7 Scariest Creepypasta Stories That Need Movie Adaptation Like Backrooms 

Backrooms is running in theaters now, and it originated in an anonymous image posted to a forum in 2019. It was a room of yellow fluorescent light and wet carpet the color of old mustard, stretching in every direction with no exit and no explanation. Kane Parsons, now 20 years old, made it into a YouTube series that, as they say, broke the internet. And he then made it into a feature for A24, becoming the youngest director in the company’s history (per Deadline). 

Backrooms is about what it feels like to step through the wrong door and find that reality has suddenly stopped applying. There are creepypasta stories still on the internet that could translate to really effective horror movies. Thus far, none of them has gotten the adaptation they deserve. We list 7 of them, and the list is ranked.

Title	Backrooms
Director	Kane Parsons
Main Cast	Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Premise	A man falls into another dimension where he wanders through an unsettlingly yellow, empty, labyrinthine office space that may be home to otherworldly beings
IMDb score (as of May 29, 2026)	7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes score (as of May 29, 2026)	88% | 72%

7 Ari Aster Could Do Wonders With a Film on The Dionaea House

Eric Heisserer wrote this in 2004 as a chain of emails, years before he wrote 2016’s Arrival, one of Denis Villeneuve’s greatest movies. A man receives messages from a friend who visited a house and came back wrong. The correspondence grows stranger, more fractured, more desperate. That is, until the emails simply stop without explanation. Just silence where a person used to be. There are no jump scares and no third-act revelation, just language visibly buckling under the weight of what it’s being asked to describe.

All of Ari Aster‘s movies following Hereditary indicate he was heading toward something like this all along, even if he didn’t know its name.

6 Penpal Proves You Don’t Need a Supernatural Entity to Frighten

Letters attached to balloons are launched from a kindergarten class. Mostly, the kids receive replies that stop at some point. But not the pen pal of the narrator. And then, he starts sending photographs. Not of himself, mind you. Of the narrator.

​Dathan Auerbach built the whole thing from a childhood memory his mother insists never happened, and isn’t that itself a kind of horror? It is revealed that the photographs and all the weird things happening in the narrator’s life are the work of one person who has stalked the narrator’s entire childhood. The monster in this story is a man. That doesn’t make it any less scary. On the contrary, it heightens the tension.

Auerbach has written a book on the Penpal creepypasta, and take our word for it: it’s great.

5 Smile Dog Is Already Happening to You

A cursed photograph depicts a dog with a human-toothed grin that drives whoever sees it toward madness. The only relief, like for the supernatural entity in It Follows, is passing it on. Written before most people knew what an algorithm was, it now reads like a technical diagram of one.

The image self-replicates through distress, person to person. Each new viewer becomes the next vector. Reimagined as a feature, it could do to social media what The Ring did to VHS tapes. It could also be a great creature feature.

4 Candle Cove Is About What We Agree to Forget

A forum thread where adults excavate their memories of a children’s TV show from the seventies that gets darker with every reply. Each post adds a detail that no one should remember this clearly. It gets more disturbing. The villain is The Skin-Taker, a skeleton sewn from children’s hides.

Nick Antosca, who has created Apple’s upcoming series adaptation of Cape Fear, adapted the story as the first season of horror anthology Channel Zero.​ It was a show that had the right instincts but the wrong execution. It understood the imagery, which is great, but missed the point entirely, which is less so. The subsequent seasons, also based on creepypastas, are much better though not as faithful to the source material.

What the feature version needs to understand is that this isn’t really a haunted-TV story. It’s a story about how whole communities agree to misremember the things that happened to them when they were too small to name what was wrong. It could be more social horror compared to the straightforward horror of Backrooms.

3 Ted the Caver Is Where All of This (Likely) Started

Originating from an Angelfire blog from 2001, it was about a real guy, a real cave, and there were real photographs of him and his friend squeezing through a hole barely wide enough for a human body. The genuine images lent credence to the claims that it was real.

Many consider it the first creepypasta. It’s debated. The dread is geological in nature and reminds one of Neil Marshall’s claustrophobic 2005 horror movie, The Descent (do watch it, if you haven’t already). It builds through accumulation, through the slow wrongness of details that don’t quite add up until suddenly they do. The last link loops back to the same page. There is no further update. The film adaptation should similarly resist the urge to explain what really happened. If done well, it could easily outdo even Backrooms.

2 SCP-3001 Is the Most Devastating Horror Story Nobody Has Filmed

Since its existence in 2008, the SCP Foundation has served as the source material for multiple games and movies. It is an infinite wiki collection of catalogued supernatural entities. SCP-3001 describes an astronaut who finds himself in another dimension. And the universe stops registering that he exists. The horror here is the specific loneliness of being forgotten (and not necessarily death). Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the world’s iconic filmmakers, made films that felt like this. This means somebody should try to make a sci-fi horror movie on this creepypasta.

1 The Russian Sleep Experiment Is the Horror Film Haneke Never Made

Five Soviet test subjects were dosed with an experimental stimulant and kept awake for fifteen days, the whole thing witnessed and recorded by the scientist running the experiment. By the end, they’re something closer to Wendigos (one of the many monsters depicted in the Supernatural TV series) than people. That’s the film. Apart from the creepy imagery, the horror is also institutional. Michael Haneke could make something genuinely unforgivable here, and that’s meant as the highest praise. After Backrooms, this should be a top priority for Hollywood to turn a creepypasta story into a feature film.

Here is every creepypasta story in a nutshell:

Story	Origin	Premise
The Dionaea House	Eric Heisserer, 2004	A chain of emails about a friend who entered a house and came back wrong, then stopped writing entirely.
Penpal	Dathan Auerbach, 2012	A man traces the responses to a childhood balloon letter and finds someone has been watching him his entire life.
Smile Dog	4Chan, 2009	A cursed photograph of a grinning dog with human-like teeth drives viewers to madness. The only relief is passing it on.
Candle Cove	Kris Straub, 2009	Adults on a forum piece together memories of a children’s puppet show that couldn’t have existed the way they all remember it.
Ted the Caver	Ted Hegemann on an Angelfire blog, 2001	A real caver’s real blog documents an underground expedition that gets quietly, irreversibly wrong.
SCP-3001: Red Reality	SCP Foundation Wiki, 2017	An astronaut slips into a dimension where the universe incrementally stops registering his existence.
The Russian Sleep Experiment	Creepypasta Wiki, 2010	Five Soviet subjects kept awake for fifteen days by an experimental stimulant, documented by the scientist who put them there.

Which of these do you think deserves the next A24 treatment, and who should direct it?

Backrooms released in theaters in the US on May 29, 2026.