How liminal spaces served horror for decades before even manifesting

In a famous 1960 episode of the classic series “The Twilight Zone” entitled “A Nice Place to Visit”, a career thief dies and experiences a paradise of an afterlife with a cruel twist. 

He finds himself in a casino. No matter how many games he plays, it’s impossible for him to lose. The place is full of fake people who will do whatever he wants. 

After a good while, the ease of the place starts to get to the thief. He begs the guardian angel who brought him there to take him to “the other place”. It’s only then revealed to him that he’s already in the other place.

This fantastic work introduced to many people at the time the concept of a ‘heterotopia’, a concept of place explained later in the ‘60s by French philosopher Michael Foucault as “defined by relations of proximity between points or elements,” or places that serve as either a parallel to or in the absence of a ‘utopia’ or ideal space.

What further defines these spaces is their functions, or how people interact with them. Often they serve as a place where people will stay to change who they are, like a school classroom, or stay in to serve as a touchpoint with history or geography, like a museum.

The buildings or structures are real, but the other function you are interacting for has to be ‘bought into’ in a sense. People may find these places odd or creepy when not in use as they are intended, for instance a completely empty cathedral.

Between heterotopias and other specific-use, ultra-contextual places, there are places whose purposes are just to be used to get from one place to another or one state of being to another. These are known as ‘liminal spaces’. If you are just passing through a place, like that same classroom when you’re not using it, it can probably be deemed liminal.

This concept of liminality, where we recognize a place but don’t have its use in mind, ties strongly into people’s sense of the uncanny.

Books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” or music like “Everywhere at the End of Time” by The Caretaker use familiar things and places and work on purpose to warp them, making them good subjects for horror. These serve as great examples because they reach beyond and bend familiarities at the meta level in their respective media.

These themes of liminal horror seem to translate even better in visual media, though. Along with all the other things they executed flawlessly, 1979’s “Alien” nailed its setting of cold, clean hallways and 2001’s “Silent Hill 2” video game worked within its memory limitations to pump foggy, empty streets full of tense atmosphere.

These ideas are carried into lots of other great works of fiction, but it really only took one 2019 meme to push the idea into super-virality for Gen Z: The Backrooms. This off-kilter picture of an abandoned office perfectly captures what people look for in psychological horror: a ‘normal’ place that evokes that odd longing and nostalgia mixed with dread. Something just seems off.

It also opened the scope of what people find liminal. Any dreamlike image with that certain aura will do. Pictures of run-down shopping malls, empty parks, and weird compounds caught lots of traction on social media. 

A lot of these more popular posts also use settings that tie into early childhood nostalgia, like ball pits or playgrounds, which during the COVID-19 pandemic was a feeling a lot of people were primed to engage with.

Over the last five years, the progression of the liminal space genre has turned from a rush to track down and post the most dimly-lit parking garage or render the perfect indoor pool into a world where people are retroactively applying this lens to old media and using their skills to pull off some incredible creative work.

For example, an entire horror community centered around 1996’s “Super Mario 64”, a decidedly non-horror title that just so happens to have some dreamlike, empty spots here and there, created not just liminal space images from the game, but multiple horror video series and spinoff games.

Inspired by “House of Leaves,” an anonymous creator built a custom map for 1994’s Doom II titled MyHouse.wad that starts off as a normal house but becomes increasingly labyrinthine and confusing the more you play.

The ideas and motifs of liminal spaces have meshed with and influenced other new horror subgenres too, like unfiction alternate reality games, analogue and digital horror, and whatever A24 is doing.

This is the ultimate purpose of these new vehicles of horror in general. Now it doesn’t matter what your lane is or what you’ve learned to create to that point. If you have creative skill and the time to use it, there’s a masterpiece waiting for you.