Backrooms Movie vs Infirmary Movie: Which 2026 Found-Footage Horror Gets Under Your Skin?
Backrooms Movie vs <a target="_blank" href="https://www.google.com/search?ved=1t:260882&q=Infirmary+movie&bbid=8281819812793584616&bpid=1943652877206054270" data-preview>Infirmary</a> Movie: Which 2026 Found-Footage Horror Gets Under Your Skin?
Do horror films make you feel uneasy? Worried? Terrified? Or just plain scared, the kind of scared where you check the hallway before turning off the light?
Those four words are not the same feeling, and 2026 has handed us two found-footage films that prove it. On one side stands the Backrooms movie, Kane Parsons' A24 feature that turned a viral internet legend into a box-office phenomenon. On the other, a small, mean, beautifully controlled film called Infirmary, now streaming on Shudder. I watched the Backrooms movie during its first theatrical run. I watched Infirmary yesterday. And I haven't stopped comparing them since.
One built a maze inside the mind. The other locked me in a hospital corridor and refused to give me the key.
Why Found Footage Still Scares Us in 2026: The Backrooms Movie and Infirmary Side by Side
Let me confess something first. I love found footage, but only when it is well made. The subgenre has a bad reputation, and frankly it earned it. After The Blair Witch Project opened the door in 1999 and Paranormal Activity kicked it off its hinges a decade later, the market drowned in shaky cameras, endless screaming and night-vision footage of nothing happening in a basement. For every [REC], Lake Mungo or Noroi, there were twenty films that confused "cheap" with "authentic."
So when a found-footage film works, it feels like a small miracle.
The format has one weapon no other horror style owns: it removes the comfort of the frame. In a classic horror film, a director composes every shot, and somewhere in the back of your head you know someone is in control. Found footage takes that safety net away. The camera belongs to a character, and that character might be dying, panicking, or simply looking the wrong way. You see only what they see. You miss what they miss.
That is the shared DNA of both films in this comparison. But what each one does with it could not be more different.
Two films, two opposite fears
The Backrooms movie grew from a creepypasta, an online urban legend about an endless maze of yellow office rooms, damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights. You "no-clip" out of reality and end up there, alone, forever. Kane Parsons, under his YouTube name Kane Pixels, started building short films around that idea when he was a teenager, making them himself in Blender. The videos exploded, A24 signed him at just 19, and his feature debut reached theaters on May 29, 2026, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell. The official logline is pure A24 minimalism: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
That is a concept movie. Its terror is philosophical, almost architectural. It asks: what if the world has a back door, and what if you walked through it?
Infirmary asks a much smaller question, and that is exactly its strength. What happened to Edward? Directed by Nicholas Pineda in his feature debut, the film presents itself as recovered footage of a young former Marine who vanished on his first night working security at an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Pineda shot it inside a real derelict hospital of around 200,000 square feet, using only body cameras and security cameras. After a festival run that included London's FrightFest, it premiered on Shudder and AMC+ on October 2, 2026, as part of the streamer's Season of Screams lineup.
No doorway to another dimension. No mythology. Just a building, a night shift and the feeling that something in the dark knows your name.
Liminal space versus locked space
Here is the clearest way I can put the difference. The Backrooms movie is about liminal space, the in-between places that feel wrong because they are empty: a mall after closing time, a school corridor in summer, an airport at 4 a.m. Its fear is spacious. It stretches forever in every direction.
Infirmary is about locked space. Its fear is narrow. The corridors close in, the doors stay shut, and the security monitors show rooms you would rather not enter. Where the Backrooms movie makes you feel lost, Infirmary makes you feel trapped.
Both are nightmares. But they hit different nerves, and that is why comparing them tells us something about how horror really works on our bodies and minds.
The question this article will answer
Over the next sections, I will take each film apart: Infirmary's clever camera technique and its suffocating three-character cast, then the psychological layers of the Backrooms movie, explained through its liminal design and a song that kept playing in my head as I left the cinema. After that, I'll score them on the four feelings from the top of this page, uneasy, worried, terrified, scared, and be honest about where each one stumbles.
Spoiler-light, I promise. Where I have to touch the endings, I'll warn you first.
Because the real question isn't which film is "better." A big studio concept and a micro-budget debut were never going to fight in the same weight class. The real question is simpler and more personal: which one gets under your skin and stays there?
Grab a flashlight. We're starting the night shift.
Infirmary on Shudder: Bodycam, Security Cam and the Suffocation of Three Characters
Some horror films scare you with what they show. Infirmary scares you with how it shows it.
Watching it last night, I felt something I rarely get from streaming horror: a physical, almost sensory reaction. My shoulders tightened. My breathing slowed. I caught myself leaning toward the screen, the way you lean toward a door when you think you heard something on the other side. That is not a jump-scare reaction. That is immersion, and Infirmary earns it through one smart technical decision.
Two cameras, two kinds of fear
Nicholas Pineda builds the whole film from two sources: Edward's body camera and the hospital's security cameras. That sounds like a simple gimmick. It isn't. The way the film moves between them is the best thing about it, and it is why I would call Infirmary a genuinely well-made found-footage film.
The bodycam is subjective fear. It sits on Edward's chest, so it sees what he faces, bobbing with every step, swinging wildly when he turns. You are inside his panic. When he hesitates at a doorway, you hesitate too. When his flashlight catches something at the edge of the frame, the camera doesn't politely pause for you. It moves on, and you are left wondering whether you saw what you think you saw.
The security cameras are the opposite. Fixed, high in the corners, cold and grey. They watch from above with no emotion at all. And that is exactly what makes them terrifying. From the security angle, Edward looks tiny, alone, exposed. You can see the empty corridor ahead of him and the dark doorway behind him. You know more than he does, and you can't warn him.
Switching between those two views does something clever to the viewer. One moment you are Edward. The next, you are watching Edward, like a guard staring at a monitor at 3 a.m. That rhythm, inside and outside, hunter and hunted, is where the suffocation comes from. Hitchcock famously explained suspense as showing the audience the bomb under the table. Infirmary puts the bomb on a security monitor and then straps you to the man sitting at the table.
The building as a fourth character
Pineda shot inside a real abandoned hospital, and you can feel it in every frame. Peeling walls, stained tiles, long institutional corridors that seem designed to make human beings feel small. No set designer could fake that kind of decay.
Old psychiatric hospitals carry a special weight in horror for a reason. They were places where people were locked away, often against their will, and the buildings seem to remember it. Fans of Session 9, Grave Encounters and the Korean hit Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum know this territory well, and Infirmary sits proudly in that small but mighty hospital-horror tradition. Where Grave Encounters leaned into its ghost-hunting TV show parody, though, Infirmary plays it straight. No wink at the audience. No comic relief. Just the job, the night and the building.
Essentially a three-hander
What surprised me most is how few people this film needs. Infirmary is essentially a three-hander:
- Edward (Paul Syre), the young man and former Marine on his first night shift, our eyes through the bodycam.
- Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), the veteran head of security, the voice of experience who clearly knows more about this place than he says.
- Ms. Downey (Danielle Kennedy), the woman who works at the hospital, and the film's most quietly unsettling presence.
That is the core of it. Three people and an enormous empty building. And the small cast is not a budget limitation in disguise. It is the point. With so few faces on screen, every interaction matters. Every conversation between Edward and Lester carries an undercurrent: is the old man protecting the rookie, or preparing him for something?
Paul Syre deserves real credit here. Acting in bodycam found footage is brutally hard, because for long stretches the audience can't even see your face. Syre carries the film mostly through voice, breath and movement, and his rising nerves feel completely real. Mark Anthony Williams, meanwhile, gives Lester a tired, heavy calm that becomes more disturbing the longer you think about it.
Ms. Downey and the family secret (mild spoiler)
Skip this paragraph if you want to go in completely fresh.
As the night goes on, Ms. Downey turns out to be far more than a staff member. The film suggests she is connected to the family that has long run the infirmary, and suddenly her calm, polite manner reads very differently. It is a strong idea: the horror is not just in the building, it is in the people who keep it running. Institutional evil, passed down like an inheritance. I'll come back later to whether the film fully pays off that revelation, because I have my doubts.
Why it feels more suffocating
Put all of this together and you get a film that tightens like a belt, one notch at a time. A small cast. A single location. Cameras that alternately trap you inside a frightened man and force you to watch him helplessly from above. No escape hatch, no other dimension, no wider mythology to breathe in.
That is why, for me, Infirmary is the more suffocating experience of the two. The Backrooms movie made me think. Infirmary made me hold my breath.
But thinking can be its own kind of terror, and that is where Kane Parsons takes us next.
The Backrooms Movie Explained: Liminal Space, the Subconscious and "Windmills of Your Mind"
When I walked out of the cinema after the Backrooms movie, a song started playing in my head. Not a horror score. Not a jump-scare sting. It was "The Windmills of Your Mind," that strange, spiraling ballad written by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman for The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and three decades later Sting recorded a reimagined version for the 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.
Why that song? Because it is built like a maze. Its melody keeps circling back on itself, its images turn and return, and it never quite lands where you expect. It is music about a mind that cannot stop looping. And that, more than any monster, is what the Backrooms movie is really about.
From creepypasta to A24: the backrooms in brief
For anyone asking what the Backrooms movie is about, here is the short version. The Backrooms began as an online legend: a photo of an empty, yellow-walled office space, and a story about people who accidentally "no-clip" out of reality and fall into an endless labyrinth of identical rooms. Damp carpet. Buzzing fluorescent lights. No windows, no exits, no one else. Just you, forever.
Kane Parsons took that idea and gave it a story. His Kane Pixels YouTube series, which began in 2022, followed a therapist searching for a patient who vanished into a dimension beyond reality. Rendered in Blender and designed to look like grainy 1990s camcorder footage, the videos became a phenomenon. A24 signed Parsons at 19, making him the youngest filmmaker the studio had ever worked with, and paired him with screenwriter Will Soodik and producers including James Wan's Atomic Monster and Shawn Levy's 21 Laps.
The feature keeps the official logline beautifully simple: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. Behind it, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell find a space that should not exist.
The physical backrooms: liminal space as horror
The first layer is the one everyone talks about: the place itself. The Backrooms is the ultimate liminal space, a term for transitional places that feel eerie precisely because they are empty and in-between. Think of a hotel corridor at midnight, a closed shopping mall, a waiting room with no one waiting.
Parsons understands that these spaces frighten us because they are almost familiar. We have all stood in a fluorescent-lit office or an empty showroom. The Backrooms takes that ordinary memory and stretches it to infinity until it breaks. As one horror site put it after the release, the film managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. That is no small trick.
He also kept his promise to rely heavily on practical effects. The film's distorted creatures, the Still Life entities, were played by real actors under layers of makeup and prosthetics, with only occasional digital touch-ups. You feel the weight of them. They belong to the same physical world as the carpet and the walls, which makes them far more disturbing than any weightless CGI ghost.
The psychological backrooms: the back of the conscience
Here is where I think the Backrooms movie becomes something special, and why I would call it the more original of the two films in this comparison.
Watching it, I felt that the backrooms were never only a physical place. They are also psychological. A back room of the mind. A space behind the conscience, where we store the things we cannot face: grief, guilt, memories we have filed away and pretend not to own.
Every one of us has backrooms like that. The film simply builds them out of drywall and carpet.
That reading is what connects it to "The Windmills of Your Mind." The song describes thoughts that circle endlessly, images feeding into images, a mind trapped in its own spinning machinery. The Backrooms is that same experience made into architecture. Every corridor leads to another corridor. Every room echoes the last. You walk and walk and arrive nowhere, the way an anxious mind lies awake at 3 a.m., replaying the same fear in slightly different forms.
And the original YouTube premise, a therapist searching for a missing patient, points straight at this interpretation. A therapist's job is to go into someone else's backrooms. Seen that way, the film is less about a monster in a maze than about what happens when we finally open the door we kept locked inside ourselves.
A concept that is genuinely new
Horror has given us haunted houses for a century, haunted hospitals for decades, and found footage for more than 25 years. What it had never quite given us, at this scale, is horror born from internet folklore and built around the subconscious rather than a ghost, a killer or a curse.
That is the Backrooms movie's great achievement. It reportedly became the highest-grossing film in A24's history, and I don't think that happened only because millions of teenagers already knew the YouTube videos. It happened because the concept speaks to something everyone recognizes: the fear of being lost inside your own head.
Infirmary trapped me in a building. The Backrooms trapped me in a thought. Which of those is scarier depends on what kind of fear you carry, and that is exactly where we turn next.
Uneasy, Worried, Terrified: Scoring the Fear in Backrooms vs Infirmary
Let's go back to the question at the top of this page. Horror is not one emotion. It is a ladder, and a good film knows exactly which rung it wants you standing on. So instead of handing out stars, I'm going to score the Backrooms movie and Infirmary on four separate feelings: uneasy, worried, terrified and scared.
1. Uneasy: the slow itch under the skin
Unease is the quietest fear. Nothing has happened yet, but something is wrong. The light is too flat, the silence too long, the room too empty.
This is where the Backrooms movie wins, and it isn't close. Kane Parsons has built an entire film out of unease. The humming fluorescent tubes, the stained carpet, the endless yellow walls: none of it attacks you, and all of it bothers you. It is the feeling of walking into an office after hours and sensing that the building does not want you there. Liminal horror is unease turned into a whole world.
Infirmary does unease well too, especially in its long opening patrols, but its decaying hospital is a place we already expect to be creepy. The Backrooms makes the ordinary sinister, and that cuts deeper.
Winner: Backrooms.
2. Worried: fearing for someone
Worry is different. It needs a person to worry about. It is the knot in your stomach when you care what happens to a character and can see trouble coming before they can.
Here Infirmary takes the lead. With essentially three characters, every scene is about Edward, the young guard on his first night. Through the security cameras, we see what he can't: the empty corridor ahead, the dark doorway behind. That gap between what we know and what he knows is the engine of worry, and Pineda runs it hard. Paul Syre's nervous breathing on the bodycam audio does the rest. By the halfway point, I was genuinely worried for this kid.
The Backrooms movie has a bigger, starrier cast, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve bringing real weight, but its scale works against intimacy. The maze is the star. The people are visitors.
Winner: Infirmary.
3. Scared: the jump, and the turning figure
Being scared is the body's reaction, the jolt, the gasp, the hand over the mouth. And here I want to talk about something I keep noticing in found-footage films, Infirmary included.
Call it the turning figure. The scene goes dark. The camera, held by our character, moves slowly toward someone standing with their back to us, often a woman, sometimes a man. They don't move. They don't answer. The camera gets closer, and closer. And then they turn around, and the face is wrong. Disfigured. Possessed. Not human anymore. Cue the scream, the jolt, the shaking camera.
I don't want to claim filmmakers sit down and plan this as a rule. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe it's simply what the format pushes everyone toward. But once you see it, you see it everywhere in found footage. Its most famous ancestor might be the final shot of The Blair Witch Project, where a character stands silently facing the corner of a basement, his back to the camera. That image is so effective precisely because he doesn't turn. Later films took the idea and added the turn as the payoff.
Why does it work so well in found footage specifically? Because the camera is our eyes. We can't cut away. We can't look over the stranger's shoulder. A back turned toward us is a face withheld, and the format forces us to walk straight toward it. The turn becomes the reveal of everything we feared was there. It taps into something primal, too: the fear of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, a person we thought we recognized becoming a monster, a ghost, a stranger wearing a known shape.
Infirmary uses its own version of this move, and I'll admit it got me. But it also reminded me how often I have seen it before. The jump lands. The surprise doesn't.
The Backrooms movie relies less on this kind of scare. Its Still Life entities, played by real performers in prosthetics, are more unsettling in how they move and how they hold still than in sudden reveals.
Winner on pure jolts: Infirmary. Winner on originality: Backrooms.
4. Terrified: the fear that follows you home
Terror is the top rung. It is not the jump in the moment. It is what stays with you afterward, in the dark corridor of your own home.
This is the hardest category to judge, because the two films leave very different marks. Infirmary's terror is physical and claustrophobic. Its corridors, its cold security monitors and its tight little cast made me hold my breath in a way the Backrooms never did. For a stretch of its running time, it is the more suffocating film by far.
But the Backrooms movie's terror travels further. It follows you into every empty office, every late-night hotel corridor, every quiet moment when your own thoughts start circling. A film that changes how you see ordinary spaces has done something lasting.
Winner: a split decision. Infirmary is more terrifying while you watch it. The Backrooms is more terrifying after.
The scorecard
- Uneasy: Backrooms
- Worried: Infirmary
- Scared: Infirmary (with a familiar trick)
- Terrified: split, Infirmary in the moment, Backrooms in the memory
Two films, two kinds of fear, nearly an even score. But neither one is flawless, and the flaws tell us almost as much as the scares. That's the next door we open.
Where Infirmary Stumbles and the Backrooms Movie Soars (and Vice Versa)
No horror film is perfect, and the honest critic's job is to say where the lights flicker. Both of these films have real strengths, and both leave something on the table. Here is where I think each one stumbles, and where each one flies.
Infirmary's climax: an ending that stays in the dark
Mild spoiler warning: I won't reveal what happens, but I will talk about how the ending feels.
For most of its 86 minutes, Infirmary is a tight, disciplined machine. The camera switching works, the tension builds, and the three-character structure keeps everything focused. Then the climax arrives, and the film loses its grip a little.
My problem is simple: it is not very clear what happened. The final stretch moves fast, the footage gets chaotic, and when the screen goes dark I was left piecing events together rather than reeling from them. Maybe that is deliberate. Found footage has a long tradition of open endings, and Nicholas Pineda may have chosen to leave the climax to interpretation, the way The Blair Witch Project left us staring at a man in a corner with no explanation. Mystery can be powerful.
But ambiguity works best when the film has given us enough pieces to argue about. Here, I wanted one or two more clues. A climax should be the moment everything the film has been whispering finally speaks out loud. Infirmary keeps whispering.
The dark revelation needed more teeth
Connected to that is the film's big secret. The suggestion that Ms. Downey, played with quiet menace by Danielle Kennedy, is tied to the family that has run the infirmary is a genuinely chilling idea. It turns the hospital from a haunted building into an inherited sin, a place where evil is managed, maintained and passed down like a family business.
That revelation should land like a punch. Instead, it lands like a tap on the shoulder. The film introduces the idea but doesn't push it far enough to make us feel its full horror. Think of how Hereditary made a family's legacy feel like a trap closing from all sides, or how Session 9 let the history of its asylum slowly poison everyone inside. Infirmary has the right ingredients for that kind of dread. It just needed to turn up the heat.
For a debut feature made on a small budget with essentially three actors, though, these are the flaws of ambition, not incompetence. Pineda clearly knows how to build fear. Next time, I suspect he'll know how to finish it.
Where Infirmary soars
Let me be fair, because the film's achievements outweigh its stumbles. Its technique is outstanding. Few found-footage films use their camera sources this intelligently, and the movement between bodycam and security cam deserves to be studied by anyone making the format. Its performances feel real. Its location is used to the last inch. And it gets something right that many bigger films miss: suffocation comes from limits. Fewer people, fewer rooms, fewer exits.
That is why Infirmary is the stronger experience of the two, even if it is not the stronger idea.
Where the Backrooms movie soars
The Backrooms movie, by contrast, soars on concept. It brought internet folklore to the big screen without losing what made it frightening online. It turned liminal space into a mainstream horror language. And for me, it opened a psychological door, the backrooms of the conscience, that horror rarely walks through so boldly. Kane Parsons was still a teenager when A24 signed him, and he delivered a film that feels like the start of a new kind of horror rather than another entry in an old one.
And where the Backrooms stumbles
Its weakness is the flip side of its strength. A concept this big can swallow its characters. With a larger cast and a wider canvas, the film is never as intimate or as personally nerve-racking as Infirmary. You admire the maze more than you fear for the people in it. And for viewers who don't know the YouTube lore, some of the world-building can feel like reading the second chapter of a book whose first chapter is online.
Where to watch the Backrooms movie and Infirmary
- Infirmary: streaming exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ since October 2, 2026, as part of Shudder's Season of Screams.
- Backrooms: released in theaters by A24 on May 29, 2026. Streaming and rental options vary by country and change often, so check a service like JustWatch for where the Backrooms movie is currently available near you.
Watch them back to back if you can. Start with the Backrooms for the idea, then let Infirmary lock the door behind you. Together, they make the best argument in years that found footage is far from finished.
The Verdict: Two Doors, Two Nightmares
So, which one gets under your skin? After living with both films, my answer is this: the Backrooms movie is the better idea, and Infirmary is the better night of fear.
Kane Parsons opened a door horror had barely touched, a maze built from liminal space and the backrooms of our own conscience, spiraling like the melody of "The Windmills of Your Mind." It is original, ambitious and haunting in the way it changes how you see an empty office or a silent corridor long after the credits roll. It is no surprise it became a box-office phenomenon for A24.
Nicholas Pineda, working with a fraction of the money and essentially three actors, made something smaller and sharper. His switching between bodycam and security camera is found-footage technique at its best, and for most of its running time Infirmary is the more suffocating, more physical, more breath-holding experience. Its climax needed more clarity and its dark family revelation needed more bite, but this is a debut that announces a real talent.
And both films prove something I have always believed: found footage is not a tired gimmick. When it is well made, it is still the format that comes closest to putting you inside the fear rather than in front of it. Even its familiar tricks, like that turning figure in the dark, still work on us, because the camera won't let us look away.
Watch the Backrooms to think. Watch Infirmary to stop breathing. Then turn off the lights, if you dare.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Backrooms movie scary?
Yes, but in a slow, psychological way. The Backrooms movie relies more on unease, liminal dread and unsettling creatures than on constant jump scares. If empty corridors and buzzing fluorescent lights already bother you, it will stay with you for days.
Why is the Backrooms movie rated R?
The MPA rated Backrooms R for language and some violent content/bloody images. Parents' guides note frequent strong profanity, several violent encounters with creatures, and many disturbing images.
How long is the Backrooms movie?
The Backrooms runs about 1 hour and 50 minutes. Listings vary slightly between sources, but most put it at 110 to 111 minutes.
What is the Backrooms movie about?
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom, leading into an endless dimension of empty rooms and corridors. The story follows a therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, who goes into this dimension to save a patient who disappeared, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mark Duplass also starring. It expands Kane Parsons' viral Kane Pixels YouTube series.
Where can I watch the Backrooms movie?
After its theatrical release on May 29, 2026, the Backrooms became available to rent or buy digitally on platforms including Prime Video and Fandango at Home. Availability differs by country, so check a streaming guide like JustWatch for your region.
Will the Backrooms movie be on Netflix?
There has been no announcement of the Backrooms coming to Netflix. A24 films typically move from theaters to digital rental first, then to a subscription streaming partner later, which varies by territory.
Is Infirmary on Shudder?
Yes. Infirmary is a Shudder Original and has been streaming exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ since October 2, 2026, as part of the Season of Screams lineup.
Is Infirmary found footage?
Yes. Infirmary is built entirely from bodycam and security camera footage, presented as recordings recovered after a young security guard vanished on his first night at an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
What happens at the end of Infirmary?
Without spoiling it: the climax is deliberately ambiguous. The film reveals a dark connection between the hospital and the family that ran it, but leaves much of what happened to Edward open to interpretation. Many viewers will want a second watch to piece it together.
Who directed Infirmary and who stars in it?
Infirmary is the feature debut of Nicholas Pineda, who co-wrote it with producer Katy Krauland. It stars Paul Syre as Edward, Mark Anthony Williams as Lester and Danielle Kennedy as Ms. Downey.
How long is Infirmary?
Infirmary runs about 86 minutes, which makes it a tight, efficient watch compared with the longer Backrooms.
Who directed the Backrooms movie?
Kane Parsons, the creator behind the Kane Pixels YouTube series. A24 signed him at just 19, making him the youngest filmmaker the studio has worked with. Will Soodik wrote the screenplay.
Can a 14 or 15-year-old watch the Backrooms movie?
In the US, an R rating means viewers under 17 need a parent or adult guardian in theaters. Whether it suits a younger teen depends on how they handle strong language, bloody images and sustained psychological dread. Parents' guides are a good place to check details first.
Which is scarier, Backrooms or Infirmary?
It depends on your fear. Infirmary is more suffocating and jumpy while you watch it, thanks to its small cast and claustrophobic hospital. The Backrooms is more unsettling afterward, because its liminal spaces and psychological ideas follow you into everyday life.
What other found-footage hospital horror films are like Infirmary?
If you enjoy Infirmary, try Grave Encounters, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum and the asylum chiller Session 9, which is not found footage but shares the same abandoned-hospital dread.
Do horror films make you feel uneasy? Worried? Terrified? Or just plain scared, the kind of scared where you check the hallway before turning off the light?
Those four words are not the same feeling, and 2026 has handed us two found-footage films that prove it. On one side stands the Backrooms movie, Kane Parsons' A24 feature that turned a viral internet legend into a box-office phenomenon. On the other, a small, mean, beautifully controlled film called Infirmary, now streaming on Shudder. I watched the Backrooms movie during its first theatrical run. I watched Infirmary yesterday. And I haven't stopped comparing them since.
One built a maze inside the mind. The other locked me in a hospital corridor and refused to give me the key.
Why Found Footage Still Scares Us in 2026: The Backrooms Movie and Infirmary Side by Side
Let me confess something first. I love found footage, but only when it is well made. The subgenre has a bad reputation, and frankly it earned it. After The Blair Witch Project opened the door in 1999 and Paranormal Activity kicked it off its hinges a decade later, the market drowned in shaky cameras, endless screaming and night-vision footage of nothing happening in a basement. For every [REC], Lake Mungo or Noroi, there were twenty films that confused "cheap" with "authentic."
So when a found-footage film works, it feels like a small miracle.
The format has one weapon no other horror style owns: it removes the comfort of the frame. In a classic horror film, a director composes every shot, and somewhere in the back of your head you know someone is in control. Found footage takes that safety net away. The camera belongs to a character, and that character might be dying, panicking, or simply looking the wrong way. You see only what they see. You miss what they miss.
That is the shared DNA of both films in this comparison. But what each one does with it could not be more different.
Two films, two opposite fears
The Backrooms movie grew from a creepypasta, an online urban legend about an endless maze of yellow office rooms, damp carpet and buzzing fluorescent lights. You "no-clip" out of reality and end up there, alone, forever. Kane Parsons, under his YouTube name Kane Pixels, started building short films around that idea when he was a teenager, making them himself in Blender. The videos exploded, A24 signed him at just 19, and his feature debut reached theaters on May 29, 2026, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell. The official logline is pure A24 minimalism: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
That is a concept movie. Its terror is philosophical, almost architectural. It asks: what if the world has a back door, and what if you walked through it?
Infirmary asks a much smaller question, and that is exactly its strength. What happened to Edward? Directed by Nicholas Pineda in his feature debut, the film presents itself as recovered footage of a young former Marine who vanished on his first night working security at an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Pineda shot it inside a real derelict hospital of around 200,000 square feet, using only body cameras and security cameras. After a festival run that included London's FrightFest, it premiered on Shudder and AMC+ on October 2, 2026, as part of the streamer's Season of Screams lineup.
No doorway to another dimension. No mythology. Just a building, a night shift and the feeling that something in the dark knows your name.
Liminal space versus locked space
Here is the clearest way I can put the difference. The Backrooms movie is about liminal space, the in-between places that feel wrong because they are empty: a mall after closing time, a school corridor in summer, an airport at 4 a.m. Its fear is spacious. It stretches forever in every direction.
Infirmary is about locked space. Its fear is narrow. The corridors close in, the doors stay shut, and the security monitors show rooms you would rather not enter. Where the Backrooms movie makes you feel lost, Infirmary makes you feel trapped.
Both are nightmares. But they hit different nerves, and that is why comparing them tells us something about how horror really works on our bodies and minds.
The question this article will answer
Over the next sections, I will take each film apart: Infirmary's clever camera technique and its suffocating three-character cast, then the psychological layers of the Backrooms movie, explained through its liminal design and a song that kept playing in my head as I left the cinema. After that, I'll score them on the four feelings from the top of this page, uneasy, worried, terrified, scared, and be honest about where each one stumbles.
Spoiler-light, I promise. Where I have to touch the endings, I'll warn you first.
Because the real question isn't which film is "better." A big studio concept and a micro-budget debut were never going to fight in the same weight class. The real question is simpler and more personal: which one gets under your skin and stays there?
Grab a flashlight. We're starting the night shift.
Infirmary on Shudder: Bodycam, Security Cam and the Suffocation of Three Characters
Some horror films scare you with what they show. Infirmary scares you with how it shows it.
Watching it last night, I felt something I rarely get from streaming horror: a physical, almost sensory reaction. My shoulders tightened. My breathing slowed. I caught myself leaning toward the screen, the way you lean toward a door when you think you heard something on the other side. That is not a jump-scare reaction. That is immersion, and Infirmary earns it through one smart technical decision.
Two cameras, two kinds of fear
Nicholas Pineda builds the whole film from two sources: Edward's body camera and the hospital's security cameras. That sounds like a simple gimmick. It isn't. The way the film moves between them is the best thing about it, and it is why I would call Infirmary a genuinely well-made found-footage film.
The bodycam is subjective fear. It sits on Edward's chest, so it sees what he faces, bobbing with every step, swinging wildly when he turns. You are inside his panic. When he hesitates at a doorway, you hesitate too. When his flashlight catches something at the edge of the frame, the camera doesn't politely pause for you. It moves on, and you are left wondering whether you saw what you think you saw.
The security cameras are the opposite. Fixed, high in the corners, cold and grey. They watch from above with no emotion at all. And that is exactly what makes them terrifying. From the security angle, Edward looks tiny, alone, exposed. You can see the empty corridor ahead of him and the dark doorway behind him. You know more than he does, and you can't warn him.
Switching between those two views does something clever to the viewer. One moment you are Edward. The next, you are watching Edward, like a guard staring at a monitor at 3 a.m. That rhythm, inside and outside, hunter and hunted, is where the suffocation comes from. Hitchcock famously explained suspense as showing the audience the bomb under the table. Infirmary puts the bomb on a security monitor and then straps you to the man sitting at the table.
The building as a fourth character
Pineda shot inside a real abandoned hospital, and you can feel it in every frame. Peeling walls, stained tiles, long institutional corridors that seem designed to make human beings feel small. No set designer could fake that kind of decay.
Old psychiatric hospitals carry a special weight in horror for a reason. They were places where people were locked away, often against their will, and the buildings seem to remember it. Fans of Session 9, Grave Encounters and the Korean hit Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum know this territory well, and Infirmary sits proudly in that small but mighty hospital-horror tradition. Where Grave Encounters leaned into its ghost-hunting TV show parody, though, Infirmary plays it straight. No wink at the audience. No comic relief. Just the job, the night and the building.
Essentially a three-hander
What surprised me most is how few people this film needs. Infirmary is essentially a three-hander:
- Edward (Paul Syre), the young man and former Marine on his first night shift, our eyes through the bodycam.
- Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), the veteran head of security, the voice of experience who clearly knows more about this place than he says.
- Ms. Downey (Danielle Kennedy), the woman who works at the hospital, and the film's most quietly unsettling presence.
That is the core of it. Three people and an enormous empty building. And the small cast is not a budget limitation in disguise. It is the point. With so few faces on screen, every interaction matters. Every conversation between Edward and Lester carries an undercurrent: is the old man protecting the rookie, or preparing him for something?
Paul Syre deserves real credit here. Acting in bodycam found footage is brutally hard, because for long stretches the audience can't even see your face. Syre carries the film mostly through voice, breath and movement, and his rising nerves feel completely real. Mark Anthony Williams, meanwhile, gives Lester a tired, heavy calm that becomes more disturbing the longer you think about it.
Ms. Downey and the family secret (mild spoiler)
Skip this paragraph if you want to go in completely fresh.
As the night goes on, Ms. Downey turns out to be far more than a staff member. The film suggests she is connected to the family that has long run the infirmary, and suddenly her calm, polite manner reads very differently. It is a strong idea: the horror is not just in the building, it is in the people who keep it running. Institutional evil, passed down like an inheritance. I'll come back later to whether the film fully pays off that revelation, because I have my doubts.
Why it feels more suffocating
Put all of this together and you get a film that tightens like a belt, one notch at a time. A small cast. A single location. Cameras that alternately trap you inside a frightened man and force you to watch him helplessly from above. No escape hatch, no other dimension, no wider mythology to breathe in.
That is why, for me, Infirmary is the more suffocating experience of the two. The Backrooms movie made me think. Infirmary made me hold my breath.
But thinking can be its own kind of terror, and that is where Kane Parsons takes us next.
The Backrooms Movie Explained: Liminal Space, the Subconscious and "Windmills of Your Mind"
When I walked out of the cinema after the Backrooms movie, a song started playing in my head. Not a horror score. Not a jump-scare sting. It was "The Windmills of Your Mind," that strange, spiraling ballad written by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman for The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and three decades later Sting recorded a reimagined version for the 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.
Why that song? Because it is built like a maze. Its melody keeps circling back on itself, its images turn and return, and it never quite lands where you expect. It is music about a mind that cannot stop looping. And that, more than any monster, is what the Backrooms movie is really about.
From creepypasta to A24: the backrooms in brief
For anyone asking what the Backrooms movie is about, here is the short version. The Backrooms began as an online legend: a photo of an empty, yellow-walled office space, and a story about people who accidentally "no-clip" out of reality and fall into an endless labyrinth of identical rooms. Damp carpet. Buzzing fluorescent lights. No windows, no exits, no one else. Just you, forever.
Kane Parsons took that idea and gave it a story. His Kane Pixels YouTube series, which began in 2022, followed a therapist searching for a patient who vanished into a dimension beyond reality. Rendered in Blender and designed to look like grainy 1990s camcorder footage, the videos became a phenomenon. A24 signed Parsons at 19, making him the youngest filmmaker the studio had ever worked with, and paired him with screenwriter Will Soodik and producers including James Wan's Atomic Monster and Shawn Levy's 21 Laps.
The feature keeps the official logline beautifully simple: a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. Behind it, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell find a space that should not exist.
The physical backrooms: liminal space as horror
The first layer is the one everyone talks about: the place itself. The Backrooms is the ultimate liminal space, a term for transitional places that feel eerie precisely because they are empty and in-between. Think of a hotel corridor at midnight, a closed shopping mall, a waiting room with no one waiting.
Parsons understands that these spaces frighten us because they are almost familiar. We have all stood in a fluorescent-lit office or an empty showroom. The Backrooms takes that ordinary memory and stretches it to infinity until it breaks. As one horror site put it after the release, the film managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. That is no small trick.
He also kept his promise to rely heavily on practical effects. The film's distorted creatures, the Still Life entities, were played by real actors under layers of makeup and prosthetics, with only occasional digital touch-ups. You feel the weight of them. They belong to the same physical world as the carpet and the walls, which makes them far more disturbing than any weightless CGI ghost.
The psychological backrooms: the back of the conscience
Here is where I think the Backrooms movie becomes something special, and why I would call it the more original of the two films in this comparison.
Watching it, I felt that the backrooms were never only a physical place. They are also psychological. A back room of the mind. A space behind the conscience, where we store the things we cannot face: grief, guilt, memories we have filed away and pretend not to own.
Every one of us has backrooms like that. The film simply builds them out of drywall and carpet.
That reading is what connects it to "The Windmills of Your Mind." The song describes thoughts that circle endlessly, images feeding into images, a mind trapped in its own spinning machinery. The Backrooms is that same experience made into architecture. Every corridor leads to another corridor. Every room echoes the last. You walk and walk and arrive nowhere, the way an anxious mind lies awake at 3 a.m., replaying the same fear in slightly different forms.
And the original YouTube premise, a therapist searching for a missing patient, points straight at this interpretation. A therapist's job is to go into someone else's backrooms. Seen that way, the film is less about a monster in a maze than about what happens when we finally open the door we kept locked inside ourselves.
A concept that is genuinely new
Horror has given us haunted houses for a century, haunted hospitals for decades, and found footage for more than 25 years. What it had never quite given us, at this scale, is horror born from internet folklore and built around the subconscious rather than a ghost, a killer or a curse.
That is the Backrooms movie's great achievement. It reportedly became the highest-grossing film in A24's history, and I don't think that happened only because millions of teenagers already knew the YouTube videos. It happened because the concept speaks to something everyone recognizes: the fear of being lost inside your own head.
Infirmary trapped me in a building. The Backrooms trapped me in a thought. Which of those is scarier depends on what kind of fear you carry, and that is exactly where we turn next.
Uneasy, Worried, Terrified: Scoring the Fear in Backrooms vs Infirmary
Let's go back to the question at the top of this page. Horror is not one emotion. It is a ladder, and a good film knows exactly which rung it wants you standing on. So instead of handing out stars, I'm going to score the Backrooms movie and Infirmary on four separate feelings: uneasy, worried, terrified and scared.
1. Uneasy: the slow itch under the skin
Unease is the quietest fear. Nothing has happened yet, but something is wrong. The light is too flat, the silence too long, the room too empty.
This is where the Backrooms movie wins, and it isn't close. Kane Parsons has built an entire film out of unease. The humming fluorescent tubes, the stained carpet, the endless yellow walls: none of it attacks you, and all of it bothers you. It is the feeling of walking into an office after hours and sensing that the building does not want you there. Liminal horror is unease turned into a whole world.
Infirmary does unease well too, especially in its long opening patrols, but its decaying hospital is a place we already expect to be creepy. The Backrooms makes the ordinary sinister, and that cuts deeper.
Winner: Backrooms.
2. Worried: fearing for someone
Worry is different. It needs a person to worry about. It is the knot in your stomach when you care what happens to a character and can see trouble coming before they can.
Here Infirmary takes the lead. With essentially three characters, every scene is about Edward, the young guard on his first night. Through the security cameras, we see what he can't: the empty corridor ahead, the dark doorway behind. That gap between what we know and what he knows is the engine of worry, and Pineda runs it hard. Paul Syre's nervous breathing on the bodycam audio does the rest. By the halfway point, I was genuinely worried for this kid.
The Backrooms movie has a bigger, starrier cast, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve bringing real weight, but its scale works against intimacy. The maze is the star. The people are visitors.
Winner: Infirmary.
3. Scared: the jump, and the turning figure
Being scared is the body's reaction, the jolt, the gasp, the hand over the mouth. And here I want to talk about something I keep noticing in found-footage films, Infirmary included.
Call it the turning figure. The scene goes dark. The camera, held by our character, moves slowly toward someone standing with their back to us, often a woman, sometimes a man. They don't move. They don't answer. The camera gets closer, and closer. And then they turn around, and the face is wrong. Disfigured. Possessed. Not human anymore. Cue the scream, the jolt, the shaking camera.
I don't want to claim filmmakers sit down and plan this as a rule. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe it's simply what the format pushes everyone toward. But once you see it, you see it everywhere in found footage. Its most famous ancestor might be the final shot of The Blair Witch Project, where a character stands silently facing the corner of a basement, his back to the camera. That image is so effective precisely because he doesn't turn. Later films took the idea and added the turn as the payoff.
Why does it work so well in found footage specifically? Because the camera is our eyes. We can't cut away. We can't look over the stranger's shoulder. A back turned toward us is a face withheld, and the format forces us to walk straight toward it. The turn becomes the reveal of everything we feared was there. It taps into something primal, too: the fear of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, a person we thought we recognized becoming a monster, a ghost, a stranger wearing a known shape.
Infirmary uses its own version of this move, and I'll admit it got me. But it also reminded me how often I have seen it before. The jump lands. The surprise doesn't.
The Backrooms movie relies less on this kind of scare. Its Still Life entities, played by real performers in prosthetics, are more unsettling in how they move and how they hold still than in sudden reveals.
Winner on pure jolts: Infirmary. Winner on originality: Backrooms.
4. Terrified: the fear that follows you home
Terror is the top rung. It is not the jump in the moment. It is what stays with you afterward, in the dark corridor of your own home.
This is the hardest category to judge, because the two films leave very different marks. Infirmary's terror is physical and claustrophobic. Its corridors, its cold security monitors and its tight little cast made me hold my breath in a way the Backrooms never did. For a stretch of its running time, it is the more suffocating film by far.
But the Backrooms movie's terror travels further. It follows you into every empty office, every late-night hotel corridor, every quiet moment when your own thoughts start circling. A film that changes how you see ordinary spaces has done something lasting.
Winner: a split decision. Infirmary is more terrifying while you watch it. The Backrooms is more terrifying after.
The scorecard
- Uneasy: Backrooms
- Worried: Infirmary
- Scared: Infirmary (with a familiar trick)
- Terrified: split, Infirmary in the moment, Backrooms in the memory
Two films, two kinds of fear, nearly an even score. But neither one is flawless, and the flaws tell us almost as much as the scares. That's the next door we open.
Where Infirmary Stumbles and the Backrooms Movie Soars (and Vice Versa)
No horror film is perfect, and the honest critic's job is to say where the lights flicker. Both of these films have real strengths, and both leave something on the table. Here is where I think each one stumbles, and where each one flies.
Infirmary's climax: an ending that stays in the dark
Mild spoiler warning: I won't reveal what happens, but I will talk about how the ending feels.
For most of its 86 minutes, Infirmary is a tight, disciplined machine. The camera switching works, the tension builds, and the three-character structure keeps everything focused. Then the climax arrives, and the film loses its grip a little.
My problem is simple: it is not very clear what happened. The final stretch moves fast, the footage gets chaotic, and when the screen goes dark I was left piecing events together rather than reeling from them. Maybe that is deliberate. Found footage has a long tradition of open endings, and Nicholas Pineda may have chosen to leave the climax to interpretation, the way The Blair Witch Project left us staring at a man in a corner with no explanation. Mystery can be powerful.
But ambiguity works best when the film has given us enough pieces to argue about. Here, I wanted one or two more clues. A climax should be the moment everything the film has been whispering finally speaks out loud. Infirmary keeps whispering.
The dark revelation needed more teeth
Connected to that is the film's big secret. The suggestion that Ms. Downey, played with quiet menace by Danielle Kennedy, is tied to the family that has run the infirmary is a genuinely chilling idea. It turns the hospital from a haunted building into an inherited sin, a place where evil is managed, maintained and passed down like a family business.
That revelation should land like a punch. Instead, it lands like a tap on the shoulder. The film introduces the idea but doesn't push it far enough to make us feel its full horror. Think of how Hereditary made a family's legacy feel like a trap closing from all sides, or how Session 9 let the history of its asylum slowly poison everyone inside. Infirmary has the right ingredients for that kind of dread. It just needed to turn up the heat.
For a debut feature made on a small budget with essentially three actors, though, these are the flaws of ambition, not incompetence. Pineda clearly knows how to build fear. Next time, I suspect he'll know how to finish it.
Where Infirmary soars
Let me be fair, because the film's achievements outweigh its stumbles. Its technique is outstanding. Few found-footage films use their camera sources this intelligently, and the movement between bodycam and security cam deserves to be studied by anyone making the format. Its performances feel real. Its location is used to the last inch. And it gets something right that many bigger films miss: suffocation comes from limits. Fewer people, fewer rooms, fewer exits.
That is why Infirmary is the stronger experience of the two, even if it is not the stronger idea.
Where the Backrooms movie soars
The Backrooms movie, by contrast, soars on concept. It brought internet folklore to the big screen without losing what made it frightening online. It turned liminal space into a mainstream horror language. And for me, it opened a psychological door, the backrooms of the conscience, that horror rarely walks through so boldly. Kane Parsons was still a teenager when A24 signed him, and he delivered a film that feels like the start of a new kind of horror rather than another entry in an old one.
And where the Backrooms stumbles
Its weakness is the flip side of its strength. A concept this big can swallow its characters. With a larger cast and a wider canvas, the film is never as intimate or as personally nerve-racking as Infirmary. You admire the maze more than you fear for the people in it. And for viewers who don't know the YouTube lore, some of the world-building can feel like reading the second chapter of a book whose first chapter is online.
Where to watch the Backrooms movie and Infirmary
- Infirmary: streaming exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ since October 2, 2026, as part of Shudder's Season of Screams.
- Backrooms: released in theaters by A24 on May 29, 2026. Streaming and rental options vary by country and change often, so check a service like JustWatch for where the Backrooms movie is currently available near you.
Watch them back to back if you can. Start with the Backrooms for the idea, then let Infirmary lock the door behind you. Together, they make the best argument in years that found footage is far from finished.
The Verdict: Two Doors, Two Nightmares
So, which one gets under your skin? After living with both films, my answer is this: the Backrooms movie is the better idea, and Infirmary is the better night of fear.
Kane Parsons opened a door horror had barely touched, a maze built from liminal space and the backrooms of our own conscience, spiraling like the melody of "The Windmills of Your Mind." It is original, ambitious and haunting in the way it changes how you see an empty office or a silent corridor long after the credits roll. It is no surprise it became a box-office phenomenon for A24.
Nicholas Pineda, working with a fraction of the money and essentially three actors, made something smaller and sharper. His switching between bodycam and security camera is found-footage technique at its best, and for most of its running time Infirmary is the more suffocating, more physical, more breath-holding experience. Its climax needed more clarity and its dark family revelation needed more bite, but this is a debut that announces a real talent.
And both films prove something I have always believed: found footage is not a tired gimmick. When it is well made, it is still the format that comes closest to putting you inside the fear rather than in front of it. Even its familiar tricks, like that turning figure in the dark, still work on us, because the camera won't let us look away.
Watch the Backrooms to think. Watch Infirmary to stop breathing. Then turn off the lights, if you dare.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Backrooms movie scary?
Yes, but in a slow, psychological way. The Backrooms movie relies more on unease, liminal dread and unsettling creatures than on constant jump scares. If empty corridors and buzzing fluorescent lights already bother you, it will stay with you for days.
Why is the Backrooms movie rated R?
The MPA rated Backrooms R for language and some violent content/bloody images. Parents' guides note frequent strong profanity, several violent encounters with creatures, and many disturbing images.
How long is the Backrooms movie?
The Backrooms runs about 1 hour and 50 minutes. Listings vary slightly between sources, but most put it at 110 to 111 minutes.
What is the Backrooms movie about?
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom, leading into an endless dimension of empty rooms and corridors. The story follows a therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, who goes into this dimension to save a patient who disappeared, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mark Duplass also starring. It expands Kane Parsons' viral Kane Pixels YouTube series.
Where can I watch the Backrooms movie?
After its theatrical release on May 29, 2026, the Backrooms became available to rent or buy digitally on platforms including Prime Video and Fandango at Home. Availability differs by country, so check a streaming guide like JustWatch for your region.
Will the Backrooms movie be on Netflix?
There has been no announcement of the Backrooms coming to Netflix. A24 films typically move from theaters to digital rental first, then to a subscription streaming partner later, which varies by territory.
Is Infirmary on Shudder?
Yes. Infirmary is a Shudder Original and has been streaming exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ since October 2, 2026, as part of the Season of Screams lineup.
Is Infirmary found footage?
Yes. Infirmary is built entirely from bodycam and security camera footage, presented as recordings recovered after a young security guard vanished on his first night at an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
What happens at the end of Infirmary?
Without spoiling it: the climax is deliberately ambiguous. The film reveals a dark connection between the hospital and the family that ran it, but leaves much of what happened to Edward open to interpretation. Many viewers will want a second watch to piece it together.
Who directed Infirmary and who stars in it?
Infirmary is the feature debut of Nicholas Pineda, who co-wrote it with producer Katy Krauland. It stars Paul Syre as Edward, Mark Anthony Williams as Lester and Danielle Kennedy as Ms. Downey.
How long is Infirmary?
Infirmary runs about 86 minutes, which makes it a tight, efficient watch compared with the longer Backrooms.
Who directed the Backrooms movie?
Kane Parsons, the creator behind the Kane Pixels YouTube series. A24 signed him at just 19, making him the youngest filmmaker the studio has worked with. Will Soodik wrote the screenplay.
Can a 14 or 15-year-old watch the Backrooms movie?
In the US, an R rating means viewers under 17 need a parent or adult guardian in theaters. Whether it suits a younger teen depends on how they handle strong language, bloody images and sustained psychological dread. Parents' guides are a good place to check details first.
Which is scarier, Backrooms or Infirmary?
It depends on your fear. Infirmary is more suffocating and jumpy while you watch it, thanks to its small cast and claustrophobic hospital. The Backrooms is more unsettling afterward, because its liminal spaces and psychological ideas follow you into everyday life.
What other found-footage hospital horror films are like Infirmary?
If you enjoy Infirmary, try Grave Encounters, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum and the asylum chiller Session 9, which is not found footage but shares the same abandoned-hospital dread.
