The Backrooms Movie Proves One Of The Best Horror TV Shows Ever Was A Decade Too Early

The upcoming "Backrooms" will try to take a viral internet sensation and turn it into a prestige A24 horror film. That's exciting, as it suggests mass culture might be ready to embrace online horror aesthetics and ideas in a way it thus far hasn't. But in the case of "Channel Zero," a Syfy horror anthology series that loosely adapted internet Creepypastas, this is all somewhat tragic, because it proves the series came along too soon to really be accepted.

There's something exhilarating about the arrival of the next generation of filmmakers, who are the first to have grown up in the internet age. It's already resulted in some of the most interesting and subversive filmmaking of recent years. There's a reason "Skinamarink" looks the way it does, with director Kyle Edward Ball having previously run a YouTube series and generally being heavily influenced by internet aesthetics. "I Saw the TV Glow" flew under the radar in 2024 but was one of the best horror movies of the year, melding visions of the online mediascape with a perfectly rendered aesthetic tribute to TV shows of the early 2000s (most notably, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). Now "Backrooms" is poised to bring that same darkly nostalgic internet-forged aesthetic to the masses.

At a time when so much of moviemaking — heck, mass culture as a whole — seems to be about regurgitating old ideas, these young filmmakers are finding a way to reckon with their youth in interesting ways that genuinely feel new and different. Which is why it's such a shame that "Channel Zero" was canceled after four seasons. Despite always being unique and terrifying, the show never became a big hit, but that might be different today. "Channel Zero" was ahead of its time — a mid-2010s show looking for a mid-2020s audience.

The horror anthology series is hardly new. "The Twilight Zone" is arguably the best anthology TV series of all time, and we've seen a steady stream of similar shows emerge in the decades since Rod Serling's seminal series went off the air in 1964, from "Tales from the Crypt" to more modern examples like "Black Mirror" and "American Horror Story." But "Channel Zero," which was created in 2016 by Nick Antosca, stood out because it based each of its four seasons on a different Creepypasta.

Creepypastas are internet horror legends that, in a way, transcend their user-generated origins to become treated as online folklore. Slender Man is perhaps the most well-known example, with that particular tale being adapted for a 2018 movie. But the internet is awash with similar stories, "Backrooms" included, and "Channel Zero" highlighted several of them even prior to "Slender Man."

The inaugural season was based on the "Candle Cove" Creepypasta by cartoonist and writer Kris Straub, who also made the YouTube analog horror series "Local 58." It starred Paul Schneider and Fiona Shaw in a story that wasn't entirely dissimilar to "I Saw the TV Glow," wherein several adults recall a strange 1980s TV show from their youth that seemingly disappeared. Straub plays a man obsessed with the mysterious show and his memory of it. Season 1 was well-received, and maintains a "Certified Fresh" 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The show only improved from there. Alas, its first season proved strangely prophetic, as "Channel Zero" was destined to become a lost TV show itself.

Season 2 of "Channel Zero" adapted Brian Russell's "No-End House," but made some major changes to the original Creepypasta. The protagonist was changed from a drug-addicted man to a young woman and her friends, who enter a house of horrors that gets progressively worse as they move through it. The third season, "Butcher's Block," was based on Kerry Hammond's "Search and Rescue Woods," and saw two sisters move to a new town plagued by mysterious disappearances. The fourth and final season was entitled "The Dream Door" and was an adaptation of Charlotte Bywater's "Hidden Door." It followed a newlywed couple who moved into a new house only to find a mysterious door that held some unpleasant secrets, including the inescapably disturbing figure of "Pretzel Jack."

That final season sits at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, though that's based on just eight reviews. Still, "Channel Zero" certainly didn't decline in quality over its four seasons, with Vox's Emily St. James even commending the show for making viewers feel "low-grade terrified" every time Pretzel Jack appears. Sadly, on January 16, 2019, Syfy cancelled "Channel Zero" shortly after the fourth season ended.

"Backrooms" itself is based on a Creepypasta which was then turned into a YouTube series by Kane Parsons, the director of the upcoming A24 adaptation. If successful, the film could very well signal the arrival of a new era whereby internet urban legends truly transcend their online origins. Studios have tried it before, but with the aforementioned "Skinamarink," "I Saw the TV Glow," and even something like Robbie Banfitch's cosmic horror hellmouth "The Outwaters," but it feels as though we're ready to see online horror go fully mainstream. Perhaps "Channel Zero" might even get a reprieve...