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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3569 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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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.

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.

Back in 2011-2014 I would find myself driving the backroads of rural Southern Georgia several times a year. Places where you could drive 1-2 hours in any given direction and NOT hit anything truly resembling 'civilization.' And more importantly, places where there was no cell service and so you might find yourself having to navigate on dead reckoning if your smartphone (which weren't all that smart back in the day) wasn't helping.

One of these times, I was out there with no cell service and about two gallons of gas in the tank, with sunset looming in about an hour. This was a safe margin in most contexts, but here, no guarantees that I would find a gas station, or that it would be open for business if I did. I got kinda existential about it. It did evoke a sort of 'frontier survival' feeling in me. Where I had to make hard decisions under uncertainty, and ration my resources, invoke my wits, and hope that I didn't make a wrong turn that would seal my doom hours later. Nevermind that I could probably just knock on the nearest farmhouse door and most likely be fine.

Alas, I found a gas station, got back in a cell service area, and while I HAD gotten quite turned around, I would not have to shelter in my car for the night.

The backwoods of Georgia are still plenty spooky to drive on at night these days, but now they're more LEGIBLE with better cell coverage and Starlink guaranteeing you're never without internet.

Last time I felt that frontier feeling was three years back, driving home after Hurricane Ian ravaged my area. I cooked meat on a wood fire, fell asleep to the hum of a generator, and had to go door-to-door to check on my neighbors. For all of three days. They got the power back on FAST.

Civilization has gotten to the point where even the most powerful natural disasters are just a waiting game to 'survive.'

Maybe this is why many popular horror movies over the past 10 or so years have used psychological allegories or "the monster is a metaphysical concept" to create fear. The innermost areas of our own brains might be the last place that terrible secrets can hide.

I guess Cosmic Horror can still manage to wring out some new ideas to make us afraid of what's OUT THERE (I take it that Pluribus is doing something like this?) but it can be hard to do without getting too cheesy

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.

This finally made the “liminal spaces” thing click for me. I’ve never understood how anyone could find an empty or abandoned space scary (aside from concerns about deranged homeless people or animals, which people have always assured me aren’t what freak them out). Up until now, I’ve always chocked it up to people watching too many zombie movies. But then, I grew up in the country, and I spent a good deal of my childhood traipsing solo through abandoned barns and woods. Today, my nearest neighbor is about 300 yards away, and I sometimes find even that too close. I’m very much not used to being hemmed in by people. But if all you’ve ever known is being surrounded by other people, peaceful, quiet places with no one around must be completely unnerving.

I own a rental house that's on a back road between two gorges tucked in the far corner of our town. So five minutes away in the same zip code you're in solid suburbia, but at this house you're dead alone for a few hundred acres in every direction except for the coyotes.

And it's interesting because when I look for tenants, a large number of people will tell me that they can't live there because it isn't safe, no one is around. Where my reflex is that it's very safe because no one is around. I would have figured that it would be gendered, because I would think it very effeminate to worry about, but a lot of men say so too, expressed as concern about property or women.

It's just fascinating because such fears must be primal, as they are clearly irrational. There's much more to worry about in a city than in the middle of nowhere.

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.

Huh, interesting. I don't really think of it like that. When I think of the backrooms kind of genre, I think of being a small child and seeing the boiler room at my elementary school. Being six years old, the boiler looked enormous, loud, dangerous and fascinating and hidden. When I think of endless dream spaces, I think of occupied spaces, or of forests.

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.

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