10 Liminal Space Horror Shows & Movies To Watch Before The Backrooms
Although nondescript and benign, there is something eerie about being alone in places such as hotel hallways, empty schools, stairwells, and other similar locations.
The reason for this strange sensation is that all of these places fall under the banner of liminal spaces. Defined as transitional and in-between places, liminal spaces evoke an eerie, out-of-time feeling when focused on for too long. They tend to be areas that people pay no attention to, passing through them to reach their destination; it is only when you stop midway that the creeping, weird sensations begin to set in.
When given attention, liminal spaces can be pretty scary, and so it is no surprise that there is an entire subgenre of horror movies dedicated to conjuring up that same terror. The most eagerly anticipated entry is Kane Parsons The Backrooms. Inspired by the internet urban legend about an extradimensional expanse of empty rooms accessed by exiting reality, the film is an adaptation of Parsons’ YouTube series on the same topic.
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, Backrooms chronicles events following the appearance of a strange doorway in the basement of a furniture showroom. With A24 behind the project, the film looks set to bring liminal space horror to the forefront of genre conversations.
Everyone is familiar with horror subgenres such as the slasher or zombie movie, but few will understand what liminal horror means, and may need educating. With that in mind, here is a collection of some of the most intriguing liminal space horror movies and shows that are available to watch in preparation for the release of Backrooms.
Before buying tickets to Kane Parsons’ The Backrooms movie, one absolutely vital piece of viewing is his YouTube series, Backrooms. Piggy-backing off of the internet chatter about the rumoured otherworld, Parsons developed an online miniseries that dug into the phenomena. Primarily unfolding in the ‘90s, the internet show is centred around a fictional research institution called Async as they attempt to study the newly discovered Backrooms – or Complex as it is known in the series.
Some of the episodes are exceptionally creepy, but none more so than the debut episode that went viral, currently clocking 72 million views on YouTube. This video has repeatedly been hailed as the ‘scariest thing on the internet’, and a glance at the sub-ten-minute footage confirms that.
Of all the known liminal spaces, hotel hallways seem to be the kind that unsettle most people. Depending on the time of day, these spaces are almost always empty, and that quietness creates discomfort, as does the thought that somebody might spring up out of nowhere. They also work at disorientating the user as each floor often has the same decor, and depending on the hotel, tends to have a warren and labyrinthine set-up, causing guests to sometimes end up lost on the way to their room. The unease created within an empty hotel is demonstrated expertly in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
As Jack Torrance and his family move into the Overlook Hotel to be its custodians for the off-season, events take an unexpected turn. Filled with shots of seemingly never-ending hallways and riffing on the fear that something can pop up out of nowhere, The Shining is a great early example of liminal space horror.
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamirink tapped into the liminal space that is the middle of the night. The abstract story sees two young children become trapped inside their house after being left alone overnight. Whilst physical places are the more well-known side of liminal spaces, the term can also apply to psychological ones, and there is nothing more frightening than wandering the house in the dead of night. Suddenly, everything that was normal in the daylight takes on a sinister edge; Skinamirink nails this feeling.
In terms of traditional scares, Skinamrink has none, with Ball somehow generating fear out of the most mundane shots. Despite there not being any identifiable threat to the children, Ball’s movie is soaked in dread, the movie attacking the viewer on a subconscious level. One of the less accessible liminal horror films, Skinamirink is one to work up to rather than start with.
Director Jane Schoenbrun is one of the most exciting voices working within genre cinema right now. If you have yet to watch We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, please correct that at your earliest convenience. The story follows a teenage girl, Casey, whose world starts to unravel after she begins playing an online horror game. Blurring fantasy and reality is a key component of liminal horror, and once Casey has signed up to the game, she and the audience begin questioning everything.
Add to that the hypnotic allure of the internet and screens, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair induces an almost trancelike state on the viewer to the point you come away wondering if you might just have transcended to the Backrooms for a few moments.
Whilst everyone knows that The Blair Witch Project is a pioneer of found-footage horror, few realise that it also falls under the umbrella of liminal space horror. The film famously tells of three film students who go missing while shooting a documentary in the Maryland woods about the myth of the Blair Witch. Told through the footage found after their disappearance, The Blair Witch Project shows their initial documentary work before becoming a survival story as the three become lost in the woods.
It is in this section, as the trio find themselves seemingly trapped in a loop, unable to find their bearings and repeatedly returning to the same points, that fulfils the liminal space theme. A classic horror movie for a reason, The Blair Witch Project is always worth a rewatch, but especially now through the liminal space lens.
Liminal spaces exist not only in the corporeal world but also in the metaphysical, with dreams being a perfect example. Dreams are often disorientating, jumping around in time, featuring strange elements, or simply creating vast spaces within which the dreamer becomes trapped. In this way, dreams, or more specifically nightmares, are perhaps the closest people will come to experiencing something akin to the creepypasta Backroom stories.
The disquietening sensation of the dream world is exemplified excellently in Anthony Scott Burns’ Come True. Leaning closer to sci-fi than horror, Come True follows teen Sarah as she enlists in a strange sleep study. Once enrolled, she finds reality mixing with her dreams, something that proves very dangerous when a dark figure from her nightmares begins stalking her. Not only do the narrative and visuals scream liminal space, so too does the infectious score that lulls the audience under its spell.
Much like Skinamirink, The Outwaters is an acquired taste. Covering off both found-footage and liminal spaces, The Outwaters is a textbook example of disorientating the viewer. The first half of The Outwaters is fairly mundane, the footage capturing the pre-production for shooting a music video in the Californian desert.
Once the crew arrives in the desert, however, The Outwaters goes completely insane. The camera distorts, moves around, and more often than not, restricts exactly what the viewer can see, causing immense confusion and a healthy frisson of fear.
Starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, Vivarium follows a young married couple as they move from the city to the suburbs. Here, all the streets and houses are identical, and weirdly, there seems to be no way to leave. The pair repeatedly try to leave the area, but each time they do, they find that they have driven in circles, and it soon becomes clear that something or someone does not want them to go.
Houses once had a lot of character and individuality, but these days housing estates are built from the same cookie-cutter, and wandering through these developments would be another example of a liminal space. Vivarium also has some far stranger events, but those surprises are best kept secret to ensure maximum enjoyment on a first-time viewing.
Directed by David Robert Mitchell, It Follows is a modern horror classic. The cursed story finds teenager Jay (played by Maika Monroe), the latest recipient of an STD; that’s a ‘sexually transmitted demon’. As Jay is continually stalked by the shape-shifting entity, she and her friends frantically search for a way to save her. It Follows does not feature stairways or long corridors, but fits into the liminal space horror realm due to its weird ‘out-of-time’ feeling.
When watching It Follows, it is impossible to identify the time period it is set in. This is because there are elements from the past, present, and to some clamshell e-reader degree, future. Somehow, the film occurs ‘out of time’, and watching it unfold in such a manner builds into the movie's strangeness.
When it comes to a setting for a liminal horror film, they don’t come more perfect than the set-up in Cube. The late ‘90s sci-fi horror is rightly a cult classic, and generated a sequel, prequel, and Japanese remake, proving that liminal space genre content is franchiseable. In Cube, a group of strangers awaken in a cuboid room. None of them recalls how they got there, and they begin to work together to find a way out. However, their cube is surrounded by other identical rooms (save for the colour). Worse still, some of them have been equipped with deadly boobytraps.
With each room appearing identical, the strangers must work together to figure out how to best navigate their situation. In addition to being a great sci-fi horror, Cube digs into the human psyche and might just be the best example of the toll that simply existing within an endless liminal space can take.
