The Poolrooms began as a 2020 render by artist Jared Pike: a fluorescent-lit maze of empty indoor pools with no visible exit. It spread across TikTok and YouTube as a Backrooms offshoot, an internet urban legend about slipping through reality into a tiled dreamscape you can’t swim out of.
In The Poolrooms, a teenager dives after a lost GoPro and ends up in a maze of tiled swimming pools, waterslides and hidden chambers. The teen keeps filming as the space stretches beyond any apparent exit, with a creature lurking beneath the water. The found-footage horror film is due in theaters December 25, 2026.
Directors Galen Christy and Sasha Yelaun filmed at Rigby’s Water World and Assembly Studios in Atlanta, then extended the settings with Maya and Blender. Christy told Bloody Disgusting, “There was something deeply disturbing about taking an object you associate with childhood and making you afraid of it.”
The film draws on Poolrooms lore, which grew from Jared Pike’s 2020 renders of empty indoor pools and later became part of Backrooms lore. The filmmakers say The Poolrooms isn’t an official Backrooms adaptation. It was previously announced as The Pools.
