The new film Backrooms directed by Kane Parsons has everyone talking about ‘liminal horror’. As someone who writes stories which might fit into this bracket, I’m excited to have a new sub-genre to ponder.
Here are some initial thoughts – reactions, almost – to a phrase I had not heard until about three days ago.
1. In liminal horror the space itself is the source of the unease, not the ghosts or monsters that lurk within it. A still image of an empty room can evoke the appropriate sense of unease, partly because it is empty.
2. “It’s bigger on the inside…” Perhaps liminal horror is about spaces that should not be and that make no sense. A long corridor is creepy; a corridor that seems infinitely long is deeply unsettling. H.P. Lovecraft wrote about spaces with non-Euclidean geometry just as he referred to impossible colours. You might also think of the deliberately disconcerting geometry of Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Or even the land that somehow sits beyond the back of the wardrobe in the works of C.S. Lewis.
3. Do we hate these eerie spaces, or yearn for them? It’s a love-hate relationship. We call it liminal horror but there’s also a romantic allure about places that are silent, empty, blank… Where we might lose ourselves, slip between walls, and be left alone for two fucking minutes. In Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, the other liminal horror film currently doing the rounds, the protagonist finds himself on a subway station corridor that he soon learns is an impossible space and a trap. But at the beginning, for a moment, he is free from the noise and aggression of the city – and from his responsibilities. Did he perhaps want this?
4. Did Lucio Fulci get there first? I know, I know, I’m always on about Fulci’s 1981 film The Beyond, which I don’t even think is a good film, and certainly isn’t one I’d recommend to everyone. But the ending has the protagonists run down a staircase in a hospital and find themselves in the labyrinthine basement of a hotel from which they had earlier fled. They continue their flight until the basement opens up into an infinite, foggy plain strewn with shrouded corpses. That feels like liminal horror to me.
5. These are some other things that are coming to mind, but I don’t know if they’re liminal horror:
- the mausoleum in Phantasm
- the wasteland and abandoned industrial buildings of Stalker
- the near-abandoned apartment block in Dark Water
- the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead
- Dave Bowman’s tacky hotel room in space in 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Judgement City in Albert Brooks’s comedy Defending Your Life
- Being John Malkovich and the floor between 7 and 8
- that perfectly white room where Willie Wonka shrinks Mike Teavee
6. “Alright, cunt, what happens?” – Reece Shearsmith. Liminal horror as internet meme doesn’t need a plot, or characters. It can just be, “Whoah, look at this weird door I found,” or, “Check out this hallway!” But books, stories and films generally do require things to happen to people. But does this spoil the fun? Perhaps liminal horror is a rare sub-genre that might work best in virtual reality.
7. Oh, actually, never mind Fulci – perhaps Elizabeth Jane Howard got there first. At the end of her story ‘Three Miles Up’ from 1951 concludes with a canal boat exiting a channel not on the map into “a sheet, an infinity, of water stretched ahead; oily, silent, and still, as far as the eye could see, with no country edging it, nothing but water to the low grey sky above it.” Infinite, edgelesss and endless feel like the qualities we’re looking for here.
8. Are the spaces where liminal horror stories take place related to ideas of heaven, purgatory or hell? I mentioned Defending Your Life above which isn’t a horror film but, like the sitcom The Good Place which I’m sure it inspired, suggests that death might feel like being in a waiting room. “I’m in the waiting room now,” is something my mum actually says when pondering her mortality. Waiting rooms, like corridors, are spaces between spaces, checkpoints or chokepoints on a journey rather than the final destination.
9. Fog creates instant liminality. It erases the edges, swallows the horizon, silences the world, and leaves you floating in space. It turns any house into The House on the Borderland.
10. So, every single haunted house story is liminal horror? So, John Carpenter’s The Fog is liminal horror? So, any story where they find tunnels hidden beneath a building is liminal horror? Well, yes, maybe, I don’t know, that’s what I’m trying to work out. But perhaps the missing component in my thinking above is that the weird spaces in which liminal horror occurs need to be modern, or at least not antique. In liminal horror, the lights are probably on; they’re probably fluorescent; and they’re probably humming. They’re probably not domestic settings, either, but institutional: hotels, schools, transport hubs, office blocks. They’re bland, beige and functional. Is there some element of the Kafkaesque here – the fear of being lost in the system?
11. Liminal horror is in the eye of the beholder. When I wrote about the creepiness of hotels, someone on BlueSky got mad at me because they just didn’t understand what I was talking about. Hotels are nice! Stop saying things are uncanny when they’re not! It’s just a hallway. It’s just an empty space. It’s only a storeroom.
12. Sorry I keep using the word ‘liminal’. It’s one that many people avoid using these days. I usually avoid it myself. How else might we describe this sub-genre or trend? I’ve heard ‘analogue horror’ thrown around, referring to the use of filters to evoke VHS recordings and other vintage media. That’s not about spaces but it can help sell their reality and their feeling of being outside time. Today, I saw ‘ordinary horror’ for the first time, via Zachary Gillan, but Andrea Capra, the author of the book of that title, means something very specific: “the horror that haunts our world, and that we may encounter firsthand”. I feel some connections between liminal horror, analogue horror, and various forms of lo-fi ambient music – analogue hiss and crackle, ASMR-adjacent field recordings, a hypnotic waiting room quality. So, perhaps ambient horror would work, too.
My latest collection of stories Thin Places in Hard Concrete has a story about a motorway interchange and a recreation of a medieval palace in an underground bunker, among other contenders for the liminal horror tag. It’s available as an eBook or paperback from Amazon wherever you are. For starters, here’s where you’ll find it if you’re in the UK or US:
I’ve chosen not to apply digital rights management (DRM) to the eBook file so you can download it as an ePub file or PDF to read on whichever device you like, such as a Kobo.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 