10 Movies Like ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’

Osgood Perkins is a staple of the current horror scene; in the past two years alone, he’s put out three very different horror films (including the hit Longlegs) and has another one slated for later in 2026. The most recent least-seen of this batch actually makes a worthy companion piece to Obsession. Similarly stripped down and attuned to manipulations of romantic relationships, the movie follows a woman (Tatiana Maslany) on a weekend getaway with her boyfriend (Rossif Sutherland), who she has been dating for one year. A series of unusual events unnerve and disorient her, and she begins to wonder if she’s losing her mind. The relationship isn’t a one-to-one match of the wish-caused possession in Obsession, and Keeper sticks closely to the woman’s point of view rather than the desperate man’s, but it’s creepy in a similarly small-scale, big-chill key.

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This experimental horror film — one of the most experimental to ever receive a wide theatrical release in the U.S., that’s for sure — won’t be for all tastes. But anyone who left Backrooms wishing the movie had gone further into glitchy, uncanny realm of pure atmosphere might benefit from checking out this vastly less narrative-driven horror story meant to evoke the eerie-to-terrifying feeling of a child waking up in the middle of the night, or staying up way paste their appointed bedtime, or faced with unexpected time without supervision. Like Backrooms, some will respond with: Uh, so what? That’s not especially scary. The lack of any real onscreen characters will further alienate some audiences. But for those on the Skinamarink wavelength, it’s an experience unlike any others.

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Zach Cregger’s twisty horror story, with healthy helpings of dark comedy, will probably be seen as an ur-text for this era of horror, and not just because he comes from a comedy background similar to Obsession writer-director Curry Barker. Cregger also uses gender politics as something of a Trojan Horse for a different type of story than he appears to be telling at first glance, when the story seems to be about a man and a woman accidentally booked into the same Airbnb property, warily circling each other and wondering if they can be trusted. What Cregger eventually unleashes is both a bold pivot and a very different form of #MeToo-related storytelling. Like Obsession, the movie is arguably more focused on playing to its audience to the hilt than making an unprecedented point about gender dynamics. But even moreso than Obsession, the movie really does play to the absolute hilt, especially to a crowd that has no idea what’s coming. It may not inspire a lot of serious discussion, but it will inspire big laughs and screams.

Us (2019)

After the blockbuster success of Get Out, Jordan Peele delivered something weirder and arguably more ambitious with his sophomore feature. Us matched Get Out in grosses, but has more of a mixed reputation –—which is too bad, because it’s at least as accomplished, and dabbles in a slightly surreal sensibility (as well as a retro interest in American artifacts like Hands Across America) that makes it compatible with Backrooms (while maintaining Peele’s trademark humor). A family on vacation encounters their menacing doppelgangers, a dreamlike scenario that only gets weirder as the movie reveals more about their origins. Like Backrooms, the movie is more interested in evoking eerily familiar feelings of discomfort than providing clockwork jump-scares –—and the performances in this one, led by Lupita Nyong’o, are even better.

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Technically, Ingrid Goes West isn’t a horror movie, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be tempted to cover your eyes with your hands at certain parts. Like Obsession, it’s about an imbalanced relationship, although Bear’s connection with Nikki looks downright cosmic next to the fascination Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) has from afar with social-media influencer Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen). Reeling from her mother’s death, Ingrid decides to cut down on that distance: She moves to Los Angeles to stalk Taylor and somehow parlays her awkwardness into what seems like a genuine friendship with her idol. Things get more complicated, and blackly funny, from there. The movie’s dark humor lends it some more common ground with Obsession and its keen understanding of internet psychology also makes it an oddly fitting companion piece to Backrooms. They both might well appear in a “what was the internet?” film retrospective in 10 or 20 years.

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If you found yourself wishing that Backrooms was a lot funnier, check out Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s seminal dark comedy about a puppeteer (John Cusack) who finds a portal in a strange office building that leads straight into the consciousness of actor John Malkovich (playing himself, naturally), allowing anyone who passes through access to Malkovich’s perspective — and eventually, with enough practice, to try to control his actions. With its mixture of depressing low-tier corporate spaces and unconventional possessions, Being John Malkovich, though not a horror, might actually be the closest thing to a cross between Obsession and Backrooms. It’s also, independent of any of that, a great, hilarious, surprisingly insightful film in its own right.

Thematically and narratively, The Blair Witch Project doesn’t have much to do with either Obsession or Backrooms. It’s the first found-footage horror blockbuster, a shoestring horror movie about a trio of filmmakers venturing into the Maryland woods for a documentary about the so-called Blair Witch — and finding an increasingly spooky series of mysterious incidents, culminating in one of the scariest final stretches of any horror movie I’ve seen. The movie’s kinship with Obsession comes from the fact that they’re both among the lowest-budget movies to ever become a worldwide smash; both movies cost well under a million dollars and went on to make hundreds of millions worldwide, a testament to the power of scrappy filmmaking and a great marketing hook. Speaking of which: When Backrooms jumped from viral internet phenomenon to mainstream blockbuster, it recalled the marketing for Blair Witch, a Sundance sensation that made the jump to mall multiplexes through a campaign that initially suggested the footage really had been found in the woods. Backrooms didn’t blur reality and fiction quite so convincingly, but it has a similarly ambiguous relationship with real-life spaces.

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A more overtly fantastical take on “liminal space” horror comes from Canada, where this culty horror/sci-fi movie was made in the late ’90s. Its set-up might be more reminiscent of Saw: Strangers wake up in an unfamiliar room and must contend with a series of deadly traps. But the nature of the room – location unclear, with an infinite-seeming network of passages leading into other similarly bare spaces – definitely feels like an influence on the Backrooms phenomenon, even if Cube goes on to offer more traditional suspense (and gore) as the strangers attempt to puzzle their way out. It’s a little bit silly, but also fairly irresistible to genre enthusiasts.

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This cult classic from Polish director Andrzej Żuławski was long unavailable at home; now a restoration is easily available on Shudder. Though it’s more psychological than Obsession, any modern horror movie about a horrifically dysfunctional relationship probably owes at least a little bit to this one. Isabelle Adjani plays Anna, wife of spy Mark (Sam Neill), who announces upon her husband’s return home that she wants to separate. She exhibits plenty of strange and extreme behavior from there; as with Us, doppelgangers are involved in ways that seem like they should be impossible. As with Obsession, the movie is dominated by a stunning performance from its female lead; Adjani won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival for her intense, daring work.

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Director Herk Harvey only made one feature film, which immediately sets him apart from both Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, whose subsequent works have been assured by the financial success of their debuts. For most of his career, Harvey made mostly industrial films, but he scraped together a modest budget to make this dreamlike proto-horror film about a woman who survives a car crash, starts a new life, and is haunted by strange figures. Harvey used real locations and his know-how from his industrial-film career to create a vivid atmosphere, and though the movie has a little first-film awkwardness, that also contributes to its liminal, transfixing nature. While Backrooms had gained enough of a cultural foothold to become a big hit upon release, Carnival of Souls took a more old-fashioned (and winding) path to its notoriety: Largely ignored upon its initial theatrical release, it became better-known over the years and decades as a neglected copyright claim allowed it to be shown on TV and in rep houses. It’s now part of the Criterion Collection, and a seminal work of mid-century horror.

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