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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!
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.
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.
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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