Star Trek: The Next Generation Mashed Up With $401 Million Horror Hit Is Nightmare Fuel

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The reassuring comfort of the USS Enterprise-D takes a terrifying turn when Star Trek: The Next Generation is fused with the horror hit Backrooms.

Published Oct 31, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT

John Orquiola is a TV Editor, Senior Writer, and Interviewer with a special focus on Star Trek. John has over 5,000 published articles at SR, and he has interviewed the biggest names in Star Trek on the red carpet and VIP events, among other beloved shows, movies, and franchises.

The warm and inviting USS Enterprise-D turns into a horrific nightmare when Star Trek: The Next Generation is mashed up with the $401 million hit, Backrooms. Directed by Kane Parsons and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Backrooms is a psychological horror thriller based on Parsons' YouTube series. Backrooms became a cultural phenomenon and global box office smash, even outgrossing Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

For nearly 40 years, Star Trek fans have regarded the USS Enterprise-D as a second home. In 179 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, most sections of the Galaxy-class starship have been explored, from the roomy and carpeted bridge, to the holodecks, the crew's quarters, engineering, the shuttle bay, and the crew's watering hole, Ten Forward. The D is a comforting and familiar oasis.

While a number of terrifying events have happened on the USS Enterprise-D throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation, nothing changes fans' affection for and how they see the D. Captain Jean-Luc Picard's (Patrick Stewart) Starship Enterprise is like a plush hotel in outer space, where the crew bring their families to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Can the USS Enterprise-D become a horror show? Thanks to Backrooms, the answer is yes.

Star Trek: TNG Melded With Backrooms Is Truly Terrifying

On Instagram, @theartofstartrek melded Star Trek: The Next Generation with Backrooms, and the results are eerie and genuinely disturbing. Tinged with the sickly yellowish and green hue of Backrooms, the empty USS Enterprise-D takes on a completely different effect that would make a Starfleet Officer beam off that ship screaming. See "Trekrooms" below:

Designed by Andrew Probert and Herman Zimmerman, the sleek and soothing interiors of the USS Enterprise-D take a dread-inducing 180 turn thanks to being Backroom-ed. The D is already creepy when its empty, but seeing the various sections of the Galaxy-class starship warped, with furniture dropped and fused into the carpets, is truly a nightmare.

"Trekrooms" reimagines the Enterprise-D's corridors, ready room, holding cell, and crew quarters with consoles and furniture sunken into the floors. Engineering, the domain of Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), looks sinister when devoid of people in Backrooms' lighting.

The Jeffries Tube looks like a person could be trapped in it forever, climbing up and down with no escape. It's mortifying to see a shuttlecraft halfway fused into the floor of the shuttlebay, and the abandoned Ten Forward looks as frightening as the bar in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Leaving the most frightening for last, "Trekrooms" presents a frozen Enterprise-D crewmember stuck halfway in the floor. Backrooms takes a similar, terrifying moment of half of Starfleet Officers' bodies trapped in the floor in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 4's "In Theory" to another level of scary.

Star Trek’s Rare Horror Episodes Are Genuinely Frightening

Star Trek isn't known as a horror franchise, but there have many fear-inducing Star Trek episodes going back to The Original Series. It can even be argued that 1960s Star Trek was a show about body horror when one considers the number of terrifying transformations Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew endure, starting with Lt. Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood) turning into a psychic monster and an encounter with a murderous salt vampire.

The limitless expanse of outer space has no shortage of frightening space gods, killer aliens and creatures of every shape, size, and form, horrific technological malfunctions, and, perhaps the scariest of all, humans who reject the unity and peace of the United Federation of Planets to pursue their own agendas.

Every Star Trek series has scary episodes. Even the ribald comedy, Star Trek: Lower Decks, introduced the Moopsy, a seemingly adorable critter that eats people's bones. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 delved into horror derived from Event Horizon and The Shining, as La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), Spock (Ethan Peck), and James Kirk (Paul Wesley) are infected by the malignant entity possessing the USS Griffin ghost ship.

When the USS Enterprise-D returned after 30 years in Star Trek: Picard season 3, fans were overjoyed to see the beloved Galaxy-class starship again. Backrooms morphs the Enterprise-D into something sick and perverse, turning the homey hero ship of Star Trek: The Next Generation into grotesque nightmare fuel.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is streaming on Paramount+

Release Date 1987 - 1994-00-00

Network Syndication

Showrunner Gene Roddenberry

Directors Cliff Bole, Les Landau, Winrich Kolbe, Rob Bowman, Robert Scheerer, Jonathan Frakes, Robert Wiemer, Gabrielle Beaumont, Alexander Singer, David Carson, Paul Lynch, Corey Allen, Patrick Stewart, Chip Chalmers, Joseph L. Scanlan, James L. Conway, Robert Lederman, Tom Benko, Timothy Bond, Robert Legato, Adam Nimoy, Robert Becker, David Livingston, LeVar Burton

Writers René Echevarria, Maurice Hurley, Richard Manning, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Tracy Tormé, Hannah Louise Shearer, Stuart Charno, Ira Steven Behr, Sara B. Cooper, Peter Allan Fields, Herbert Wright, Frank Abatemarco, Burton Armus, Hilary Bader, Morgan Gendel, David Kemper, Michael I. Wagner, Philip LaZebnik, Robert McCullough, Susan Sackett, Nick Sagan, Fred Bronson, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Sam Rolfe