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The Unsettling Comfort of Liminal Spaces

Updated Published
Vivialis Narvaez Rodriguez Student Contributor, University of Puerto Rico - Rio Piedras
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UPR chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

Liminal spaces are a phenomenon that rose to prominence on social media during the pandemic. You might’ve seen them all over: photo compilations, videos titled “strangely familiar places with unsettling music” might’ve popped up on your FYP, or maybe pictures of solitary houses on strangely empty fields of grass and eternally blue skies. You probably came across the infamous “Backrooms” image that spawned a completely new genre of internet horror. But what exactly are they? And why do they cause this strangely nostalgic sense of horror in their audience?

Liminal Spaces – Scott Davies

(Retrieved from Scott Davies)

What does it mean for something to be liminal?

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, this is the definition of the word “liminal” that we will be using: “of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition: in-between, transitional.” 

In my own words, liminality is being stuck between what is and what will be. It’s a place in time and space and an emotion; a transitional state that is purely metaphorical and based on perception. Life, by definition, is liminal in nature. 

Now, what does this have to do with pictures of empty rooms and computer wallpapers? 

Memories and empty spaces

While liminal spaces grew in popularity during the pandemic, along with adjacent aesthetics such as dreamcore and weirdcore (as well as their controversial subcategory, traumacore, which I will not be getting into), liminal spaces have been around for much longer. The original Backrooms image itself had been circling 4chan since 2012. 

In general, these images don’t have much in common, but they do follow some specific trends. They’re usually low quality images of a space that should be full of people, but is empty for whatever reason. A few examples are: pictures of run down malls, empty houses, abandoned kids’ play places. Places that should feel familiar, but are in a time of day or a state that you usually don’t experience them in. This elicits an uncanny effect, but for a lot of people it also gives them a sense of nostalgia. 

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

You may notice a lot of pictures you may see under “liminal spaces” don’t literally adhere to the definition we set in the beginning. How is a house transitory if it’s a permanent residence? How is a mall between two states of being? And I think to answer this you may need to look at it in a more metaphorical sense. 

Many of these pictures seem to be older, or are made to look as such intentionally. A good chunk of them feature elements from the late 90’s and 2000’s. A lot of them hearken back to the idea of childhood. The transitory state isn’t referring to the physical place, but the time in your life to which it belonged to. That is why looking at them might feel both uneasy and comforting; they represent a sort of corrupted memory. 

Dreamcore and Windows wallpapers

Dreamcore is a subcategory of liminal space imagery that I feel is quite important to mention. They tend to follow a similar formula to liminal space imagery, but instead of referencing real physical locations, they are made to look like locations you might find in a dream. Many of these are computer generated and made by digital artists, or are edited to look unsettling using black voids and words. 

Some examples of dreamcore style images:

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

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(Retrieved from Pinterest)

Now, I personally find these to be a tad more unsettling. They tend to play into the uncanny aspects of the genre rather than the comforting ones, but they’re still worth exploring. Many of them seem to implement a lot of childhood elements such as playgrounds and older video games. In fact, as someone who grew up playing with DSI consoles, one of my favorite examples has to be this one taken from Super Mario 64:

(Retrieved from Pinterest)

The Backrooms:

Liminal spaces as a genre is something I find deeply interesting because of the ideas that it presents. It can very easily feel nostalgic and comforting. They hearken back to memories you can’t quite remember, but that remain fond nonetheless. 

That said, you can’t really deny the fact that a lot of these images are unsettling. These run down malls feel cavernous and empty, yet somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Anything could be hiding in those dark shadows in the background. 

The Backrooms image is a perfect example of this with its emptiness, its fluorescent lights, and the endlessly repeating yellow wallpaper. It is an office, you know this, but it turns sinister when out of context. You can almost smell the stale, suffocating air. You can hear the AC, distantly clattering away, having needed replacement a long time ago, blowing outmore mold than air into the labyrinth of empty cubicles. It makes you wonder “do these hallways end?” 

So what happens if they don’t? 

The Backrooms were born in May 2019 in a random unsettling images thread on 4chan, after someone posted the iconic image. 

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(Retrieved from wikidot)

An anonymous user replied some time after: 

 “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, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

From here, a mythos was born. Similar to the SCP foundation, the Backrooms became a legend built upon by countless internet users, not to mention the countless video game adaptations as well as the “Backrooms Found Footage” series on YouTube by Kane Pixels. 

Thousands of levels spiraling into oblivion, almond water running through different areas, keeping the ones who find it from dying of thirst (a piece of lore spawned off of a misunderstanding of the idea that the Backrooms smell like almonds, which was a reference to the smell of cyanide). Investigators who devote their lives to making sense of the endless landscape, entities that roam the levels, varying in danger. Internet users have spun stories of this horrifying sub dimension into existence.

The Backrooms unfortunately met a similar downfall to Slenderman: too much lore rendering the horror null. A big part of horror is dread, the terror of not knowing. The Backrooms is strangely well documented, but, no matter how many shapeless entities and levels you add, it will never be scarier than that initial single idea of an endless, inescapable nothing. 

This shouldn’t negate how interesting diving into the expansive lore can be. I myself have spent countless hours watching YouTube videos and scouring the wiki. It’s a collective internet group project that appeals to a very human part inside oneself that is to add to preexisting stories that you love.

Conclusion:

Liminal spaces came to popularity at a time when a lot of people were desperately looking for an escape to isolation, and were there at the perfect time for this genre to take off. This imagery offers a sense of nostalgia that you only really get from trying to recall a far away dream long after you’ve woken up. They represent fragments of memory that you can’t quite grasp, but still feel fond of. Liminal spaces are also a reminder that time is fleeting, and life is transitory.

On the less philosophical side, they’re just cool to look at. I’ve begun an album on my phone of pictures I think could be liminal spaces; they might represent memories, but they also look kind of creepy and I like that. 

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Here’s one I took in a nearly empty museum exhibit. 

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Here’s another one I took at the train station at 6:30AM. 

In the end, liminal spaces are what you make of them. They can be art, or they can just be old pictures of malls and pools that shouldn’t exist. 

Vivialis Narvaez is a junior writer for the UPR Rio Piedras chapter of Her Campus. They cover various topics surrounding different types of media such as video games, movies, and books with the occasional article on archeology. Outside of Her Campus, Vivi studies anthropology with an emphasis in archeology at UPR Rio Piedras. They've also volunteered at the Museum of History, Anthropology, and Art located within the UPR Rio Piedras university campus. Vivi enjoys creating stories through writing and creating art. When they aren’t finding new ways of torturing their original characters or making them kiss, they also like playing video games, watching Asian dramas, reading fantasy and horror books, and occasionally failing at crochet. On a typical day off, you might find them watching one of the many, many TV shows they started and might never finish or possibly watching YouTube video essays while drawing.