The Backrooms has been one of the big releases of the year. As a major critical and audience success, it has shown that a horror film inspired by stories that started out in horror can work perfectly well outside their most popular medium. That’s obvious when you think about all the films that have come from folk horror or urban legends, like the Japanese Red Room, for example.
So, because The Backrooms has just been released on streaming services like HBO Max, we’re going to talk about creepypastas. About which ones could make excellent films. We’re going to leave out the ones that have already been adapted, like Slenderman or the already mentioned Red Room, or those that have copyright restrictions, like Lavender Town Syndrome or NES Godzilla, to go straight to what is really interesting: everything we still haven’t seen and that, in fact, could still be adapted. Here goes our selection of six excellent creepypastas Hollywood could take note of.
Poolrooms
This is the most obvious one and they already make a brief appearance in Parsons’s film. Being an extension of the Backrooms, the Poolrooms are still the same idea: what are known as liminal spaces, but swapping the strangely empty rooms with no apparent logic connecting them for swimming Pools. Whether there’s something in them or there’s a way to escape from them back to our reality is unclear. But since their creation by visual artist Jared Pike in 2020 they’ve only grown in popularity. So much so that not only have they appeared in Backrooms, both the webseries and the film, but they have their own video game too: Pools. And in fact, they’re going to have their own film, The Pools, which will be released December 25.
Ever Dream This Man?
Probably the most enduring creepypasta in history, because it has become a meme. In 2008 Italian sociologist and publicist Andrea Natella created a website called Ever Dream This Man? claiming that a man had appeared in the dreams of countless people all over the world, and included a drawing on the site of a man with rather peculiar features. Since then, more than 8,000 people claimed to have seen him in their dreams, until in 2010 Natella declared that it was all a conceptual art project. That hasn’t stopped many people from claiming they had seen him in their dreams before seeing the image. Which makes for a great premise for a film.
Russian Sleep Experiment
If any story is adaptable almost as is with barely any changes, it’s Russian Sleep Experiment. It tells the story of Soviet experiments with political prisoners exposed to stimulant gases that kept them from sleeping for up to fifteen straight days, those exposed to this gas became hairless, eternally smiling zombies addicted to the gas and to human flesh. With only one escaping execution, there are many ways to turn this into a horror story: both as an origin story and by having the sole survivor flee and end up free in some ordinary neighborhood. The rest writes itself.
Interface series
Posted on Reddit by a user named _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, it’s hard to imagine how this creepypasta involving Nazis, LSD experiments, interdimensional spaces, flesh interfaces, and interdimensional entities could be adapted. But if Stranger Things has been an enormous success, why wouldn’t its adult, over-the-top version be successful too, which is what the Interface series really are?
Username:666
Originally posted on Niconico, a kind of Japanese YouTube, this is a video considered cursed. What makes it stand out is that in the video a person tries to open a YouTube channel, 666, and in doing so ends up in a satanic version of the platform and, as he moves through it, keeps finding himself in ever darker places. Though today it might seem naïve and hackneyed, the video is terrifying by the standards of its time, 2007, and could well work with a stronger j-horror angle.
The Rake
Perhaps the simplest creepypasta, because it’s based simply on a character: a sort of enormous cross between a man and a hairless dog, with huge claws, that has been seen on four different continents since 1691. Capable of disemboweling its victims while they sleep, it is able to imitate human voices. And besides being perfect for a film, so much so that it got a rather awful film in 2008. But didn’t we say we wouldn’t talk about any that had already been adapted? Allow us this exception to finish: The Rake deserves it.
