Nowhere, Forever: How Liminal Spaces Became Horror's New Obsession

Long before run-down shopping malls, abandoned school buildings and the endless corridors of shuttered factories became the landscape of horror media, they existed in very real contexts. This meant the loss of livelihoods, fractured communities and demographics that had shifted beyond support. They weren't threatening, they were...empty. Places where people bustled, toiled and congregated. Now, they lay silent and empty. Empty isn't dangerous, until it is.

The roots of the word "liminal" are Latin. Limen means "threshold". In the early 1900s, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep used the word and the concept to describe rites of passage. Moving from one social state to another. It would later be adapted to describe transitional states where ordinary structures and identities fall away. It is in this meaning that the true basis for how we view liminal spaces can really start to come into focus.

Liminal horror isn't powered by some inherent fear of empty space. It's frightening because it represents a loss of purpose for something we subconsciously feel should still have one. We struggle to reconcile that the purpose has broken down when clearly the framework still exists. It places us at a threshold we didn't expect.

But thresholds have existed in horror LONG before the current trend of "liminal spaces". Think of the long, spiraling staircases into the bowels of Castle Dracula. Romero's dead shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. The never-ending rooms of Cube. What those spaces had in common was their unreliability. We just didn’t have a convenient name for what they were doing to us. Uneasy. Unsafe. Scared.

What makes liminal space horror so jarring is its uncanniness. Fluorescent hallways aren't frightening when they are full of people. They are frightening when they're empty. You KNOW something or someone should be there but they are absent. You usually know how you got into that hallway, but what if you couldn't remember? Traditional horror thrives when it adds something unexpected to a familiar place. Liminal horror doubles down by leaving a void. A jump scare that never leaves the ground. An expectation that is subverted by design. When liminal horror is at its strongest, its main weapon is removing the one thing we always expect to find...people.

A Memory of Somewhere

But why has liminal horror boomed so much over the last two decades? Yes, there are great storytellers and we live in the most advanced effects age ever but those are really minor players. Liminal horror has a unique ability to tap into the memory architecture of those who remember what these spaces used to be. It's not castles or abandoned labs or run-down villages. It's shopping centers, schools, indoor playgrounds. A sizable list of places that hold core memories for many of us.

Think of the "city map" carpet (you know the one!). The squeak of your old high school gym floor. The forgotten playground you used to spend hours at every summer. These places are memories with all of their identifying information stripped clean. Nostalgia is a powerful accelerant for horror. That horror now is fed by anxiety, dread, isolation and most notably, confusion.

Video Games Taught Us To Wander

One of the premises of "Backrooms" is that you can "noclip" out of reality. You can just sort of pop through a wall into a place that exists even though it shouldn't be accessible. It's the 'out of the bubble' area that we aren't meant to know.

Early games were already teaching players the strange thrill of finding spaces that seemed to exist outside the expected rules. Even the hidden Warp Zone in Super Mario Bros. could feel like discovering something behind the game’s reality rather than part of it. It wasn't scary. It was by design, but it FELT like you had broken a rule of the game's reality.

Over time, we would start to get video games that used what we would now recognize as liminal horror to create atmosphere. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Dead Rising, pretty much the entire survival horror catalog. Yes, these games have monsters and great effects but they also relied on you playing in a dark room as you traversed a landscape that felt familiar but wasn't what you expressly knew. A house, a mall, a resort, a neighborhood. Developers relied on that...ambiance...as much as they did quick time events and jump scares.

As game-development tools became cheaper and more accessible, games would have noclip areas that were NOT given a purpose. Unfinished renders, broken code and even just poor level design. This allowed you into a space you didn't belong. Being able to see the machinery underneath the world is very adjacent to liminal horror.

The Internet Assembles The Ingredients

The early 2010s is where we start to see the coming together of what would create the modern liminal horror genre. We had the video games but in that era we started to see the mainstreaming of urban exploring, analog horror, creepypastas and the ability to share scary or unsettling images that had no explanation or expressed purpose.

Dozens of touched-up pictures circulated across the internet and message boards. An empty nursery, enhanced with grayscale, some filters and other effects, became a shared experience. A communal unease. We knew it wasn't OUR nursery but it was unsettling. We all hated it. What made it liminal was that we couldn't point out why we hated it but rather what we hated was that it was missing something. It was uncanny.

The Backrooms Gives The Feeling A Mythology

In 2019, a 4chan thread asking for unsettling images produced the now-famous yellow-room photograph. Another anonymous poster added the tiny piece of fiction about accidentally "noclipping" out of reality and becoming trapped in an enormous maze of fluorescent rooms. Researchers now discuss the Backrooms as a form of participatory digital urban legend. It gave power to the concept we had been spoon-fed over the previous century.

The Backrooms didn't invent liminal horror. It didn't create our fascination with these spaces. It did something else: it crystallized it.

The yellow room became a stand-in for all of those empty rooms we experienced, whether digitally, in books, movies or real life. The feeling that liminal spaces gave us now had an icon. It established lore. The premise was fluid, everyone had a chance to contribute and participate. That's what separates Backrooms from The Funhouse or Waxwork or even movies like Hostel. There is no defined space. Every single participant could add a "backroom" based on their own interpretation.

When Reality Became Liminal

Right after the origin point in 2019 of The Backrooms, the world was suddenly thrust into a situation that immediately created a worldwide liminal space. The COVID pandemic created very real, and very plentiful, liminal spaces. Empty schools, deserted airports, you could even feel the lessening of people on the roads. It was eerie. People weren't sharing enhanced photos or old internet memes. These were actual photos taken in real time.

Millions of people now understood exactly how unsettling it was to encounter a familiar place operating without its expected population. COVID didn't create the liminal obsession, but it lowered the bar of entry for everyone who now had firsthand experience of how unsettling the world had become.

Reality had briefly acquired Backrooms lighting.

Kane Pixels Makes The Room Move

Fast forward to 2022. Kane Parsons (Pixels being his digital moniker) releases "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" on YouTube. At just 16, Parsons combined the mythology, aesthetic and environment into something startlingly cohesive. This turned static images into narrative horror.

He made the space itself the attraction and the antagonist. You can't escape literal space. Parsons sharpened the concept that it is not necessarily what is chasing you, it's that the hallway is not ending. Subverting your expectation for an escape and leaving only the creeping realization that there is an escape, you just don't know where. In 2026, Backrooms completes that journey into the mainstream with Parsons directing the concept's leap to feature film.

Why Are We Still Obsessed?

There are five big reasons why liminal horror resonates with us and seemingly refuses to relent.

Nostalgia: Liminal horror pulls at our shared experiences. It shows us something safe and familiar but on further inspection, it shifts into something faceless that resembles memory but quickly becomes unplaceable.

Isolation: These are spaces created to hold people that simply…don't. The architecture promises crowds, conversation and movement. Their absence tears at that expectation, and the pit in our stomach grows because we know someone should be here.

Uncertainty: Nothing presents danger in an empty space so our brains give us our own boogeyman.

Digital Familiarity: Games have trained us to recognize the rules of constructed spaces. Walls are boundaries. Hallways lead somewhere. Levels end. Liminal horror exploits that conditioning by presenting spaces that look constructed but refuse to obey the rules we've learned to expect.

Loss: At the heart of liminal horror is loss. Spaces we once held dear now bleak and uninhabited. The loss of familiarity and the safety it provides clings to us.

But perhaps the biggest reason is that we now live in a liminal era. Contemporary life is perhaps the purest example of being in the "threshold". Whether that's the continued shift from physical to digital and the overall warp speed ramp of technology, or the realization that the post-pandemic world is never going to return us to that 2019 life. Public spaces are being eliminated for private actors. Physical spaces increasingly blur into the same sanitized aesthetic, while more and more of our lives migrate somewhere digital. Everything in our external lives seems to be shifting alongside us as we age. We all are scared of forgetting the importance of locations, losing people we love, dampening the significance of events or even the raw memories themselves.

Maybe the reason the empty hallway bothers us isn't that we think something is waiting at the other end. Maybe it's because we recognize the hallway. We just can't remember from where.

Liminal horror works because the place doesn't feel unknown. It feels forgotten.