Liminal Spaces and the Layers of Dread
Deep dive into Liminal Spaces, trying to answer these questions:
1. Why Liminal Spaces became a modern horror?
2. Which place do they take on the grand map of the human fear?
3. How does this grand map of human fear look like?
4. What may come next after Liminal Spaces?
You can watch this video with my slow-paced narration or read the same as an article below.
Why Liminal Spaces? Personal story
A few months ago I got into the car accident. The car was damaged beyond repair, but luckily I myself wasn’t. I got a pelvis fracture, but the one that didn’t need surgery. I just needed to stay in bed for a while so my body could repair itself. So I spent a few weeks in a public hospital. Sure I wasn’t alone there. It was a room full of people and sometimes they annoyed me with their talks during the day.
But night, it was different. My bed was next to a big window and probably it was the best place in the room. That winter was exceptionally snowy. I could half sit on my bed and look outside, watching big snowflakes spiraling down in an endless flow. Illuminated by the cold blue glow of the street lamp.
And then, in the dead of night, one thing struck my mind: This state I’m in right now is not exactly living my life, nor it is the opposite. It is something in between. Just existence with no plans, no checklists and no deadlines. And this is exact definition of liminal. The state in between. And that exact feeling I captured there, I can also find in this countless images and videos on liminal spaces.
The question I asked to myself: why liminal spaces became the modern horror, which place do they occupy on the grand map of the human fear? And how does this grand map look like after all?
This last question really haunted my mind. After a few weeks and several iterations I came up with this: the thing I call The Domains of Fear.
The Domains of Human Fear
This is something like a mental map of the human fears and we’ll try to view it from the different angles.
Of course it’s not perfect but still I think it’s interesting enough to give it away. Maybe someone will take inspiration from it.
The first thing here is these domains are not the things we fear, not exactly. These are distinct types of fear that cannot be reduced to one another; or maybe it’s right to call them shapes of human fear.
We have two areas here: the Given World and the Man-made World. The given world contains the Greater World, the Mind and the human Body, which touches the Mind but is also a part of the Greater World. The Man-made World has all the fears related to our social and artificial reality: Belonging & Order, Systems, Architecture and Technology.
Please note that I tried to paint this picture “in a large strokes”; of course, these domains can be subdivided and expanded with further details.
Timeline
This is the timeline, another viewing angle of the same domains. It shows how different types of fear evolved with the course of the human history.
The Body
Firstly, the Body domain. It covers animal-level fears, the ones that come from our animal nature. It’s the fear of direct physical harm, the fear of the body like pain, disease and decay. This is the very ancient, concrete and personal fear and it’s still with us in the 21st century, just not on the surface. The abundance of bloody horror and jump scares in 3D games prove this point.
I also put here fear of the dark and fear of being vulnerable in the open places, since it has the same ancient roots.
Belonging and Order
The next one is called Belonging and Order. It’s about belonging to a group, your place in society and the things you consider right and normal. This is the fear of losing or breaking any of this, either by your own actions or by actions from other people.
The most ancient version of this fear is the fear of being exiled from the group. For the hunter-gatherer society that meant imminent death. In the middle ages the fears related to religion and church appeared. Heresy, excommunication, impurity, public shame and dishonor. Later in the Renaissance, when the religion’s grip on the minds of people loosened a bit, other things came to the front: fear of losing reputation and becoming outsider. 21st century brought new “advancements” here: cancel culture, various types of online shaming, bullying and trolling.
Take a look at these fears from left to the right. One thing that captured my eye here it’s most of the old fears remain, so it’s more like layers on top of layers, rather than one thing replacing another. This is the concept I refer to, when I say “layers of dread” in the title.
The Greater World
The Greater World is everything beyond the Man-Made World: nature, wilderness, night sky, underworld, and finally the whole Universe. But important thing here – it is not the universe itself, but the way we conceptualize it according to our society, religion and the shared knowledge. This is the fear of the big unknown, often mixed with awe. Supernatural things and entities also fit here, if they are part of of the shared model of the Universe: spirits, ghosts, angels and daemons, aliens and so on. For the more detailed map, I think it would be good to separate natural from supernatural, but for now we’ll keep them in this one broad domain.
Of course, the shared model of the Universe changed many times through the human history. For the primal society, it was filled with wilderness, natural forces and spirits. In the middle ages the universe had Earth in the center with the sun and all planets revolving around, Heaven on the outside and Hell inside the Earth. 20th century brought the Big Bang theory, which expanded our shared model of the universe profoundly. Also a new type of fear: a tiny insignificant human presence in vast, cold and indifferent universe, largely attributed to H.P. Lovecraft. And from my perspective the modern pinnacle of this type of fear in literature is the “Three Body Problem” trilogy by Liu Cixin.
Mind / Inner World
Now, the next domain of fear is the Mind or the Inner World. As our picture of the universe exploded with a Big Bang theory, the shared model of our mind exploded with the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and many others. The mind itself turned into the realm of various forces and hidden desires. This went full scale in the late 19th century with the first prominent example “Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. What happened later is described by the term “psychologization of horror”. Evil no longer comes from the outside, but the mind itself becomes a haunted space. My favorite book that fits into this domain is “Operators and Things, the inner life of a schizophrenic” by Barbara O’Brien.
Systems
This embodies fear of the various bureaucratic institutions, the pinnacle of this type of horror is Kafka’s “The Trial”. This is a masterpiece in a way it delivers this message: The system doesn’t need to hate you in order to process you. Modern corporations tap on the same nerve, although it might feel less intense. And most of the conspiracy theories sit here.
Modern shades of this horror include omnipresent surveillance and algorithmic judgment, digital bureaucratic systems of the 21st century.
Technology
Lots of things here but to name just a few:
- industrial warfare with mass-produced weapons and uniforms, treating soldiers as the replaceable units
- Bioweapons and nuclear weapons of mass destruction
- Inventions and opaque technological forces going out of control
- Artificial Intelligence, the pinnacle of technology in many ways
Fear in Architecture
The attachment of architecture to the things we fear became stronger and stronger the last few centuries. In the early 18th century Gothic the real horror is usually not the castle itself. The castle is only the stage where older fears play: things like tyranny, family secrets, inheritance and so on. The corridors, ruins and locked rooms matter only because they give these fears a common setting and the background. But later notable thing happens. Gothic space turns from background into a medium of fear: not just a place where horror happens, but a place that seems to store and transmit dread. Finally, in the latest Gothic, architecture itself begins to generate dread, as if ancient walls, empty chambers and decaying structures can shape the mind and trap the soul.
This is one strong bridge to the liminal spaces. Let me put it slightly different way: as the architecture surrounding us becomes our environment, it no longer can be just the background. It inevitably becomes charged with emotions and images. For the Gothic genre these are images of the past, the ancestral evil that is still trapped inside these walls. In the liminal genre this may be a well-lit office space, which evokes emotions of alienation, engraved into these carpets, desks and fluorescent lamps.
Look at this image:
Hardly anyone will find it comforting, neutral at best. But it’s not liminal yet. This is just a typical office space, though maybe a bit exaggerated.
Now let’s remove people and most of the stuff from the tables here:
What do you feel now looking at this image? Eerie, uneasy but still familiar. Like the haunted castle, these walls and the furniture in this place still hold the echoes of its missing essence.
This is how the mundane architecture may haunt us.
Why Liminal Spaces hit so hard?
Finally the question: Why liminal spaces hit so hard, why they became a modern horror? And my answer is this: it’s because they tap on the different domains of human fear all at once. Let’s unwrap it.
Firstly, the Body domain, the animal type of fear. At the first glance nothing should be here, because there is no direct physical threat in liminal spaces. Aside from monsters in Backrooms which I’m personally not buying. But if we look closer, lots of people say they have a feeling somebody’s watching, especially in 3D games of the liminal genre, which went supernova the recent years. And this fear of nowhere to hide is the direct tap on the animal type of fear. The ancient fear of vulnerability that something is lurking out there to get you.
Next the domain – Belonging and Order, also strong. The order of things in the public places is the presence of people, and there is no one here right now,the order is broken. Not clear if this is your fault or not, but you’re here alone, exiled, maybe even forever.
The Greater World domain, here also check. Many liminal spaces are depicted as vast and endless. Remember 600 million square miles from the Backrooms? Not all liminal spaces do this, but the most terrifying ones do. And not only that, Backrooms try to bend your picture of the whole reality. If this is kind of backstage to reality, and this is huge, which one is actually the most important of the two? Maybe Backrooms is the main reality and the world as we know it is just the byproduct of it?
This also taps a little into the Mind domain. This all seems so crazy, so you begin to question not only your reality, but your sanity as well.
Then, of course, the Architecture. Public and corporate spaces that are designed to have people in them, now they sit completely empty. Not dead though: the lights are still on, the elevators are still operating, the loudspeakers deliver some announcements. Like these places are waiting for people to join in, but they never come. And the corporate type liminal spaces are the most dreadful as I think. The Backrooms, the most popular liminal horror, clearly falls into the corporate category. Here empty corporate spaces blend with the fear of bureaucratic systems, that are presented by the corporations.
Maybe just the Technology domain is not present here, just yet. But please stay in your seats, the journey is not over.
So the main thing I found here is that liminal spaces are tapping into multiple domains of fear, almost all of them. And I think this multi-domain nature of liminal fear is what makes it so deep and multi-dimensional. And when we add nostalgic and comforting aspects on top of that, it becomes even more complex, dreadful, uneasy, but somewhat nostalgic and comforting at the same time. And this is my answer to why liminal spaces hit so hard.
Dead City (scary story)
Before we fantasize about what can come next after liminal spaces, let me tell you one short story. This is by famous modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin, the story is called “Blue Lantern”.
The story is about the boys at the age of about 10, who spend their time at a summer camp. And before going to bed, in the dark, they tell each other scary stories, as many kids do in this age.
So this is the story:
A man returns home from a long business trip to his home city. Upon arrival he noticed something sinister: all the people in the city are dead.
– What do you mean by dead? Are they lying dead on the streets? (asks another boy).
– No, they’re walking and talking and look normal.
– How does he know they’re dead then? (asks the same boy).
– I don’t know. It’s he who knows it, not me. Just somehow he knows that all the people around are dead.
And the first boy continues this story.
So the man returns home and sees that his wife is dead too. He doesn’t dare to ask her about this. He’s too terrified. So they exchange the casual phrases and the life goes on.
The man goes to work and there everyone’s dead too. A few weeks pass then he can no longer hold it and he asks his wife:
– Do you know that you’re dead?
– Yes, I do.
– And do you know that everyone else in this city is dead?
– Yes.
Then his wife asks him:
– And do you know why I’m dead and why everyone else around is dead?
The blood stands still in the man’s veins but still he replies:
– No, tell me.
– This is because you’re dead yourself.
What is next after Liminal Spaces?
This story is very simple but still I find it dreadful. But let’s get back to liminal spaces and what may come next after them.
I see almost a straight line here and to a great extent it’s already happening. We can draw a line from the Gothic to the liminal spaces if we say that the haunted castle in the Gothic horror is like the decaying corpse of what it once was. But still somehow holding its ancestral evil. The liminal office space is not a corpse, but a shell of what it once was. If we compare it to the human body, I think today the shell of the body is more creepy than just a corpse. Think robots. If we transfer this analogy to the architecture, the shell of the office space is more creepy than the abandoned office space.
But this dread can go even deeper. If liminal spaces are the uncanny valley of the architecture, this new type of dread will be the uncanny valley of the social interaction.
Imagine the city, where life goes as normal. People are there, malls and shops are working, everyone greets you and there are usual small talks, but, once you try to go a bit deeper and recognize a human behind these interactions, you hit the impenetrable barrier.
People are there, but something essential about them is gone. This is not necessarily about the world populated with androids indistinguishable from humans on the outside. It may be that people themselves lose their essence and become dead, as in our scary story. We can already see the manifestations of this. You heard of them.
Dead internet theory, for example, which states that the internet itself is already dead. There is no real human presence, just bots. It’s like the dead city from our story, but it’s online version.
Let’s take another simple thing anyone uses daily: the Google search. These days it offers you the AI generated response. If you accept it, it strips the real human traffic from the website this information was taken from.
To illustrate the implications of this, let me amplify it, just a little bit. Imagine that instead of text messaging your friend you ask your AI assistant if he’s okay. AI assistant texts your friend, yet another AI assistant responds on his side and you finally get the response. The communication is there, but the human connection is gone. This is the shell of once existent social interaction, just like the liminal spaces are the shell of human public and corporate spaces.
Another thing: you probably heard of the attempts to recreate deceased people with AI, using their digital trails. All their posts and images online. Digital shells of once real people.
In face of this, liminal spaces feel almost cozy to me.
I don’t know which form this type of dread will take and will there be a certain form that will explode like liminal spaces did, but this is my answer to the question what may come after the liminal spaces and how it will be shaped by AI: this will be something like the dead city from the scary story above, looking normal on the outside, but lacking its essence, just the shell of the former self.
If you find it interesting or you’d like me to expand on these things, please leave comments to the video in the top of this page. This way I’ll know that my efforts to make this video were not in vain.