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6 Liminal Movies You Should Watch If You Love 'Backrooms'

No Film School [Unofficial] May 27, 2026
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We've been covering Kane Parson's rise since the beginning, back when he was a teenager uploading found-footage horror to YouTube using free software and borrowed cameras.

The scale-up to a feature landed him Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and lessons worth stealing.

If you're excited about the film and want to understand the lineage it comes from (or if you just need some good liminal horror), here are six films that live in the same uncanny territory.

Vivarium

I watched this film once, and it might be enough for all its intensity and depressing setting. A young couple (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) visits a show home in a new suburban development, and they cannot leave. Every road leads back to the same house. Food is delivered. A baby appears. The world is green, pastel, identical, and completely hostile. _ _

Vivarium is liminal horror in a slightly different mode than Parsons' work. The trap here isn't a space you accidentally fell into, but one you chose, and now the walls have closed.

Lorcan Finnegan built the film's exterior (that identical row of repeating pastel facades) on a physical set.

"We built a set in a warehouse in Belgium," he told ComingSoon.net. "It was initially supposed to be 12 exterior houses, but by the time we got the shoot, we were into construction and everything, we could only afford to build three."

It didn't really matter. Three repeating facades still read on screen as weird and infinite.

Toys

This one needs a strong recommendation because its reputation is a mess. But I think one thing liminal fans are searching for is a sense of oddity and time that often pops up in movies of this period.

Toys is a 1992 Robin Williams film that bombed at the box office, got shredded by critics, and has been almost impossible to find for 30-plus years. It is also one of the most visually strange major studio films ever made, and it deserves to be back in the conversation.

The production design is surreal. You get rolling green hills that look painted, white rooms, primary-color dreamscapes, everything looking plastic. It's a fable about a toy company taken over by a war-loving general, and it predicts drone warfare and the gamification of violence that's hard to dismiss now.

Barry Levinson described it as "a black comedy in primary colors," and said of the project's reception, "All you really can do is do the work that you believe in. Sometimes you can be celebrated, and sometimes you can be trashed. That's the nature of it all" (via Consequence).

Levinson was right, and the film deserved better.

Learn more about why retro and analog aesthetics hit different in horror.

Skinamarink

Shot for $15,000 in Kyle Edward Ball's childhood home, Skinamarink is about two children who wake up to find their parents gone, the doors and windows disappeared, and something unseen speaking to them from the dark. There are no faces. The camera spends most of its time pointed at ceilings, floors, and doorways. It is one of the most effective horror films made in the last decade.

Ball built the soundscape from scratch with deliberate nostalgia.

"I wanted it to not just look like an old movie, but sound like one, too," he told Film Inquiry. "The only audio in the movie that was actually recorded on set was the ADR for the actors, which was not recorded while we were shooting the actors, and the scene where someone opens a closet door. The rest was put in after the fact."

We have a full breakdown of why the film works. It's one of the cleaner examples of constraint-as-creative-tool you'll find.

The Rolling Giant

Okay, technically this is a stretch—it's a 46-minute YouTube short, not a theatrical release. But it might be better than most of the horror films released recently, and it is __Kane Parsons, so it belongs here.

Part of his The Oldest View series, The Rolling Giant follows a vlogger who discovers an abandoned shopping mall located somehow a mile underground. Like the Backrooms, the visuals were rebuilt entirely in Blender. A giant rolling puppet is inside. It is looking for the main character. And it is so good and so scary.

Parsons told Dazed that "the analog appearance goes a long way in selling that quote-unquote, 'liminal feeling', or making it feel far away in time." _ _

The Rolling Giant takes a real demolished mall (Valley View Center in Dallas), a real art piece, and a real botanist's history and folds them into horror that feels like recovered memory. Check out what shaped Parsons' influences, then watch this for free on YouTube. You will not regret it.

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut follows a theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who constructs a life-sized replica of New York City inside a Manhattan warehouse, populated by actors playing himself and everyone he's ever known. Time collapses, and the production never ends, because of course that's how it would go.

The warehouse becomes a world that mirrors and swallows the one outside it. It's a film about mortality and creative obsession, and also about what it means to be trapped inside a space of your own making.

It is also extremely funny, which tends to get lost. Kaufman said in an IONCINEMA interview, "You need to see it more than once. The trick is to get people to watch it more than once."

He's right. It's the most emotionally devastating film on this list, and it understands what liminal means at a philosophical level that most horror films don't attempt.

Being John Malkovich

Everyone's seen it, for good reason. It still doesn't get enough credit as liminal horror. A filing clerk (John Cusack) discovers a portal behind a cabinet on floor 7½ of an office building, leading directly into the consciousness of actor John Malkovich. You spend 15 minutes experiencing what it's like to be him. Then you get ejected into a ditch on the New Jersey Turnpike.

It gets discussed as absurdist comedy, as Kaufman-isms. But watch it now, in the context of everything above, and what you're watching is a film about being trapped in a space that was never meant for you.

Spike Jonze told Filmmaker Magazine that he and cinematographer Lance Acord "shot most of the scenes very simply" because, rather than breaking each scene down into 10 setups, he wanted "to spend my time getting performances from the actors."

The film feels strangely grounded even as it does the most structurally bizarre things imaginable.

What are some other liminal films you love?

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