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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!
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 enduredgot 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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