror series, the film strips away much of what made the creepypasta icon genuinely terrifying. (RD)