When I was in the fourth grade, I was in my elementary school's after-school program. I didn't really get along that much with my peers, but I didn't really care, because I was much more interested in something else. I would do the same routine every day I was in that after-school program. I would ask to go to the bathroom or get some water, and when nobody was looking, I would slip into the school. While everyone was outside playing, I enjoyed being inside the school alone, wandering around the empty hallways.
Despite being a dumb fourth grader, I was never caught. I would wander wherever I could go, the backstage of the auditorium, the empty cafeteria, or the hallways adorned with children's drawings. I had friends, but I never took them along with me. I just liked being alone in a place that should be full of life.
For whatever reason, I was fascinated with roaming my school after classes had ended. I seemed to unconsciously appreciate the feeling of being alone in these places. Places that were never meant to be seen this way.
Places that should have been bustling with life. Places that you never really pay any attention to. I didn't know it then, but I know now, that the thing I was unconsciously appreciating were liminal spaces. Liminal space is the name given to this recent semi-viral trend of photos depicting places where reality feels altered.
These uncomfortable, creepy, and nostalgic photos have become massively popular over the last few years. They're photos that depict things like old office spaces where all the equipment has been moved out, schools with blank hallways, or playgrounds at night. Just by those examples, I bet you can get the basic gist of what liminal spaces are.
Places where reality simply does not feel right. Photos of places depicted at night or when no people are around, and they seem to have a sort of uncanny aspect to them. But why do seemingly ordinary locations instill such a strong sense of unease in us? To understand this, we need to define what a liminal space even is. Typically, liminal spaces are defined as transitional spaces that provoke discomfort.
The term liminal, according to Google, means occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold. What this pretty much means is liminality represents the in-between of two states. For example, if childhood represents state A and adulthood represents state B, then the teenage years serve as the liminal stage between the two.
Or if you look at the past as state A and the future as state B, then you could technically say that the present is liminal. So how do you apply this feeling visually? Maybe in a photo like this. Hallways are commonly seen in photographs of liminal spaces because they represent a literal example of liminality. They are the transitional spaces between two rooms.
If the elevator is state A and your hotel room is state B, then the hallway is the liminal state. But it isn't just the transitory nature of liminal spaces that makes them so relatable to so many people, it's the nostalgia you feel while looking at them. Take a look at this picture.
Have you been here before? Obviously not. You haven't been in this exact place before. but you probably have been in places very similar.
Something that makes liminal spaces feel nostalgic is the fact that details don't matter. You don't remember the detail of every hotel you've been to, yet hotel hallways seem to give you that feeling, even if you haven't been to that specific hotel. What you do remember, however, was the way you felt in these places. You felt tired. You felt the water dripping down your swimsuit as you walked back to your room.
Liminal spaces don't have to be specific to anyone to be nostalgic. Really, they just rekindle repressed memories by giving you places and scenarios that, while you yourself haven't been to, you have probably been to places very similar. This is just a gas station.
This is a school hallway. This is a play place. Ever been to one of those as a child?
Another nostalgic factor of Liminal Spaces is the fact that these places feel frozen in time. Old shopping malls with faded 80s and 90s decor, the remains of architecture planned and built by people in a time you could never return to. It's this nostalgia from the past combined with the dread of knowing these are things that can never be brought back that really sells nostalgia in liminal spaces.
These once great places filled with families and fun are now husks that only spell whispers of their past. Because these liminal spaces are so impersonal. Things from the past that you never really think about, being rekindled by imagery of empty rooms and places from your childhood.
Abandoned malls, shopping centers, places that are no longer relevant. Things left behind by humanity. These places are given life by the virtue of you being there. The virtue of people being there. Life is given to a place when it is in use, so when nobody can be seen anywhere, and these places are rotting on the inside with faded decor from a time you never knew, it feels as though a husk is left behind.
Places that were once inhabited, now long abandoned. If these walls could talk, they would say nothing. Really, I think the husks of long abandoned architecture is something that is generally uncanny.
Liminal spaces are the uncanny valley of architecture, and this is to be expected. The uncanny valley refers to a realm where things appear human-like, but ultimately fall short, resulting in a creature that almost resembles us, but fails in this creepy way. There is a study that applies the uncanny valley to physical spaces rather than faces.
They did this by taking regular photos and altering them to make them more uncanny. According to the study, these are the steps to making an image feel uncanny. 1. The Lack The lack of anything meaningful was a strong contributor, removing things like tables and cloths on the floor.
Repetition Making the image repeat itself in certain places, such as the paintings on the walls or the tables. 3. Placement If everything was a little bit askewed, almost on purpose, that would also contribute to the uncanny vibe. 4. Controlled Distortion If something about the positioning of objects was a little weird, such as the tables and chairs being moved to the wall.
Social Presence Absolutely no people should be in the image. According to the study, applying all of these factors results in an image like this. You don't have to look too closely to realize that this image is undoubtedly a liminal space, which really demonstrates the interconnectedness of the uncanny and liminal realms. So clearly, the uncanny and liminal spaces go hand in hand. So no.
Illuminal space does not technically have to be transitional to work. Uncanniness also works to make some illiminal spaces feel... weird.
These ethereal spaces that seem to bend reality. Architecture that seems so odd it's hard to believe a human would design it. Places that seem to be designed without purpose or function. They exist simply to exist. You'll never find places like these in reality because they have an almost dreamlike quality to them.
There have been games that attempt to replicate this dream-like feeling, but I don't think any game does it better than 2.22am. 2.22am perfectly captures the feeling of liminal spaces, the feeling of living in this impossible world between two points. Because 2.22am doesn't really have a start or an end in the practical sense. There isn't even a fail state or a goal.
You are shown things without context, placed in worlds that don't make any sense, given tasks that are meaningless. The game isn't about anything. You do these surface level tasks for seemingly no reason, and as the game progresses, you slowly begin to feel like it's ramping up to something horrible.
That underneath the surface of these seemingly pointless actions is something darker than you can imagine. And when the pretense of this odd reality starts melting away, you expect there to be a point to it all. Some explanation behind everything is certainly coming, right? But no. The game just ends.
I played this game at night with all the lights off and using headphones, and yet I never felt scared while playing it. When it ended, all I felt was anxiety. I felt like I was going to perform in front of a live audience.
I felt almost nervous, if you know what I mean. 2.22am is such an odd case because it's a stretch to even call it a game. It was only after I had finished it that it hit me. 2.22am isn't a game. 2.22am is a dream. I mean- being shown things without context, being put from one weird area to another, it's kind of dreamlike in a way.
To date, I have never seen a game that gets the feeling of being in a dream so right, especially if you play alone at night as intended. This dreamlike quality ties back into liminal spaces. The only two things you typically can't remember about your dreams are where they started and where they ended. No state A, no state B, just an infinite liminal state, an altered reality between being asleep and being awake.
In a way, dreams are the original liminal spaces. I hate to be that guy, but to understand what I mean, you really need to play 222 AM the way it's meant to be played, alone and at night. It's free and on itch.io, I'll leave a link in the description.
So, a transitory nature, a sense of nostalgia, and a dreamlike uncanniness. Those to me are the three pillars of a good liminal space. Having one or more of these features ensures the feeling of liminality.
But of course, liminality is subjective. There's some posts on the subreddit with thousands of upvotes that just don't resonate with me at all. But some certainly do.
If you've spent any time in this community, you probably have a favorite liminal space. And so do I. This image is so powerful to me, I can't explain it. This image combines everything we've already talked about. The transitional highway.
the uncanniness of deep space, and the nostalgia for being on the highway as a kid. This image captures everything about Illuminal Space. I also feel like I've been here before, the blackness of space reminding me of the nights spent half-asleep in the car on the way home from a trip. I feel like I've imagined this place, this exact place, or at least seen it in a dream. I've been on this highway.
I fell asleep here while looking at the stars above, but at the same time, I know I haven't. The old cars remind me of a time I never knew. but I'm sure my relatives did.
Maybe my grandparents drove a car like this, maybe not. Whatever the case is, this liminal space speaks to me in a way I can't even hope to explain. There's a part in 2.22am where you're dropped in this maze of dark blocks with no textures and are told to just walk around. The feeling of walking around through a place like this was an interesting one. It was almost like walking through one big liminal space.
It gave me a very uneasy feeling. What I feel for that area in 2.22am is now what I feel about the back rooms. The back rooms is pretty much a creepypasta derived from one simple 4chan post with this image attached to it that reads If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum humbuzz, and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you. This creepypasta garnered instant success and was a driving force in a genre known as liminal horror.
The idea of the back rooms is creepy for many reasons, but I think the main thing that really gets me is the idea of being trapped. 600 million square miles of the same mono-yellow wallpaper with absolutely no escape. Being trapped in one big liminal space.
Liminal spaces in general can create such a weird kind of scare that nothing else in the horror genre can come close to. For example... When looking at a school at night, you might unconsciously think, nobody's here, because nobody should be here. Nobody should be at an abandoned building at 2am, but if somebody was, that would naturally unnerve you. And this is what most horror does to scare you, putting a monster in a place it isn't supposed to be, like a spaceship or your closet.
Liminal spaces are different. They instead leave you with ambiguity. Instead of making you question why somebody's in an abandoned shopping mall at 3am, You question why you are at an abandoned shopping mall at 3am, alone with your own thoughts. A type of slow burn terror.
Fearing a monster in the dark is scary, but at least you actively know the thing threatening you and where it is. Liminal spaces give you no such relief. You can't easily spot a threat. You don't know if there is a threat.
As a result, your brain starts working overtime. You try to find something to be afraid of. Something to justify this horrible feeling you have. But you never will.
You're simply existing in a place where you shouldn't, dwelling in an uncomfortable environment. This is what liminal horror should be, and that's why the Backroom's creepypasta is so genius. It takes this discomfort of existing in a liminal space and builds an entire world out of it.
But of course, we can't talk about the Backrooms without mentioning the famous series created by Kane Pixels. The Backroom's found footage was a video uploaded to Kane's channel on January 7th, 2022. It starts off found footage style with a couple of teenagers making a movie until the guy holding the camera steps back and no clips into the back rooms. He walks around stumbling across different famous liminal spaces.
Also, I've been to this hotel in real life. I don't know why I felt the need to mention that. Until finally this cable monster catches up with him and kills him.
The reason I mention this video is because it highlights a very big shift to an entirely different online phenomenon. Because of the success of Kane's original video and the series that followed, the backrooms outgrew the original concept of liminal spaces and went on to become a mainstream phenomenon. Backrooms have far outgrown their liminal counterpart, and Google Trans supports this. At its peak, for every seven searches for liminal spaces, there were 100 searches for the backrooms.
Because of this boom of success, people started putting their own interpretations of the backrooms online, with different entities that were set to inhabit it. Backrooms were so popular that people started theory crafting lore to it and proposed that this original image was only the first level and there were actually hundreds of them. Channels like Broogly have gained hundreds of thousands of subscribers just by explaining these different levels.
This is all very cool and all, but all these levels and entities were never really the point of the backrooms, to me at least. The point of the backrooms was to scare someone by the mere existence of the environment. this terrifying concept of existing in an uncomfortable place with no escape.
Like I said before, once you add some sort of monster to the mix, the Backrooms quickly starts to lose what makes it unique in the first place. Now instead of focusing on the environment, you focus on the scary monster, and it quickly loses what makes the liminal aspect work in the first place. If you want to know what I mean, play 222 AM, and then play one of the many horror-focused Backrooms games on Steam. You'll quickly see the difference.
This all really leads back to the original Kane Pixels video. With almost 50 million views now, Kane's video launched the backroom so far from the original concept that a surprising number of people who know about the backrooms now have never even heard of liminal spaces. This has been pushed to the point that any semi-popular liminal space image will inevitably get the comment, Make this into a backrooms level!
But do I think liminal spaces have been ruined by the backrooms? No. In fact, I love the modern concept of the backrooms. Say what you will about the backrooms, but it sure does take a lot of talent to make cool found footage videos like these, no matter how far they stray from liminal spaces.
It is really cool to see the community making new levels, and getting to know the lore is just a blast. It's really cool to see creative people creating these increasingly creepier backrooms levels with unique stories and lore, and seeing all these cool ideas posted on competing wikis. Are some of them made by younger people without much experience in story writing or horror?
Yes. But then again, you're watching a video made by somebody who's still in high school, so better to let younger people be creative. There really isn't a problem with the modern imagining of the backrooms.
It is a really fun concept spearheaded by creative people, but it's not what I'm talking about when I mention liminal horror. I realize I went on a 1000 word tangent about the backrooms, but I think it's an important example of how liminal spaces have outgrown themselves. I think it's also important to look at how liminal spaces have been used in media, specifically in cinema.
American Psycho is a movie that needs no introduction. You all know what this masterpiece is. You may wonder why I bring this movie up.
Well, American Psycho feels liminal in terms of life. Patrick Bateman is a man who has it all. A big business, lots of money, and a charming personality.
But it's all a front for who he really is. Having money is great, but he derives no satisfaction from it. The only thing he seeks is approval from his peers, having the same expensive dinners every day and talking to his rich friends about the same thing, day after day.
He wants nothing more than to fit in, but he hates the monotony of day-to-day life and the feeling that he isn't getting anywhere, like he's trapped in one big liminal space. And he starts killing people to cope with the sense of liminality. All he wants to do is fit in with the people around him.
He wants people to notice him, the real him, until... Spoiler warning. He confesses everything to his lawyer, yet his lawyer doesn't take him seriously, because he had dinner with one of the people Patrick Bateman supposedly killed just last week.
It leaves the viewer wondering if it was all in his head. No matter what he does, he can't escape the liminality of life. He seeks the recognition of others to confirm his identity as a murderer, but he'll never get it. Even if Bateman did kill those people, he might as well not have, because in his twisted mind, he thinks that the only way to achieve catharsis is by the recognition of others.
When he does not get this catharsis, it drives him deeper into despair. Even after admitting his crimes, nothing new happens. No matter how desperately he tries, he can't escape the liminality of his situation. He wants so badly to get to state B, but he can't. He's forever stuck in liminality.
Liminal spaces don't describe anything. They are places we never think about. Places we don't have time to make mental models of, but are essential nevertheless.
We may expect a certain something from a school hallway. We expect there to be people, if not in the halls, then in the surrounding classrooms. But at night, we don't expect anyone. We can't expect anyone.
We question why the photographer is even there in the first place, until we eventually forget about the photographer, and place ourselves in these places, and wonder why we're here. These are places taken out of context, places we never had the time to care about, but places that shaped who we are nonetheless. During COVID, we were all in a liminal space of sorts.
A liminal state of waiting for reality to make sense again. I don't think it's a coincidence that these images started popping up when they did. These empty images guided myself and many others through the pandemic.
They told me, maybe we are in a state of change. Maybe things don't make sense right now, but that's okay. Liminal spaces and the constant change of life are two sides of the same coin. They guide us through the ups and downs. They remind us to seek comfort in the transition.
I see liminal spaces as a metaphor for everything in life. The ebbs and flows of living are perfectly described by these bleak, dark hallways and lifeless shopping malls. Because, if you think about it, life really is just one big liminal space between your birth and your death. So why not appreciate it?
Take comfort in the transition. And I think back to me exploring my school alone in the fourth grade, how I felt during that time, why I loved exploring these liminal hallways, why I was so infatuated with the in-between. And I think of a quote from the late Ursula K. Le Guin, the only quote from a person that has ever made me cry.
When I take you to the valley, you'll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right. The rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow, late in the rainy season. And maybe you'll say, there it is, that's it. But I'll say, a little farther.
We'll go on, I hope. And you'll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats. a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadow of a creek in the dry season. And maybe you'll say, let's stop here, this is it. But I'll say, a little farther yet.
We'll go on, and you'll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river. And looking back, you'll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below. And you'll say, isn't that the valley? And all I will be able to say is, drink this water of the spring.
Rest here a while, we have a long way yet to go. And I can't go without you.