The Liminal Familiar, Unfamiliar

We all have that distinct memory, don’t we? You awake in the middle of the night to the soft blue glow of the television static, just barely able to see out in front of you. Not quite fully cognizant yet, but not dreaming either, shapes take form in the shadows, a long tall figure, someone slumped in the corner chair where your laundry used to be. There’s a sense of undercurrent humming, a vibration barely detected, but no less palpable to your freshly adjusting mind – that’s when it hits you. An inexplicable sense of creeping dread, a tightening in the chest, a need to get up and run, or the urge to lie very still until the moment passes. Sound familiar? Feel familiar?

Are you lost?

Maybe this will jog your memory further…you’re standing at the edge of a street corner just before sunset, in either direction a road stretches out into the fading light, there are some trees, some street lamps, maybe even the distant hum of a motor or the flutter of birds. However, no matter which way you turn, you can’t quite make out where exactly it is you are. It feels like home, or somewhere close, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to pin down which direction is the correct choice. You fall into yourself, paralyzed by the sudden shrinking light and the realization that you’re nowhere and everywhere at once. Either direction you choose you feel as though will pull out ahead of you, block after block- forever.

Can you remember?

Or perhaps this is more your speed, a day in the mall to do some shopping, you’ve arrived early to keep ahead of the crowds and make use of the rest of your day. A few purchases and a stop for something to drink, you’re pretty sure you’ve had enough. Heading to the elevator you came up on, you make your way back down to the entry to find your car in the parking lot- at least, you thought this was the parking lot. After a few turns around the large cement columns, comparing the picture of the section number you took on your phone to the markers around you, you’re confused.

Surely this couldn’t be how far you walked to the entrance when you arrived? It seems as though you’ve been walking an awfully long time despite what you remember to be a quick stroll across the asphalt. The low tone of the glowing light-bulbs fills your ears and drops out – still present, but now more a feeling rather than a noise, you start to feel sick, disoriented even. You keep walking.

Paying Close Attention

Despite our consistently lively world, we often come across pockets of time or certain spaces we just pass through that appear to possess something that reaches beyond consciousness and grips a primal fear that only now is becoming more prevalent. Without a direct threat, still a sense of dread rises from the potentiality of something. The vast open nothingness usurps our general assumption of safety and leaves us both fearful and wanting. Fearful that we have been cast aside, become lost, or quite simply, forgotten.

Liminal spaces highlight a strange construct, and in recent years filmmakers have been keener on reining in this notion that nothing might just be something after all.

Skinamarink – Home Unsettled

Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, released in 2022 to a somewhat mixed reaction. The film chose to lay it’s groundwork in an extremely specific layer of liminality. Coming off of his Youtube channel where he would craft shorter works he fashioned after nightmares, his directorial debut did that tenfold. Kyle and Kaylee, four and six years old, awake after a particularly traumatizing night to find that their father is missing. Along with him, somehow, the windows and doors are also slowly disappearing. Time stretches on and the sun never rises, we follow these innocent children slowly, not in discovery – but sitting in the experience with them. Long shots of dark still closets fill the screen. A barbie hangs in mid-air. The toys the children take comfort in are adhered to the ceiling just out of reach and the house seems to expand to impossible length and depth.

The Fragile Mind of a Child

Ball, for some, me included, has crafted one of the most upsetting features in horror. It doesn’t rely on your typical trappings- minimal jump scares, sparse dialogue, we rarely ever even see the children themselves in full face anything outright. A deep undulating darkness pervades the screen and allows you to sit in it imagining what could possibly have brought down such a strange fate on these truly innocent beings. Children so young they barely have a grasp on the situation at hand, mom and dad are gone and it doesn’t seem like they’re ever coming back.

The house contorts like a toy and becomes unfamiliar over and over at the whims of who knows what leaving only the darkness as a constant. There is no triumph, no third act hero, we are simply given an eye into a horrific emptiness before we pull out and are left worried, chilled to the core. Who will save them? There is a sense that child-like wonder here provides a mask just heavy enough to misinterpret danger as play, potentially forever in the shadowed liminality of a childhood home upturned.

Backrooms – Scientific Error Terror

With no grasp on the situation or the space, there can be no purchase in reality to bring oneself back from the brink of an expanse that has no regard for you. Only space after empty space to keep reaching for an exit that may never come. The terrifying notion that you could fall out of existence and reemerge somewhere such as this, only to never be seen again, is one that could really worm its way into your brain if you let it.

Kane Pixels (Kane Parsons) lit up Youtube with his extremely impressive take on The Backrooms. A simple internet meme turned on its head and grown beyond itself, much like the titular hallways. A series of videos varying in degrees of content flesh out the narrative built around the fabled expansion that exists on another plane of existence.

Yellowed wallpaper, tan carpeting, office furniture, the deep one goes into the space, the more there is to find. Color patterns change, different constructs appear, even entire tree-lined streets. A semblance of such familiar and innocuous things that, while comforting, slowly begin to swallow you whole. The hairs on your neck stand up. You break out in a cold sweat, your breathing shortens and panic sets in, and so do the questions. Is this my life now? Where do I even begin to try and escape? Can I rest? Is anyone else here? Is there something after me?

A chilling premise of forever being trapped in this space.

Completely alone. Unable to call for help. Kane has blown this out into a more scientific approach. The rift opened by the Async Research Institute was meant to assist the world with overpopulation and the ever-growing storage crisis. The company finds things aren’t going as planned. Despite sometimes catastrophic result, keep the whole thing hidden from the world.

In the context of an experiment gone wrong, the fate of endless carpeted hallways is absolutely mind-boggling. Coupled with the notion that something, somewhere might be after you, even if no such threat exists, there is no release on the pressure valve. No one is coming, nothing can save you, and nothing will do you in. There wasn’t even a way to avoid what happened. You were just in the wrong place and the right time to fully no-clip out of this existence. Missing like so many others, and eventually, with nowhere to look, people will stop looking.

The Outwaters – Cosmic Intervention Upturned

A final glimpse into the liminal, Robbie Banfitch brings us another concerning angle on the liminal premise with The Outwaters. I would argue this is the most challenging of the three projects presented here to engage with. What starts out as a fun camping trip into the desert turns into a reality bending bloody nightmare. I’m still not totally sure I have a grasp on all of it.

Robbie, an aspiring filmmaker sets out to help Michelle propel her career, but something is wrong. After a night of camping, the four friends awake to thunderous booming and a distressing cacophony of animal noises. Jolted by the occurrence, they discuss it the next day and move on from the spot. Only for it to happen again the next night. Accosted by an axe-wielding naked man. Weirdly enough too, the battery on Robbie’s camera hasn’t lost any power, strangeness prevails.

Unclear Pathways

What follows is a disorienting dissenting into darkness. Often lit only by a pin of flashlight amid a vastly dark but still busy screen. Running and screaming. Flashes of blood and some sort of worm-like creatures. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Pursued and flashing through time and space. The desert, Robbie’s mother’s house, a flight to somewhere, there is no coherent direction. All the while we have almost no visual context. The how and why this might be happening to these poor souls, lost.

The Outwaters takes the liminal and aligns it with the cosmic – amid the dark expanses of nothingness, there is a violent drag through time and space ultimately leading to what seems to be a government cover up of…something deeper happening in the desert.

Total lack of explanation.

The lack of seemingly anything at all really. This is what yanks on something deeper within us to chill us to the core. In a world so rich and lush with meaning, the absence is looming. A silent building isolation. Removing from it almost everything we regard as a familiar and safe. Truly enough to rattle our senses into worry and terror.

The thoughts of ‘individuality’ are of course valuable. Having ability to define ourselves, to stand out against the noise of all others to feel like we’re being heard. Ironically feeling a sense of belonging to the wider world, however increasingly difficult that may seem. Bombarded by content. Growing strains on the ways of life we’ve expected to function. Supposedly benefitting us as we live out our days on this beautiful planet we call home.

What’s left when nothing is right?

Throughout these views into the liminal horror trend that only seems to be growing. What does that say about our current collective consciousness? Just now we are grappling with the constant need to grow. The push to build and expand into what already exists. What does that mean for us as individuals? When there is nothing else to conquer, how much farther can we reach? If there is nothing within the constructs we’ve built, what exactly has it all been for?

I feel that what these projects are saying is that now more than ever we need each other. In the real spaces we’ve forgotten we inhabit. A growing sense of isolation amid a consistently busy “community” is fraying at the edges of society. Alarmingly in ways we never quite expected. Locked behind screens. Shut away in buildings. Taking in events through photo-lenses. We experience the memory before we live in the moment itself. The horrific liminality of it all is waiting just outside your door, all you have to do is nothing.