Directed by Kane Parsons — known online as Kane Pixels, who was just 16 when he began uploading his Backrooms found footage series in January 2022 — and produced by A24 alongside James Wan and Shawn Levy, Backrooms is one of the most anticipated horror films of 2026. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, runs 110 minutes, and opened to $81.5 million on its debut weekend. For a film made for under $10 million, that is a remarkable number. For a film directed by a 20-year-old making his feature debut, it is almost unbelievable.

I find that origin story as fascinating as the film itself. And it matters — because understanding where Backrooms came from is the only way to fully appreciate what Kane Parsons was trying to do with it.

The Backrooms Phenomenon — Where It All Started

Before there was a film, there was a creepypasta.

In May 2019, an anonymous user posted a single image on 4chan — a photograph of a yellowed, fluorescent-lit corridor that felt simultaneously familiar and deeply wrong. The kind of space you might find behind a shopping mall or inside an office building that has been empty for too long. The caption described it as an image of the Backrooms: a place you could accidentally “noclip” out of reality into, leaving you stranded in an endless maze of identical rooms with humming fluorescent lights, damp yellow wallpaper, and the faint smell of carpet. No exits. No explanation. No other people.

The image spread. The legend grew. The internet, as it tends to do with liminal spaces and unexplained dread, became obsessed.

Then, in January 2022, a teenager from California named Kane Parsons uploaded a short found footage video to YouTube. It showed a person stumbling into the Backrooms through a construction site, shot with the grainy, disorienting aesthetic of old camcorder footage. The video went viral almost immediately — and kept going. By the time Parsons graduated high school, his Backrooms series had accumulated over 190 million views and attracted the attention of multiple major studios.

A24, 21 Laps Entertainment, and Atomic Monster announced a full-length feature adaptation in February 2023, with Parsons attached to direct. He was 17 years old. The film that resulted — shot on a $10 million budget in Vancouver with a cast including an Academy Award nominee — is in direct continuity with his YouTube series. Not a reboot. Not a reimagining. The same world, expanded to feature length, by the person who built it.

What Backrooms Is About

A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect turned struggling furniture store owner — recently separated from his wife, quietly unravelling, spending his nights sleeping in the back of his own shop. When electrical disturbances lead him to a crack in the basement wall, he phases through it and finds himself somewhere that shouldn’t exist: an endless, fluorescent-lit labyrinth of yellow corridors and malformed rooms with no apparent exits and no logical architecture.

He keeps going back.

His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), watches her patient disappear deeper into an obsession she can’t explain — until she has no choice but to follow him in herself.

What lies inside the Backrooms — what it is, what lives there, and what it wants — is the film’s central mystery. One that Backrooms unravels with considerable patience and, if the critics are to be believed, considerable nerve.

The Backrooms Trailer

Review: Backrooms (Spoiler-Free)

There is a scene in Backrooms — somewhere in the first hour — where Clark moves through a corridor that looks exactly like every other corridor, and the camera holds on him just long enough for you to feel what he feels: the particular dread of a space that has no memory of you having passed through it. No landmarks. No logic. Just yellow wallpaper and fluorescent hum, stretching in every direction, forever.

That scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Kane Parsons understands something that most horror directors take years to learn — that atmosphere is not decoration, it is architecture. The Backrooms in this film are not a backdrop. They are the film’s central character, and Parsons treats them with the same obsessive care he brought to his YouTube shorts. The decision to build thirty thousand square feet of practical sets rather than rely on CGI pays off in every frame. You can feel the wrongness of the space in a way that no green screen could replicate. The floors slope slightly. The doorways are set at the wrong height. The furniture appears to be sinking. Nothing is quite right, and nothing lets you look away.

Chiwetel Ejiofor carries the film’s first half with a performance of quiet, accumulating desperation. Clark is not a likeable protagonist in any conventional sense — he is a man in the process of losing everything, making increasingly bad decisions, and finding in the Backrooms something that his real life has stopped offering him. I find that psychological dimension the film’s most interesting choice. This is not a film about a man trying to escape a nightmare. It is, at least partly, a film about a man who prefers the nightmare to what’s waiting for him outside.

Renate Reinsve is extraordinary in the second half. Where Ejiofor disappears into the obsession, Reinsve brings the film back to something human — a woman trying to make sense of a patient who has stopped making sense, and then finding herself in a place that makes sense of nothing. Her scenes in the Backrooms are the film’s most purely frightening.

The found footage elements are used sparingly and precisely — the opening tape of Naren Warne, the camera feeds Clark sets up as he maps the space — and they hit harder for being rationed. The hybrid format will frustrate purists, but I think it’s the right call. Full found footage for 110 minutes would have been exhausting. The conventional cinematography gives the audience air to breathe between the suffocating sequences that made Kane Pixels famous.

Where Backrooms stumbles slightly is in its third act. The film introduces narrative threads — the Async organisation, the mythology of the Backrooms, what the creatures actually are — that it doesn’t entirely resolve with the confidence of what came before. The first hour is essentially flawless. The final thirty minutes asks more questions than it answers, and not always in a way that feels deliberate rather than unfinished.

That is a real complaint. It is also a minor one relative to everything the film gets right.

I find Backrooms one of the most genuinely unsettling cinema experiences of recent years — not because of what it shows, but because of what it makes you feel. The wrongness of those spaces lodges somewhere in the back of the brain and stays there. Two days after watching it, I noticed the fluorescent lights in a supermarket and felt briefly, inexplicably uneasy.

That is the mark of a horror film that has done its job.

Closing Shot

Kane Parsons made his first YouTube video at 16. He made his first feature film at 20, for A24, with a cast that includes an Academy Award nominee, and a budget he spent building one of the most convincing alternate dimensions in recent horror cinema.

The third act leaves questions unanswered. The atmosphere leaves marks.

If you only see one horror film this year, make it Backrooms — and see it in the dark, with the sound up, and nothing else demanding your attention.

Where to Watch Backrooms

Is Backrooms (2026) Found Footage?

Partly — and deliberately so.

Backrooms opens with pure found footage: a recovered VHS tape shot by an Async scientist named Naren Warne, documenting his final moments lost inside the Backrooms in 1990. It’s grainy, disorienting, and immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with Kane Parsons’ YouTube series. That tape is found footage in the strictest sense — recovered evidence of something that went wrong.

From there, the film shifts into conventional cinematography for the main narrative. Clark’s story is not shot handheld. There is no character holding a camera and justifying its presence. Parsons uses a traditional cinematic language — composed shots, controlled lighting, a score — to tell the furniture store half of the story.

The found footage elements return inside the Backrooms itself. Clark sets up cameras to document his explorations and map the space. The footage from those cameras — surveillance feeds, handheld recordings — is woven into the film at key moments, creating a hybrid format that moves between the two modes depending on where the story needs to go.

I find this the right creative decision. A full 110-minute found footage film set in the Backrooms would have been exhausting — and the contrast between the conventional world outside and the recorded, documented world inside actually reinforces the film’s central idea: that the Backrooms exist in a different relationship to reality, one where the camera is the only tool that makes sense of the space.

So — found footage? Yes, in part. Hybrid? Absolutely. And in the same tradition as Late Night with the Devil and Trollhunter — films that use the format selectively and are stronger for it.

If you came to Backrooms purely for found footage, you’ll find it. Just not all the way through. And what you find in between is worth the detour.

Similar Films to Backrooms

Backrooms is a rare thing — a horror film with no obvious direct predecessor. Instead, it sits at a very specific intersection of found footage horror, liminal space dread, and corporate conspiracy — and its closest relatives come from several different directions.

We’ve put together a full guide to the 11 best films that share its particular brand of dread — split by type of wrongness, with a comparison table and a “which one to watch first” guide.

→ Movies Like Backrooms (2026): 11 Films That Share Its Liminal Dread

In the meantime, if you want a quick starting point:

• Corporate horror → The Borderlands (2013). The most underrated film in this space.
• Found footage → Kane Pixels’ original YouTube series. Free, essential, more unsettling than the film in some ways.
• Liminal atmosphere → Annihilation (2018) or Skinamarink (2022) depending on your tolerance for demanding cinema.

Der Beitrag Backrooms (2026): A24’s Most Unsettling Horror Film of the Year erschien zuerst auf found-footage.com.

Directed by David Bruckner — who would later go on to direct The Black Phone and the Hellraiser reboot — and based on Adam Nevill’s 2011 novel of the same name, The Ritual debuted in UK cinemas in October 2017 before landing on Netflix in February 2018. It arrived quietly and built its reputation through word of mouth. That reputation is deserved.

The Story: What The Ritual Is About

Five friends plan a hiking trip through Sweden’s Sarek National Park. Before they leave, one of them — Rob — is killed during a robbery gone wrong. Six months later, the remaining four set out anyway, determined to honour his memory.

They don’t make it far before things go wrong. Mutilated animals. Strange symbols carved into trees. Occult objects in abandoned cabins. Something is in the forest with them. Something that has been there for a very long time.

The Ritual: Trailer

Review: The Ritual (Spoiler-Free)

The first thing The Ritual gets right is its setting. The (Scandinavian) forest — vast, ancient, and utterly indifferent to human presence — does most of the heavy lifting before anything supernatural has even happened. The trees swallow the group. The trails disappear. Darkness and disorientation become enemies before whatever is hunting them does. I find that sequencing precise: by the time the film reveals what is out there, you are already convinced that the forest itself is hostile.

The performances are strong across the board. Rafe Spall carries the film’s emotional weight — guilt, grief, and the particular strain of male friendship that doesn’t know how to talk about either — without ever tipping into melodrama. The group dynamic feels lived-in and believable, which matters enormously in a film that depends on you caring whether these people survive.

The film draws inevitable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project — four people, a forest, something they can’t see — and they’re not entirely wrong. But The Ritual is more direct and considerably less subtle than Blair Witch. Where Blair Witch withholds everything, Bruckner eventually shows his hand, blending cabin horror, backwoods brutality, and Norse mythology into something that feels genuinely original despite its familiar components. It’s a combination I didn’t expect to work as well as it does.

The camerawork deserves special mention — many scenes derive their unsettling authenticity directly from how they’re shot, and Bruckner uses the forest’s natural darkness with real intelligence. And unlike many horror films that throw in a supernatural element as an afterthought, The Ritual earns its monster. The mythological dimension gives the film a texture that pure survival horror rarely achieves.

The one element that divided audiences is the finale. Some viewers found the resolution undercooked after such a disciplined buildup — feeling that the film lost its nerve at the moment it needed it most. I disagree. I find the finale the most interesting part of the film — the moment where The Ritual fully commits to its mythological ambitions and goes somewhere genuinely unexpected. It won’t be for everyone. It was absolutely for me. But you can’t please everyone, right?

Oh – i almost forgot: One classic genre element makes its obligatory appearance. Yes, someone twists their ankle. You will see it coming. So will they. They go into the forest anyway.

Verdict

The Ritual doesn’t reinvent the forest horror genre. What it does is execute it with more craft, more atmosphere, and more mythological ambition than almost anything else in the subgenre. David Bruckner knows exactly how to use a forest — and exactly how long to keep you in it before showing you what lives there.

If you’ve ever felt uneasy walking through trees at dusk, The Ritual will remind you why.

Where to Watch The Ritual

Similar Films to The Ritual

The Ritual sits at the intersection of folk horror, survival thriller, and creature feature — which means its closest relatives come from several different directions. If one element hooked you more than the others, start there.

The Descent (2005) — Six women explore an uncharted cave system and encounter something that shouldn’t be there. The closest comparison in terms of sustained claustrophobic dread and creature design. One of the best British horror films ever made.

Trollhunter (2010) — Found footage, Scandinavian wilderness, ancient creatures from Norse mythology. The tonal opposite of The Ritual — deadpan where this is dread — but sharing the same mythological DNA. Read our full review.

Eden Lake (2008) — A couple’s weekend retreat is ruined by a group of increasingly violent locals. British, brutal, and relentlessly tense. Shares The Ritual‘s sense of ordinary people trapped somewhere they can’t escape, with threat coming from multiple directions at once.

Exists (2014) — Not the same mythology, not the same country, not the same format — Exists is found footage where The Ritual is not. But if what you loved was the sense of something enormous and hostile in a forest that doesn’t want you there, Exists delivers exactly that. Eduardo Sánchez knows his way around a treeline. Read our full review.

Der Beitrag The Ritual (2017): When the Forest Doesn’t Let You Leave erschien zuerst auf found-footage.com.

Caddo Lake is not one of those films.

Directed by Celine Held and Logan George and produced by M. Night Shyamalan, it is a supernatural thriller set on the bayous of East Texas that moves at its own pace, withholds its hand until precisely the right moment, and trusts — genuinely trusts — that you are paying attention. I find that trust increasingly rare in genre cinema. I find it enormously refreshing here.

Where to Stream Caddo Lake?

What Caddo Lake Is About

In a small community on the shores of Caddo Lake, eight-year-old Anna vanishes without a trace. No note. No witness. No explanation. Her stepsister Ellie (Eliza Scanlen), consumed by guilt and desperate for answers, begins investigating — and finds herself drawn toward the lake itself, and toward something in its history that no one has been willing to talk about.

Meanwhile, in 2003, a young man named Paris (Dylan O’Brien) is dredging that same lake and grieving his recently deceased mother. He notices things he cannot explain: footprints on the dry lake bed, sudden hearing loss, objects that shouldn’t be where they are. He starts pulling on a thread.

The Caddo Lake Trailer

Review: Caddo Lake (Spoiler-Free)

Caddo Lake is the kind of film that reveals itself in layers. The first act is deliberately quiet — almost frustratingly so, if you arrive expecting immediate answers. What Held and George are doing in those early scenes is something more patient and more valuable: they are making you care. About Ellie and her guilt. About Paris and his grief. About a family fractured by absences that nobody has ever properly explained.

By the time the supernatural elements arrive in force, you are already invested. And that investment is precisely what the film needs, because what follows asks a great deal of you.

The structure is non-linear in a way that rewards attention and punishes distraction. Caddo Lake cuts between timelines without always announcing the transition, trusting the audience to orient themselves through context rather than title cards. I find this a genuinely bold choice for a mainstream streaming release — and it pays off. The disorientation is intentional. The confusion is the point. When clarity finally arrives, it lands with a force that a more conventional structure could never have manufactured.

Dylan O’Brien is a revelation. This is a performance of remarkable interiority — grief, obsession, and a slowly dawning horror played with almost no histrionics. There is a particular kind of male grief that cinema rarely gets right, the kind that manifests not as tears but as compulsion, as an inability to let go of a question that has no comfortable answer. O’Brien understands it completely. Eliza Scanlen matches him beat for beat, carrying the film’s emotional present tense with a restraint that makes her character’s rare moments of vulnerability hit considerably harder.

Lauren Ambrose, in a smaller role, does the most with the least — a woman held together by sheer force of habit, whose stillness tells you everything about what she has survived.

The setting deserves its own mention. Caddo Lake — the real one, straddling the Texas-Louisiana border — is one of the most visually distinctive locations in American cinema, and Held and George use it with genuine intelligence. The cypress trees, the Spanish moss, the particular quality of light on still water: the lake feels ancient and indifferent in a way that serves the film’s supernatural logic perfectly. Nature here is not decorative. It is structural.

If Caddo Lake has a weakness, it is that the first half occasionally sacrifices momentum for atmosphere. There are scenes that linger a beat longer than necessary, and a handful of character moments that feel slightly underdeveloped given what the film eventually asks us to feel about these people. But these are minor complaints about a film that is, in its ambitions and its execution, several cuts above what streaming genre cinema usually offers.

What I find most impressive, ultimately, is the discipline. Caddo Lake knows exactly what it is doing, knows exactly when to reveal what, and never flinches from the emotional consequences of its own logic. That kind of structural confidence is genuinely hard to pull off. Held and George pull it off.

Verdict

Caddo Lake is a film that asks for patience and returns something rarer: the particular satisfaction of a story that has been constructed, not just told, and that reveals its full shape only when the final piece falls into place.

It is also, I would argue, the closest thing we have to a perfect time loop film. Not because it is flashy about it — it isn’t. There are no rules explained in expository dialogue, no whiteboard diagrams, no character who conveniently understands exactly what is happening. The loop reveals itself the way the lake reveals itself: slowly, on its own terms, with a logic that only becomes visible in retrospect. And when it does, everything clicks into place with a precision that is genuinely rare. Every scene was always exactly where it needed to be. Every detail was always pointing somewhere. You just couldn’t see it yet.

That kind of structural confidence is hard to pull off. Caddo Lake pulls it off.

If you are willing to sit with the uncertainty, Caddo Lake will give you one of the most quietly devastating endings of the year — and a time loop you will still be thinking about days later.

The Timelines Explained — Full Breakdown (Spoilers)

If you’ve already watched Caddo Lake and find yourself with questions — about the loop, the family tree, who ends up where and why — we’ve put together a complete breakdown covering every timeline, every crossing, and every twist the film has to offer, including an original infographic mapping the full loop.

See our article: Caddo Lake: Timeline & Ending Explained [+ Infographic]

Where to Watch Caddo Lake

Similar Films to Caddo Lake

If Caddo Lake left you wanting more — the slow-burn structure, the non-linear reveal, the supernatural that never quite explains itself — we have put together a full guide to the best films like Caddo Lake.

Der Beitrag Caddo Lake (2024): The Perfect Timeloop movie? erschien zuerst auf found-footage.com.