Liminal space horror is about alienation.
The outgrowth of liminal horror speaks to numerous elements – the popularity of found-footage horror as distilled from a very specific subset of broader horror and into its own well-trod niche, for starters, and it’s something that can be done by big studios or indie auteurs with much the same impact – but I think the success of liminal horror in particular speaks to something deeper.
If you really have no clue what I’m going on about, here’s a primer for you. It’s not short, but it’ll get you up to speed.
There’s something uniquely modern about liminal spaces as they’re presented, or at least, modern in the sense of iconography that evokes the post-WWII worldstate and the architecture of what currently living generations would see as the mundane hyper-real: office buildings, suburbs, parks, places where we pass through. Homes, but not our space littered with our own idiosyncrasies; the homes of others, lit just differently enough to feel like a space out of time.
When it comes to horror, we can dig past the cruel face and find that what animates our avatars of fright says something about the society they come from. Monster clowns may stem from the fear that those we trust with our children’s entertainment may not be who they seem, or – as succinctly put by someone else – on the fact that for many, clowns activate the uncanny valley, that primal sense that something is Not Quite Right, and traditional clown makeup is a “fundamental miscalculation” of what is appealing to the eye.
Fear of the outsider, or fear that the outsider is us; sociopolitical tensions made manifest, or even the personification, or monsterfication, of human weapons capable of leveling cities in seconds. You can point to a monsteral archetype in the canon of human art, and we can pick at its spiritual origin point, the fear that birthed the nightmare.
I think the widespread success of liminal horror as an art form reflects a shared feeling of emptiness in the alienation of many aspects of modern life. As office spaces, the cubicle farm boom of the 20th century was a gargantuan misread that resulted in countless workspaces reduced to lifeless, carbon-copied spaces of emptiness. Liminal spaces even as they are worked-in. That’s just one example of how the modern world’s artificial sprawl reflects not the humanity of those who exist within it, but a rejection of it. An alienating space.
We see very early in Backrooms a scene where one protagonist’s childhood memory of putting her hands in wet concrete with her mother is juxtaposed against that same development being torn down. Right off the bat, we’re seeing an instance of modernity without humanity, of things that are loved and lived-in being replaced by machines of destruction.
Liminal space imagery is certainly not hard to find in our current era, but Backrooms is the first major motion picture to directly deal with the concept, fittingly enough by Kane Parsons, the same auteur who popularized the viral concept as horror in the first place. (There will be mild spoilers if you haven’t seen Parsons’ film.)
One curious creative choice Parsons makes in Backrooms is to ping-pong between found-footage and traditional cinematography as he sees fit. On a meta level, this could just be a filmmaker who has traditionally budgeted within indie spaces taking advantage of a much higher level of financing and exploring the more conventional photographic styles afforded by that, but I find it interesting because the liminal horror style that Parsons inspired does tend to express itself almost entirely via found-footage.
Now, found footage has always been an interesting genre in all the ways it differs from traditional filmmaking. Even today, when the style has overcome its detractors and proven it’s here to stay as an entirely legitimate cinematic form, there’s something that remains almost outsider about the kind of films it produces. Even beyond the surface-level differences – there’s a certain cinematographic tension about a lot of found footage films, shots lingering either longer or for less time than they probably would in “conventional” cinema, conversations punctuated with the kind of awkward stops and talk-overs that create a simulacra of “real” conversations rather than of actors expressing a script – there’s a subjectivity to the kind of photography present in your Cannibal Holocausts and Blair Witches, all but smudging out the barrier of omnipresence between viewer, narrator and film subject.
Even one of the first major media pieces that I know of to deal in liminal horror, Mark Danielewski’s novel House Of Leaves, presents itself as found-footage media despite not being an audio/visual media itself.
The novel’s liminal elements concerning the titular House, and the found footage exploring the impossible labyrinth within, read like a Criterion essay academically analyzing a movie, while the novel itself is like a labyrinth unto itself of multiple narrators and layers of stories and formats and metatextual unreliability, like this is a thing that’s already existed in the world to be analyzed and picked apart and you’re only now coming across it, parsing through the layers to the impossible house sitting at the core of it. The subjectivity of found footage, then, coming to lie in the ‘found’ part of the name. Found by us, making each viewer an active participant in the story, one more layer of the metatextual onion.
Unlike the house, the Backrooms movie does in fact have on-screen monsters, or creatures, lurking within its off-yellow corridors, as do many liminal spaces. And they are well done, as offputting and creepy as a cinematic creepypasta demands.
But I would argue the true monster is the emptiness of these spaces. They are uncultures; constructed, by someone or something, lacking the natural beauty of the world untouched by humanity, yet utterly lacking in the signifiers that there is anything here resembling life or activity or culture. And that’s not just uncanny; it’s wrong on some deep level. It leaves a nauseous pit at the seat of the soul. As worldbuilding, liminal spaces are spiritually a world without the building, and literally a building without the world.
I think back to George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead, using a zombie-infested mall as a commentary on mindless consumerism. But Backrooms and liminal horror more broadly say something different: they would look at a bustling, thriving mall and they see not death, but life – a life that has been increasingly suppressed by hypermodernity. They yearn for the things that Dawn Of The Dead takes for granted.
Because when you think about a living mall, you think about everything that we’re not seeing in liminal horror: those brand names you see in malls are signifiers of a culture, of companies, of existing within a society. Of the scenegoths hanging out at Hot Topic and the preps at American Eagle and the athletes at Sportchek and the nice scents coming from the snack kiosks and the coffee shops offering seasonal drinks and music shops and T-shirts and families doing back to school shopping and life.
Because structures aren’t just structures. They are everything they were, everything that’s happened within them, and their role in the lives of the people who lived or worked or passed through there.
Liminal horror systematically strips all those things away until all that remains are the constructs and the inescapable sense that something should be here that isn’t. It’s life without us, but not the ruins of a society long-passed. Just emptiness.
And that’s the rub. Walking Dead-esque ruins of a humanity that was are probably more disturbing in a visceral sense; nature retaking the structures once made warm and homely by the long-dead people who once called them home, evidence of the cataclysm that brought society to an end – I can parse that. I understand it. The chain of cause and effect is clear. Same with urban exploration videos of abandoned places that were once vibrant and now left to decay in filth. The chain of cause and effect, from vibrancy to decline to decay, is clear.
But liminal horror? Liminal spaces, I find, are more difficult to parse. There’s a wrongness to them that slithers right down into your soul. To take a word I learned from House Of Leaves, they are unheimlich. Not because they’re not us. They are us, devoid of everything that should be there about us.
The direction of Backrooms sort of gives away the game in this regard too, because even the non-backrooms scenes have a certain liminality to them, grooming us gently to understand that liminal spaces simply reflect an unsettling version of our own world back at us. Maybe we’re already making the colourful world around us feel more lifeless and drab by our disappointments, our cynicisms, our taking for granted everything around us.
I’m not just using malls as a handy go-to example; Kane Parsons also directed a liminal horror video series called The Oldest View, which explores the silent tragedy of the decline of malls as society’s third space, turning once-vibrant spaces across the world into places of real-life liminality.
Maybe that’s why I’ve watched so many urbex videos of dead malls, why they hit so much harder than a lot of other abandoned spaces. Because they strike to the heart of why liminal horror is so unheimlich: many of us have warm memories and nostalgia associated with many settings used in liminal horror. I was always a mallrat, for instance. And as we view liminal spaces, that nostalgia actively comes into conflict with the part of us that perceives that what we are seeing is a version that doesn’t have the soul or the beating heart that our nostalgia does. Like viewing a corpse that life has fled.
Of course, much liminal horror leaves us with the unanswered questions: who or what built this? Or perhaps it simply is. Liminal corridors of insane geographies that do not correspond to what we understand as the nature of the world.
In Backrooms, we end with no resolution, no true answers, nor even clarity on whether our protagonist has or will get her life back. Even at the end of the film, we are placed in an in-between space. Or to put it another way, the ending is as liminal as those depressed hallways. Though the final shots do lend credence to the postulation earlier in the film that the Backrooms – and by extension, liminal space horror writ large – presents our world back at us in a way that is remembered wrong. Remembered by what, is up in the air.
No matter what, liminal horror is existentially nightmarish, because the existence of these spaces would mean that our understanding of everything is wrong. But that’s just from an in-universe perspective, something that the characters must consider, those who have glimpsed the impossible in their physical reality.
No, it’s the great big empty of these spaces that stays with us. The unhuman. Not anti-human, or inhuman, implying malice, monsterism. Unhuman. Human habitation without the human or the habitation. A mockery of meaning, a mockery of conscious existence. I think beyond its relatively budget-friendly form, this is a big reason why most liminal horror uses found-footage to get its message across. Because the subjectivity of found-footage film reminds us at every turn that these spaces are us without everything that is us. And then we become another link in the metacontextual onion, viewing the nightmare footage reflecting our own uncanny spaces back at us.
The emptiness of liminal spaces isn’t just emptiness. It’s an absence of what should be. It’s a reminder of why we, as humans, need the culture and the life and those signifiers of society. We need to be able to say, ‘we were here’. And liminal spaces present a place where it matters not if we were or weren’t, because there only remain the pallid, stale bones of where a thing should have been.
Liminal horror presents us with the still, placid corpse of the world we recognize, and in the face of the unheimlich, we flinch. We understand this is not for us. But we are here anyway, and we feel that we shouldn’t be. We want to pull toward life. Liminal spaces pull not toward death, but toward unlife. And in some ways that can feel scarier. Life and death are natural. But this…is liminal.
Backrooms is available on physical and streaming now. You can watch it in your house.