"Backrooms" (2026)

For much of its history, horror has functioned as more than a mechanism for producing fear. The best horror stories have been moral tales, cultural critiques, or explorations of genuine evil. Whether confronting human depravity, social anxieties, supernatural terror, or the consequences of forbidden desires, horror has often pointed beyond itself to something larger and more disturbing.

A growing number of recent horror films seem less interested in those themes. Instead, they offer psychological observations that are neither particularly profound nor especially frightening. Their insights often amount to the sort of lessons one might learn from an after-school children's program: unresolved trauma is harmful, people carry emotional wounds, relationships can be unhealthy, and people need healing. These things may be true, but they are hardly revelations.

Backrooms continues this trend. The film provides only the vaguest sketch of its protagonists. The central male character is presented as an upset, absent, and possibly abusive husband, though the details remain frustratingly thin. The primary female character is similarly underdeveloped, defined more by hints and suggestions than by a coherent history. Rather than creating mystery, the lack of substance leaves the film with little emotional weight.

The film's horror is likewise built almost entirely on uneasiness. The liminal spaces are intentionally disorienting and uncomfortable, but there is nothing particularly novel about that idea. Haunted house stories have long understood how architecture, emptiness, and uncertainty can create dread. The difference is that traditional horror usually uses that unease as a foundation for something more frightening. The unsettling atmosphere points toward a threat, a revelation, or a confrontation with evil.

Backrooms rarely moves beyond the atmosphere itself. It succeeds in creating discomfort, but discomfort alone is not terror. In the end, the film feels less like a horror story and more like an extended exercise in mood, one whose repetitive unease proves more sleep-inducing than frightening.