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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1303 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I’ve been thinking lately about the liminal horror genre. In my internet wanderings I’ve been revisiting a bit of the Backrooms content and Youtubers who dipped into the genre. Just wanted to share some of my random musings.

Liminal spaces are defined as in between, temporary, transitory. Usually what happens is a person somehow gets into a space they’re not supposed to and becomes trapped. Liminal horror often elicits dread from the location itself. Although there may be unsettling creatures or monsters, the location is the main focus. These stories tend to be pretty skimpy on plot but full of atmosphere.

Other people are rarely encountered in the space. If there are multiple people in the story, they have entered the space together. Often the videos are filmed in a first person POV. Besides being immersive, this device means you can’t even see the main character on screen. All the visual imagery tends to be void, empty, lifeless.

One of the aspects of this genre that really appeals to me is the idea of being lost in the middle of civilization. These spaces very often are secret floors of ordinary buildings. Help may be only a few hundred feet away. Somewhere out there are phones, food, people, all the trappings of daily life. But to the person trapped in the in-between space, they might as well be on another planet.

Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life. Think of those self contained suburban neighborhoods which are just endless mazes of roads curving back on themselves. When they’re on a large enough scale, you can wander for miles among identical, neatly trimmed homes without getting to a gas station, a store, a bus stop, or even a park.

So I wandered into one without a phone or a map one time. Walked for a while and realized I had no idea how to get back out to the main road. There was no through road once you got into the neighborhood. There were no distinguishing landmarks, no signposts on the streets.

There was a store that I was trying to get to and for some reason I thought I had found a shortcut. You could see the back of the store maybe a thousand feet away. But you couldn’t get to it because of the culvert and retention pond and the fence in the way. There was no shortcut. The only way to get to this store that was a thousand feet away was to backtrack through a few miles of the suburban labyrinth and work your way around to the main road.

What separates this experience from the strict liminal horror was the presence of people. I did pass a couple of joggers, dog walkers, etc. For them, the environment was comfortable and familiar. The safety of their home was nearby, as was food, water, transportation. For me, I was getting very thirsty and hungry, and safety seemed incredibly remote and unreachable. And I was held back from asking for help by the absurdity of my situation. How embarrassing is it to knock on someone’s door and admit you’re a stranger in the neighborhood and you’re hopelessly lost? How did I even explain how I ended up there to begin with? It’s clearly not the kind of neighborhood you just wander into if you don’t live there. The whole thing had me at quite a loss. Even surrounded by homes where I knew there were people inside, I felt completely alone and without resources.

When you go on an expedition to a cave or a forest, you expect trouble. You pack supplies. You plan your route. The people who get trapped in liminal spaces often get there entirely by accident, or they just planned to take a quick look and get on with their day. Despite civilization being so close, they find themselves without food, tools, or any way to communicate. They are woefully unprepared for this scenario. Who expects to pack survival gear when they are just exploring around town?

Another aspect of liminal horror is the disconnection of spaces not designed for people. Liminal horror is full of spaces that seem to have no purpose, or were designed with some alien or abstract purpose that can’t be fathomed. They are often behind walls, under floors, in maintenance passages. Often they aren’t built with the intention that people would ever be in them except maybe to make repairs. A curious or casual visitor is not welcome, most likely unauthorized to be there, and will be viewed as an intruder.

The space is hostile to trespassers, and indeed to all life. There is nothing growing, no plant or animal life. All is dust and silence. Any thing that could make this space its habitat is surely something outside human knowledge or comprehension.

There are no human comforts like water or food or bathrooms. When there are elements of human activity, they are incongruous in the space and distributed in a haphazard manner, as if someone just needed to store a random assortment of furniture. You can tell it was not placed there with the intent for humans to make use of. If a space has clear signs of being abandoned, then of course that raises the question of why it was abandoned and presents an intriguing hint of where the story could go.

The alien aspect of liminal spaces combines well with megalophobia. While some liminal horror deals with small spaces, a lot of it involves space that is very large. Endless labyrinths extend on and on. Gargantuan walls loom over tiny people. A massive empty hangar or airport terminal extends into the darkness. The size again reinforces the sensation that this space is not designed with humans in mind.

Liminal horror sometimes has an evil entity that is hunting the protagonist, but this element doesn’t seem to be critical. Often the space itself carries its own menace. A massive space destroys small humans just because that is its nature. Humans will be swallowed or crushed without even any awareness or malevolence. It is inevitable and inexorable, and there is no weapon to fight against it.

Backrooms is the classic presentation of liminal horror (check out Kane Pixels) but I would also strongly recommend The Stanley Parable for a game presentation of this topic. Would love to hear your suggestions also!

Would love to hear your suggestions also!

This trailer came up on my Youtube feed the other day. Empty swimming pools with creepy architecture.

strange to see it framed as 'liminal horror' because i have always felt weirdly comforted by such spaces.

could be downstream of mild misanthropy, or perhaps a childhood+adolescence of being allowed to explore freely among such spaces: hallways, tunnels, theatre backrooms, rooftops, etc. the video game 'myst' also comes to mind.

It's all part of the same supernatural tradition, right? The same thin places can lead to a kid eaten by monsters or a kid being gifted magical treasure by fairies in two different legends. The liminal Shitbird Geography of every suburban town provides both the overlooks and reservoirs and abandoned camps and empty barns where teenagers make out or smoke weed, and the same places where every serial killer story is set when the slasher gets at the horny teenagers.

I think of it as 'urban exploration gone wrong'. It starts out as a curious adventure and then you realise you can't backtrack due to a locked door or getting lost. A very mild anxiety sets in (mollified by the mundane banal surroundings) where you try to calmly start thinking through your options. You check your phone battery and its dead. Your loved ones won't be expecting you until tomorrow. Uh oh.

Liminal horror is in many ways the modern manifestation of the "horror of the gaps," that horror exists just at the edge of civilization, just at the edge of what we have normal knowledge of, and as that line has shifted so has the location of horror. In the same way that we talk about the God of the Gaps shrinking to exist in the spaces between human scientific knowledge, supernatural horror has shrunk over the years to fit into the spaces where civilization does not adhere.

In ancient and medieval horror stories, the spirits exist just at the edge of the village. The forest is dark and full of terrors. You might meet the devil at any crossroads at night. Only God sees what goes on in the mountains or the deserts, and who can possibly say what might be on the other side? Hansel and Gretel can run into a witch just on the edge of town, the Black Forest has everything from dwarven kingdoms to the gates of hell depending on the story, the Irish bogs are full of fairy lights and changelings.

Then the Enlightenment happens in England, science happens, exploration happens, the world is connected, the forests that aren't cut down are well mapped, the deserts and mountains have good roads through them. We know there aren't witches in the woods. So then you have Bram Stoker, who projects that horror across the English Channel, to Transylvania, a gap in modernity, a place where horror can still exist without modernity knowing about it. Then a few more decades pass, and modernity is pretty well hit in Transylvania, so Lovecraft has to fit his cosmic horror into smaller gaps: Antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a strange cult on an Island or among the negroes and Portuguese down at the docks. Then you have the "highway horror" of mid-century America: Children of the Corn or Deliverance or Silent Hill, the idea that if you take the wrong turn off the highway traveling between civilized towns you can end up in horror. This is a very real experience any Pennsylvanian has had: driving your nice comfortable car on a nice modern highway between metropoles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you can end up at a gas station that time forgot very easily. Hell, driving from NYC to Syracuse, you briefly find yourself in towns where all the signs are in Hebrew and the locals make it very clear that the uncircumcised are unwelcome. Then the world became a little more connected, and a little more documented, and highway horror started to lose its credibility, because those towns have high speed internet and cell phone service and cameras and everything. In the 1970s, Deliverance just barely works, today banjo kid would be watching videos on TikTok just like any other kid.

So horror has had the retreat again, and having nowhere left to go geographically (the forests are parks, transylvania and silent hill both have high speed internet, Antarctica has been mapped and the pacific islands are mostly resorts), horror has to retreat into the interior. The liminal spaces are a new wilderness, created by humans but over time taking on a life of their own. This is just the latest gap that horror has shrunk to inhabit. The backrooms and hallways are a reflection of internet horror, the horror that is hidden in recursive chatrooms and forums and groups. That infrastructure created for one thing can be used for others. The same horror around homeless people living in subway tunnels. Some of it is a sense of living in the ruins and margins of a great civilization that has retreated. As a kid living in the exurban-rural rust belt, realistically there was no wilderness, but there was the abandoned. There was an abandoned construction company building we used to "explore" each year on a certain camping trip in the boy scouts, the "House of Nine Inch Nails" because of graffiti made years before I arrived. Places like this became part of the "shitbird geography" that forms a big part of teenage suburban life, the places you can go in town to smoke or drink or make out with a girlfriend: dead ends where bridges are out, abandoned industrial buildings, access roads built for projects that were never completed, old churches that have been empty for years, school buildings still used only for storage, reservoirs with long access roads and no traffic at night. Of course, cheap chinese surveillance cameras have probably disrupted this activity for today's kids anyway. But there's still some space, somewhere, that remains abandoned, wrong, uncanny, still existing but eternally empty.

This fits into the book I read last week: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.

It was a really good horror book for me, probably the best horror literary experience I have ever had, primarily in that a friend gave it to me for Christmas and I had heard of the book but knew nothing about it. It was often mentioned as a book in the "confusing metafiction" space, but if you had asked me in advance what a book called "House of Leaves" was about, I would have said that it was a domestic drama about a Japanese lady and the passage of time, or something like that. So I'll say right now, if you want to read House of Leaves the way I did, STOP READING THIS COMMENT.

HoL is fun because it combines Borges style reality-bending metafiction with simple horror: there's an alternate dimension and a monster in it, a big monster that growls and has big claws and might want to kill you. Or it might not exist at all. There's absolutely no certainly about anything. The book is layered with at least three unreliable narrators: it presents itself as a found text of a found text of a review. The narrative of the book is a summary and review of a documentary, The Navidson Record, about a family that moves into a house in Virginia, only to find the house is bigger inside than outside, and that a mysterious door appears leading to an infinite hallway with more doors and staircases etc. But the summary and review is presented as the incomplete and damaged found papers and work of Zampano, an old blind man living by himself who died under mysterious circumstances, and put together by Johny Truant, our punk rock vulgarwave guide and narrator. Johny in turn inserts his own opinions and stories through footnotes to Zampano's review of Navidson. Then, on top of Truant, you have the "editor" who published Truant's mostly complete manuscript. So you have these layers of Event >>> Navidson's documentary >>> Zampano's review >>> Johny's editing and interpolations >>> the editor. There's additional sub layers, like when Navidson's wife cuts a trailer for the movie and the critics that Zampano either cites or invents, but there are always those layers to deal with.

In some ways, i think this is kind of a cheat code for Danielewski. No matter what mistake or inconsistency or bad writing HoL partakes of, it's impossible to pin it on Danielewski, it's always an error made "by" the unreliable narrator, revealing something about our knowledge or his character. If the parts of the story don’t fit together, that’s an unreliable narrator, or it’s a call out to some kind of symbolic happening, it’s meaningful that the error was made. Then you chase down that error and turn it into a new theory. The book is about the labyrinth but it also is the labyrinth. And you get lost in the book. In theories, in readings. Which of narrators and levels of narration are “real?” The obvious answer is none of them, but also some of them. Each level involves claims that don’t make any sense. Navidson claims there’s a giant labyrinth in his hallway, Zampano claims that there’s this movie and all this academic criticism of it, and Johny claims that despite being marginally employed as a tattoo apprentice despite having no tattoos he gets laid constantly. The latter is actually the least believable claim for me, to be honest. There’s theories that hold that all of them exist, that none of them exist and it’s all a mysterious other person, that one of them is the real writer and the rest are created fictions to cover up or represent parts of the psyche of the real author. And you can’t escape the labyrinth, there is no answer. Danielewski successfully creates a riddle with no answers. I had a lot of fun debating it with friends, and it’s a good atmospheric spooky book, but there is nothing real at the end of it. I highly recommend it, but my answer to the question is ultimately that we choose to enter or exit the labyrinth, as Davidson ultimately is retrieved from the House by his wife’s love, and that the real answer is the friends we make along the way.

Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life.

I experienced this same kind of thing when doing my eponymous marathon run. Most of the roads I planned to use are long and straight and grid-style, easy to navigate as long as you know which direction the sun or the ocean or the bay is in. But there are two patches of neighborhoods at the far ends of the Island that are that same kind of labyrinthine subdivision, with discontinuous road names that start and stop, curve around into cul-de-sacs, disconnect and then restart after an offset. And after 20 miles, buzzing on exhaustion and endorphins and caffeine, I couldn’t find my way out. I had my phone, I had it tracking my progress!, but I don’t want to sit there and stare at it, and somehow I kept making wrong turns and getting spun around. Partly I suppose I’d gotten comfortably with the open grid, where I had basically memorized the five or so turns I would make before leaving home in the morning, and now trying to remember directions was impossible. I didn’t want to walk it staring at my phone, both for pace and pride reasons, but I had to stop and look at the map multiple times, and still got turned around, because all the buildings look the same and all the roads have similar names of flowers or trees, and everything is so similar it’s hard to figure out. It starts to stress me out, out of a mix of shame and fear that I’m crashing out. And it’s creepy because it’s empty, it’s the off-season, and there are maybe two dozen people in a neighborhood with a hundred houses. I feel like an intruder, the silence is deafening. I found my way out eventually, but the gps map of my trip looked permanently stupid, with long lines up and down the boulevards and then a tangle of knots up at the north end of the island.

I think these kinds of liminal spaces are where we run into our limitations, no longer in reaching a space or conquering it, but in mapping or understanding it.

It's striking to me how one can get a sense of relative isolation even when objectively close to other people. Perhaps it's precisely because we're so used to being hemmed in by other people nowadays that even a little bit of separation makes an impression. I used to go running at a park by my house. Objectively it was probably only half a mile wide at its widest point and maybe 3 miles end to end. It was bracketed by the interstate on one side and a suburbs on the other 3 sides. During the day there were usually other people there and you could always hear the noise of the highway whatever the time. And yet, the way the network of trails I ran on twisted in and out of the trees and back on each other, it felt much more expansive than it was, and I often felt quite remote from other people - particularly around dusk. It made such an impression on me that I wrote a little bit of weird fiction inspired by it.

Great post. I do think, though, that if you narrow things down to the modern, “backrooms” type of liminal space, it fits into the broad category of depictions of common dreams. It’s less about horror, or the edge of the forest, and much more about the strange, incompletely recreated, bizarrely navigated versions of reality we dream of. I distinctly remember having dozens, maybe hundreds of individual dreams almost identical to backrooms type spaces (endless corridors and rooms made up of components of buildings I had navigated in real life) before I became familiar with the concept. If I had to speculate I would say that our own generative intelligence isn’t generally able to create fully realistic, fully plausible, fully coherently navigable (in the ‘interior dimensions match exterior dimensions, rooms plausibly fit the space and connect appropriately etc) interactive environments in our head - at least for those who haven’t specifically trained memory palace type techniques, and even those involve only a very limited form of three dimensional reconstruction in some form - so we have these weird spaces we navigate in our dreams, not in a sinister way but in a processing capacity way. The primitive AI we have works in much the same way, it can generate already compelling video and imagery but struggles (albeit ever less so) with multiple angles of the same event or space, with that exact coherence I mention above.

The liminal space idea is just one in a long line of attempts by artists to depict the contents of our dreams.

I think that’s also probably why you saw space horror start to pop up in the late 70s. It kind of petered out in the 90s because space feels too far away anymore to be creepy.

I appreciate the connection you've made and I like the framing of the "gap" concept very much. What is it that draws us to invent mysterious horrors in places outside of our sphere of normal activity? As you said, our sphere of what is "known" has grown and grown but we keep identifying nooks and crannies under the surface of our comfortable bubble. Is it a desire for new things to explore? Do we somehow feel comforted or intrigued that there are still places not yet delved into?

When I was younger I was very much into cryptozoology. My favorite section of the library was the one with all the books about Bigfoot, Loch Ness, UFO encounters, etc. And this was in early internet days too, so the library and TV documentaries were the main source to feed my fascination. These days I'm over it. It's pretty clear that the preponderance of evidence is not on the paranormal investigator's side. But it makes me sad, in a way, because I liked the feeling that there were things Out There that science couldn't explain, that would defy logical certainty, that could still impart a sense of wonder. Even if they are terrifying and implacable, it is a profound loss to come around to, "oh, I guess this is it then. This is all there is."

I have read House of Leaves and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I could have done without the acres of footnotes as I don't think they added anything. But the core concept is brilliant. I just remember being struck by the idea that Zampano is blind and therefore could never have described watching a video recording in such detail and going on and on about the camera work and so forth. The whole existence of the record is an utter impossibility and yet there it is in front of you. I'm afraid I don't remember much though as it's been a while since I read it.

Control is more a blended mix of New Weird stuff, but the giant complex with a singular evil entity that's more of a force of nature than a person, the twisting and manipulation of normal-but-never-familiar spaces, so on. Decent game, little twitchy for my tastes.

Non-standard variants:

Portal and especially Portal 2 are kinda prototypes; underneath the humor and the claustrophobic testing chambers, the scale and scope of even the smaller bits of the larger complex you see get kinda staggering.

The Liminal Experience is a Minecraft Modpack, and both an example and an (unintentional?) sendup of the genre. It is the first level of the Backrooms as a skyblock/stoneblock-like, that's the joke, full stop. But it's also in Minecraft. So at first you've got nothing, and you're going to get easily lost, and probably starve to death wandering endless halls filled with useless cruft while foreboding sounds buzz through the air, and the rare (and buffed) monsters will shove your face in. But after a few hours, you can start making out paths to and from your base with chalk, you can funnel monsters into lava, and a lot of the random detritus is now useful resources. There's still some interesting decisions going on, like having to break lights and/or explore further and further away for fresh resources, but eventually the bizarre infrastructure and dangerous machinery is just you.

Chromaticraft's Lumen/Chroma Dimension is... weird. It's meant to be a magical, exploratory, novel place. It's also meant to be abandoned, alone, solitary, and a bit of a trap for the unwary explorer of knowledge. Can't really explain in more detail without spoiling, though.

I thought the concept of the directorship of a federal admin agency being a King Arthur sword in the stone type thing was really funny.

Control is too Finnish to be plausibly American. Call me a chauvinist but I just don’t like when especially European game developers try to create authentically or quasi-authentically American spaces, they just can’t do it. It’s fine for Grand Theft Auto because it’s inherently a foreign satire of America, which is fine, but not for things that try to be a little more sincere.

They should have set the game in Finland, which would probably be even more interesting. Hogwarts Legacy suffered from the same problem in reverse, it was clearly created by Americans.

What's un-American about Control?

I played a couple of games that remind me of this:

The Exit 8 - You're stuck in an underground train station trying to find the exit.

The Lurking Horror - Text Adventure Cthulu Mythos game where you are working late on a paper at university during a blizzard and strange things start happening.

Edit: Almost forgot, Infra - You're a structural engineer that is surveying decaying infrastructure (like old dams and tunnels) alone and of course things go wrong. The only way out is through.

Great comment and on an original subject.

I'll share a personal anecdote as a means of homage.

I once worked, in IT, on what's called an infrastructure team. These are the hardcore, hands-on-servers guys who actually wire up all of the servers running in data centers and similar installations. I was not actually a hardcore hands-on-guy, but a dude who was empowered, via our bureaucratic overlords, to buy stuff. This meant I spent a good deal of time inside server rooms and data centers not as a technician, you know, doing stuff, but observing the technicians and logging all of the necessary purchases to complete the project. I passed the time mostly with idle chitchat and, for those Infra dudes who really were anti-social, by reading content on the old longform.org website before it 1) woke-ified and 2) closed down.

There was one particularly odd project that had a team of three (me and two other guys) in a totally windowless server room (they are mostly this way) for over a week. We had a deadline and so we were in there for 12+ hours daily. Because of the logistics and time of year, we would enter the larger site / building when it was dark and we would leave when it was dark. We'd then carpool to the hotel we were staying at, usually have dinner at the hotel restaurant, retire to our rooms, and do it all again the next day.

You can tell that this definitely put me in an odd headspace by the end of the week. I was definitely a little friend and wigged out.

On the final day of our work, the two guys were working on something when they (well, all of us actually) got an e-mail from back at our home office. The two other dudes were needed for a conference call about some other project. TollBooth, you are not (sad junior employee sounds).

The two guys can't take the conference call in the server room because it's actually pretty loud. Servers have to be aggressively cooled, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of them in close proximity to one another. This is done (well, at least it was then) by having cold air blasted up out of the floor on one side of the servers (the "cold aisle") and then, on the opposite side, the hot air is aggressively vaccummed down into the floor (the "hot aisle"). The result is a constant hum of fans and other circulation equipment that probably sits around 50 dB or so. You get used to it after a while and it doesn't cause hearing damage, but you can't have conversations more than about 10 feet apart. On a conference call, the other listeners would think you were in a wind tunnel.

So the others leave to take their conference call and I pull up longform or something. For about five minutes, I'm content. Hanging out on the company dime, more or less. Then, in an instant, I am filled with a palpable sense of dread. There is no proximate cause. Nothing was on fire or damaged. No e-mails foretelling doom had entered my inbox. But I was on the verge of legitimate panic.

I believe this was an episode of real life liminal horror. I was alone in a windowless computer cube with an omnipresent inhuman sound that actively suppressed basic human conversation. I had been in this room for a week, but only exited to darkness and yet another kind of liminal space (the hotel). Nothing in this space was human. No running water, no food, no bathrooms (not technically true as they were just down the hall outside of the server room, and we had been using them all week, but still). It was blinky lights, copper wires, the knowledge that an absolutely turbo-lethal amount of electricity was flowing over every inch of the room, and the sound, the sound, the sound.

Fortunately, I bravely endured got my fucking shit back together. I think I got up and used the bathroom and just that 20 seconds of movement shook me out of the headspace I was in. Other dudes finished their conference call, came back in with a pair of shrugs, and we finished up the day and the project.

The feelings of dread could have been an infrasonic effect.

I like this theory. Thank you. The sound definitely did have something to do with it. To some extent, I've always been a little more sensitive than others to big droning sounds. I think I lack the ability to tune them out the way most folks do.

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