Liminal Spaces: Where the Familiar Turns Strange
Did you go see A24’s new Backrooms film?
I did, and I loved it.
Horror is all the rage right now, but I usually steer clear of the genre because it stresses me out.
I get that’s probably the point.
Some kind of catharsis or, perhaps, perspective adjustment:
Don’t like your job? Well, at least you’re not being chased through a field by a sickle-wielding psycho in a burlap sack mask!
Sometimes I can’t resist though.
The Shining.
The Others.
Midsommar.
Sure, I’ll have trouble sleeping for a week, but sometimes the gain is worth the pain.
So it was with Backrooms.
If you’re unfamiliar, Backrooms is a film adaptation of a viral internet creepypasta from Kane Parsons (Pixels), who created the wildly popular YouTube web series first. He and the writer, Will Soodik, nailed it—not just as a well-executed portrayal of Parsons’ popular liminal space aesthetic but as a story that gets at the reason I believe we find these imagined endless liminal spaces so terrifying.
But more on that later.
Let’s dig into some details first.
What Is a Liminal Space?
A liminal space is a transitional place—one that exists between two established locations, conditions, or identities. It may be liminal for the person using it, for the space itself, or for both.
Some spaces are designed primarily for movement: bridges; staircases; hallways; crosswalks; train platforms; airport terminals.
Others become liminal because their familiar purpose has been interrupted: a school after dark; a theater after the audience has gone; a shopping mall after closing; a house during a move; a building under construction; a factory after abandonment.
The defining quality is not simply emptiness.
It is in-betweenness.
A liminal space belongs fully to neither where we have come from nor where we are going.
Spaces Meant for Passing Through
Transit-Only Spaces
Some places exist almost entirely to move us elsewhere.
A bridge is neither bank.
A hallway is neither room.
A staircase is neither floor.
A boarding gate is neither city.
We pass through these places, but we do not ordinarily belong to them.
That is why being delayed in one can feel so peculiar.
An airport becomes more than a transportation hub when the flight is canceled and we are left suspended between departure and arrival.
We have already left in one sense.
Yet we have gone nowhere.
Thresholds and Gateways
Doorways, porches, vestibules, gates, and turnstiles mark boundaries between zones.
A doorway is neither entirely inside nor outside.
A gate separates one territory from another while belonging wholly to neither.
A porch exists between the privacy of the house and the public world beyond it.
These places are physical thresholds, but they are also symbolic ones. We cross them at moments of entrance, departure, invitation, exclusion, and return.
A threshold tells us that one order ends here and another begins.
But the threshold itself belongs fully to neither.
Waiting and Holding Areas
Waiting rooms, lobbies, hospital corridors, and airport gates place us in a condition of pause.
We are not simply in a room.
We are waiting for something to happen: a diagnosis; a departure; an interview; a birth; a verdict; a reunion.
The physical space becomes charged by anticipation.
The room may be ordinary, but the person inside it is not.
Time slows.
Attention narrows.
The future seems to be gathering itself just beyond the door.
Borders and Edge Zones
Some liminal spaces exist where two environments meet.
Shorelines. Treelines. City limits. Fence lines. Riverbanks. Borders.
A shoreline is neither entirely land nor sea. It is shaped by both and claimed completely by neither.
The edge of a forest is not quite field and not yet woods.
Borders may be geographical, political, social, or symbolic. They define where one order ends and another begins.
Yet the border itself is unstable.
Water advances and retreats.
Cities expand.
Nations argue over lines drawn on maps.
These are the seams of the world.
And seams, by their nature, reveal both connection and division.
When a Familiar Place Loses Its Purpose
A familiar place can become liminal when its ordinary function has been suspended.
A school corridor at noon is full of footsteps, voices, bells, and purpose.
The same corridor at midnight feels entirely different.
An amusement park is built for music, motion, laughter, lights, and crowds.
Empty, it becomes uncanny.
A playground without children retains the form of play but not the life of it.
The swings may move in the wind, but the equipment waits.
The place contains an echo of what is missing.
The physical place has not changed very much.
What has changed is our relationship to it.
The expected people and purpose are gone.
The familiar setting remains, but the world that made sense of it has disappeared.
Abandoned Places
Abandoned places are liminal because their former identity has ended while their future remains uncertain.
A factory no longer produces.
A house no longer shelters a family.
An empty lot retains traces of what once stood there while offering no clear indication of what may come next.
These places are suspended between past use and future possibility.
They are no longer what they were.
They are not yet whatever they may become.
Perhaps that is why ruins attract us.
They make tangible the impermanence of life.
And they make tangible the interior “ruin” that we know must precede interior renewal.
(More on this in my upcoming Liminal States post.)
Places Under Construction
Construction sites are liminal in a more active way.
They are not merely abandoned.
They are becoming.
The old form may be partly demolished.
The new form is visible but incomplete.
Scaffolding, exposed beams, unfinished walls, detours, and temporary barriers reveal the normally hidden process by which one identity becomes another.
A building under construction has not lost its future.
But it has not arrived there either.
Nothing is finished.
Everything is in process.
The Uncanny Liminal
Why do empty liminal spaces feel eerie?
Part of the answer lies in expectation.
We know what a school, shopping mall, airport, theater, or playground is supposed to contain.
When the people and activity are gone, the familiar place becomes unfamiliar without becoming unrecognizable.
It occupies an unsettling middle ground.
The mind recognizes the setting but cannot reconcile it with the absence.
The place feels abandoned, but not empty of meaning.
The silence becomes an echo of past human activity.
This is the uncanny liminal: something known and strange at the same time.
Nothing terrible is necessarily happening.
Nothing much is happening at all.
And that may be precisely what unsettles us.
The Internet Aesthetic of Liminal Space
In recent years, “liminal space” has become associated with a particular internet aesthetic: fluorescent hallways; empty hotel corridors; abandoned malls; vacant playgrounds; blurry photographs of places remembered from childhood; rooms that seem familiar even when we have never visited them.
The Backrooms.
These images capture the emotional atmosphere of being between worlds.
But not every empty or unattractive room is liminal.
A place becomes liminal because of its relationship to passage, suspended purpose, ambiguity, or transition—not just because someone photographed it under unfortunate lighting. The aesthetic is powerful because it touches something much deeper than architecture.
The Horror of Imagined Endless Liminal Space
The Backrooms imagines a vast series of beige-carpeted, fluorescent-lit rooms and corridors from which there may be no escape. The horror is not simply that the rooms are ugly-bland with random (unsettling) smatterings of furniture, decorations, signs, and sounds.
It’s that they are endless.
A threshold is bearable partly because it promises another side. A hallway leads to a room. A bridge reaches the opposite bank. A waiting room eventually releases us into news, action, or departure.
But an endless liminal space removes that promise.
There is no arrival.
No destination.
No reintegration.
This is why the Backrooms’ aesthetic and architecture induce horror—because they externalize the very real and more intimate fear of being stuck in an existential threshold. I call this the Trap of the Liminal. While liminal states offer the possibility of transformation—we often resist and remain stuck.
Sometimes for years.
Sometimes for the rest of our lives.
Soodik and/or Parsons understood this when they created the Backrooms script. The whole story turns on the arcs of the two main characters: Clark, an angry failed architect turned furniture salesman and his traumatized therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, who each have been trapped in an interior liminal state for years.
Whether or not they ever find their way out, I’ll let you discover for yourselves.
Continue Exploring the Liminal
I hope you enjoyed this introduction to liminal spaces. You can return to the Liminal Hub or continue to: Liminal States: (Coming soon!)
Related reading: The Trap of the Liminal (Coming soon!)
All images from Unsplash via Squarespace.
