What are ‘liminal spaces’? How an internet aesthetic of empty rooms conquered horror

A ‘liminal space’ is a place caught between purposes — a school hallway after the last bell, a deserted shopping mall, a hotel corridor at 3 a.m., a swimming pool drained of swimmers. The word comes from the Latin limen, ‘threshold,’ and that is exactly the feeling these images trade on: somewhere you are meant to pass through, never to linger. Photographed empty and lit by humming fluorescents, such places carry a strange double charge — warm nostalgia for somewhere you half-remember, and a low dread that something is wrong. Over the past five years that sensation has hardened from a niche internet mood into one of the most bankable aesthetics in horror.

The unease is structural, not supernatural. The cultural critic Mark Fisher called it ‘the eerie’ — a failure of presence, the wrongness of a space that should be full and isn’t. A classroom implies students; a food court implies a crowd. Strip the people out and the architecture starts to feel like a stage after the play has ended, or a memory you cannot quite place. The aesthetic’s real power is that it needs no monster to frighten; the absence is the threat.

The idea has deep roots — the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, and later Victor Turner, used ‘liminality’ to describe the disorienting in-between stage of a rite of passage — but its modern, image-driven form was born online. On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan’s paranormal board /x/ asked others to post pictures that simply felt ‘off,’ attaching a yellowed, empty carpeted room (in reality a renovation snapshot from a furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin). A reply named it: you ‘noclip’ out of reality and fall into the Backrooms, an endless maze of buzzing emptiness. A wiki followed within weeks, expanding the concept into ‘levels’ and ‘entities,’ and the lockdowns of 2020 — which turned real malls, schools and airports into ghost towns — supercharged the whole vocabulary.

The Backrooms became the flagship of a sprawling family: dreamcore and weirdcore, the waterlogged ‘poolrooms,’ and the VHS-degraded storytelling of analog-horror series such as ‘Local 58’ and ‘The Mandela Catalogue.’ What unites them is a refusal of spectacle. They weaponize the mundane — drop ceilings, exit signs, motel wallpaper — and let the viewer’s own discomfort with transitional, depersonalized spaces do the work.

For cinema, the turning point came in 2022, when a 16-year-old named Kane Parsons turned the Backrooms into a found-footage series on his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, that drew tens of millions of views. A24 bet on him, and the gamble paid off: Parsons’ feature ‘Backrooms’, made for under $10 million, has grossed more than $200 million worldwide and made him the youngest director ever to top the domestic box office. An aesthetic invented anonymously on a message board now anchors a theatrical franchise.

Its influence runs wider than one hit. The same logic — that the buildings we move through without thinking can curdle into nightmares — drives the recent vogue for the corporate office as a space of horror, from ‘Severance’ to a wave of workplace thrillers. Liminality has quietly become Hollywood’s shorthand for modern unease.

The irony is hard to miss: the most photographed empty rooms of the decade started with a single snapshot of a Wisconsin furniture store mid-renovation — proof that the scariest place in modern horror is the one you have walked through a thousand times without ever looking up.

Tags: a24, Kane Parsons