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Part Two: The Menace of Liminality
In the first installment of this article series we explored the lure of liminality, seeking to understand the appeal of Liminal Spaces. However, liminality is two-faced beast — possessing horrifying qualities as well. In this article we will turn to the dark side of liminality. What exactly creeps us out about it? And what is up with a society that constructs and dwells in spaces that are … vaguely threatening?
Grab your flashlight and face the unspeakable dread that is lurking in the realm of Liminal Spaces.
Creepiness of the Unexpected
Let’s start with something straightforward. It is said that one reason for the creepiness of Liminal Spaces is that they don’t match our expectations — and therefore give us an instinctive suspicion that something strange is going on. To illustrate this phenomenon, some commentators have referred to this photograph:
It is an aerial shot of the “Burning Man Festival”. The image shows a desert with no human infrastructure. A place which we usually expect to be completely empty — but it’s teeming with 68,000 people. In contrast, Liminal Spaces, which are designed to handle large crowds, are expected to be bustling with activity, but — they are deserted. Both types of images possess an unsettling quality, resulting from a disconnect between what is anticipated and what is observed — What on earth are all these people doing there? versus Where is everyone? The harder it is to justify the unexpected, the more disturbing it becomes.
The unsettling quality of Liminal Spaces can be amplified by adding further elements of distortion — such as placing a chair in an unexpected location.
Liminal Spaces are not for Humans
As I pointed out in the initial article, Liminal Spaces can be defined as being highly processed. Just as highly processed food would be barely recognizable as something edible to people from the 19th century, Liminal Spaces would hardly be recognizable as human habitat to them.
I believe that on a subconscious level, we 21st century people also struggle to identify them as something human. And there’s validity to this perspective: Liminal Spaces are indeed not built “for humans”. They are built by corporations to fulfill a certain corporate task. As a result, they deviate so significantly from the aesthetics that usually make us feel cozy and at home that they evoke an unsettling sensation: It feels as if they are not habitats but rather machines, built to process us. Or, if they are indeed habitats, they seem to be not for us humans — but for some strange, unknown, maybe hostile being.
This effect was used in the movie “Alien”. As the Alien claims victims and the space freighter “Nostromo” becomes less and less populated, it increasingly appears as if the ship was never built to serve humans in the first place. Instead, the Nostromo reveals itself as a cold, corporate entity — just like the Alien itself, which is not a natural life form, but a bioweapon — a corporate product. Ship and Alien even look similar and share several design elements (like ribbed tubings). Consequently, the Nostromo provides excellent cover for the monster and appears to be much more of a welcoming home for it than for its crew — it’s almost like the ship teams up with the Alien in its deadly effort.
Like Liminal Spaces, the interior of the Nostromo appears artificial, made from plastic, designed to be practical, functional, and durable. The same design philosophy we would expect to find in a McDonald’s restaurant.
The notion that Liminal Spaces are habitats not for humans but for monsters was explored in the horror movie “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” (2022), animated by YouTuber Kane Pixels, that you might probably heard of — this film played a significant role in popularizing the Liminal Spaces phenomenon. In it, the famous liminal photograph known as “The Backrooms” was transformed into an actual horror movie set, inhabited by a demon. Lacking everything us humans would normally need to survive (sunlight, a resting area, a water source etc.), The Backrooms seem to be a much more natural habitat for the creature than for the pitiful humans getting trapped inside them.
Liminality has often been used in horror movies to indicate the presence of an otherworldly, non-human entity. Another prominent example is “The Shining”.
Liminal Spaces are Dystopian
What disturbs me the most when I’m looking at Liminal Spaces is that they remind me of almost every popular dark tale of the future I’ve ever heard of. Take a look at what ChatGPT has compiled about architecture in dystopian novels:
Practical, functional, sterile, utilitarian, devoid of aesthetic appeal, individuality and distinguishing characteristics, designed for mass production and efficiency — it seems as if the modern architects who design all these corporate structures that spawn Liminal Spaces have read the classics of dystopian fiction and thought, “Man, this architecture of evil is actually — pretty damn cool! I wanna build exactly that!”
Let’s do the countercheck and see what an AI image generator (Stable Diffusion) spits out when you give it the prompt “inside dystopian architecture”:
It appears that Liminal Spaces represent exactly the architecture people like George Orwell warned us against.
Where The Last Man Dwells
The concept of Liminal Spaces resonates not only with dystopian literature but also with concrete warnings about humanity’s decline mouthed by many critics of modernity. Ted Kaczynski comes to mind, commonly known as the Unabomber. An IQ 170 math genius who killed several people with mail bombs to draw attention to his manifesto, in which he advocated for the complete abandonment of technology, arguing that it enslaves us and alienates us from our natural state, which consequently leads to unhappiness. Given that most metrics of social well-being — such as sense of belonging, mental health, and trust in politics — are consistently declining, his viewpoint seems increasingly valid.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have […] destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. — Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
Or take Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned us about the rise of nihilism and its embodiment, the “Last Man” — an archetype of a human who is complacent, avoids risks, lacks ambition and a sense of beauty, and seeks only consumption, comfort, and security. His only will is the “Will to Nothingness” — a desire to devalue everything strong, beautiful, and meaningful — to avoid confronting his own insignificance.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche wrote,
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.
This suggests that a nihilist is committed to his fictional dream world and doesn’t regard reality as worthwhile, investing no more than the bare minimum in it. Imagine the Last Man as a guy with tattoos like a rugged sailor, yet working in some safe, boring job and never considering becoming an actual rugged sailor. Someone who plays computer games with kings and castles, but doesn’t seek to be something different than a nobody dwelling in a Liminal Space.
The elephant in the room, of course, is whether Kaczynski’s desire to return to the Middle Ages and Nietzsche’s idea of the reign of the Übermensch are not inherently dystopian in their own right.
Our Liminal Future
Our world has seen strong population growth over the past few centuries, only recently slowing down. As a result, we have rarely encountered abandoned human structures; almost everything is immediately repurposed. Yet, that’s not what our future looks like. In South Korea, for example, 50 million people live in an area one-third the size of Germany. With a birth rate of just 0.8 children per woman, if this trend continues, the South Korean population will reduce by a factor of 20 within three generations. Even if it only decreases by a factor of 2, this will result in tremendous vacancy.
Ultimately, this could be the future for all of us. As a consequence, Liminal Spaces will expand — offering us an opportunity to reflect on whether it is a good sign that our cities, once devoid of people, appear so alien and vaguely threatening. It’s perhaps telling that the Liminal Spaces phenomenon emerged during the Covid years, which provided a preview of the emptiness in public space yet to come.
Human society has never been static. We are always in transition, but recently, we have undoubtedly pushed this to the extreme — one could argue that our era is truly liminal in the original sense of the word. Even Nietzsche viewed the age of nihilism, which he predicted would last “for the next 200 years,” as a threshold time, as something liminal:
I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism’s] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!
