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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!
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.
Doubly so when it's a King Arthur sword that a) isn't good at its job, and b) likes to make those who attempt to use it An Hero themselves.
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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.
Typically I would agree, but for Remedy games it only adds to the slight Twin Peaks-esque unreality of it. The only it really hurt was Quantum Break.
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What's un-American about Control?
Control's trying to be about an FBI-by-way-of-X-Files, but there's a number of bits that don't really match how americans see the place. Ahti the janitor/god would have been hispanic-themed (or actually Coyote) in a US-work, the Board doesn't really match American oversight concepts, FORMER seems too inspired by the formori in form and concept. The Oceanview Motel is supposed to come from late-80s Montana, and it's hard to separate how much of it's weird because of the whole shared dream subconcious thing going on, but the lack of air conditioners is not especially plausible. The Oldest House's exterior comes by way of a specific (probably NSA) construction that exists in real-world New York, but the interior is a blend of every brand of brutalism ever, and that's necessarily going to include a lot of non-American influences.
I think it works out for the better -- it's supposed to be subtly weird in a way that just cloning a Best Western and the Hoover Building wouldn't -- but I don't have the same tastes as 2rafa.
A disembodied extradimensional alien hive intelligence doesn't match American oversight concepts? I mean, true, but unless I'm not up to date with what's going on in Finland these days...
I assume you mean the Fomori? Maybe in the sense that FORMER is large and the Fomori are giants, but the Fomori are supposed to predate the Tuatha Dé Danann whereas FORMER is an exile. In any case, FORMER looks more like a HL2 strider than an Irish sea giant.
Is... Is the claim here that it's obviously not an American game because they didn't put air vents in the transdimensional liminal space?
Of course, there's plenty of brutalist American federal buildings. Given that the building itself is essentially an SCP, it seems fitting that it isn't constrained only by American styles or even any extant brutalist style in particular.
Fair point. I'm more motioning around decisions that American writers (and artists, and developers) wouldn't make, that the devs of Control did, but it's naturally something that's going to involve tea-leaf-reading unless @2rafa has a more overt example than I can bring.
I mostly agree with you, the dialogue is obvious too, weird slang.
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