Peter Engelmann, November 24, 2025
What do we mean by liminal spaces?
Over the past decade, the term’ liminal spaces’ has gained popularity. The reason is the modern use of “liminal” within the internet culture. The most prominent example is the backrooms, which originated in the creepy pasta subculture.
The Backrooms are mostly abandoned spaces that exist in an intermediate realm between our world and another dimension, but are also sometimes claimed to be real. They emerged more like an urban legend rather than an actual discovery, and were visualized by filmmaker Kane Parsons on YouTube with his channel Kane Pixels. The foundation was the original backroom picture posted on 4chan, which depicts an abandoned office space with fluorescent light, green-yellowish walls, and old carpets. The picture and the videos present an unparalleled eeriness and become a setting for many follow-up horror stories with the labyrinthine and endless office spaces increasingly populated by monsters and other creatures. Meanwhile, the A24 studio is preparing a Backrooms movie.
The backrooms concept is particularly interesting because of the otherworldly concept: Entering the backrooms is based on the premise that one enters the backrooms by “no-clipping“, which means slipping from our normal reality into the backrooms. This term stems from gaming language but represents an old idea in connection with the otherworld: you could slip through reality into another realm and be caught there.
Folklore is full of such stories, where people went off the way and ended up in fairyland. Sometimes, as in the Rip Van Winkle Story, time runs differently than in ordinary reality, and the protagonist spends ages there.
The similarity between the Otherworld in folklore and liminal spaces was also identified by Ethan Sabatella in Senchas Claideb: “The concept of liminality in storytelling is nothing new and has motifs in folk traditions spanning back for centuries”.
The no-clipping concept is one fascinating example of how an old concept of the otherworld reemerges into the modern digital world. The whole liminal spaces phenomenon proves that the otherworld always finds a backdoor to slip into our modern consciousness.
It’s not surprising that these transition spaces between the ordinary world and the intelligible higher (spiritual world) take the shape of abandoned malls or empty labyrinthine office spaces. Imagination is at work here, and otherworldly or daimonic visionary worlds often take shape, which makes sense for the individual experiencing it. An abandoned office space makes more sense in our mechanistic, technological-dominated world as a cave inmidst the woods where fairies or dragons reside.
However, there is more to these liminal spaces. They are at the same time familiar and not familiar; they are like lost places, but seem less defined, more out of touch with ordinary reality.
The strong impact the images and videos on the web have lies with their representation of the uncanny. The uncanny is always at the core of horror and has a much stronger effect than any monster that might occur later in the videos.
The basic principle of the uncanny is that something that should be normal becomes unsettling.
This is where liminal spaces become interesting: it’s often the most normal, even boring places that become unsettling just because one or two things are changed:
An airport stripped of passengers, an empty mall where usually shoppers fill shops, or an endless office space where people work.
It’s maybe not a surprise that these liminal spaces became popular at the time when the pandemic happened.
During the corona crisis, a lot of normal places became temporarily similar liminal spaces: streets without pedestrians or train stations without people.
That uncanny feeling is not so much an intellectual experience, but rather an emotional one or something which comes from deep inside: The fear that our normal world is fragile, that in truth everything can fall apart at any time.
Furthermore, it is the anxiety that goes on in these rooms and the idea of being trapped without escape. However, it is not only anxiety; it is the typical ambiguous feeling in horror of being attracted to something and being repulsed at the same time. Attracted because the room might represent something of the past we are longing for and repulsed because of the nightmarish scenario of being imprisoned in an otherworldly realm that is just bleak, cold, and merciless.
Is the forest a good candidate for a liminal space?
We find different opinions about this question. At first sight, the forest might be something completely different, because it is a natural world – the fear in the forest is created by other factors, like getting lost or paranormal phenomena, and it is not related to these more technological liminal spaces which dominate the liminal spaces subculture on the web.
In a more traditional sense, the forest is full of liminal spaces: There are many areas where the mysterious and the familiar merge as secret groves or edges of the forest. The core idea of the liminal spaces is their transitional nature; it is about potent places, and they can change the visitor fundamentally.
If we dig further into the definition of liminality, it has a double meaning. It can be both spatial and non-physical states, such a rites of passage.
The forest as a setting for rites of passage is nearly a stereotype, which perhaps makes the extreme opposite – urban areas, lost industrial places – attractive for subculture to be different.
However, that is not what we mean by liminal spaces in the forest when it comes to the Otherworld, because the forest is not just a metaphor or setting; here, the forest is a daimonic entity itself. It is full of soul and can be as shapeshifting as the industrial liminal spaces.
In many stories and accounts, the familiar forest becomes uncanny. A wanderer gets lost because landmarks are suddenly not there, animal noises disappear, and lighting becomes more unnatural, even though it was daylight a few minutes ago.
Then we find ourselves often lost, cut off from civilization, and unable to navigate a dense and confusing environment. This leads to paranoia and a breakdown of sanity.
We see some obvious similarities between modern liminal spaces and the dark forests of this world.
However, the much more interesting similarity is grounded in the very fabric of reality as described by Patrick Harpur as daimonic reality, in which the Otherworld is defined “as a subtle, intermediate realm of existence, also referred to as Daimonic Reality, that is neither purely objective (physical) nor purely subjective (psychological)“.
Most important here is the definition of the Otherworld as an intermediate realm:
Intermediary Realm: The Otherworld sits “in between” the spiritual/intelligible world and our familiar material, sensory world. It is this “middle realm” that allows for communication and mediation between human beings and “the gods” or the divine.
In Harpur’s definition, the Otherworld is a liminal space, per se. The modern liminal spaces are excellent representations of the old idea of the Otherworld in a new form. Their constant shape shifting and ambiguity, real/not real, meet exactly the long tradition of descriptions of the otherworld.
In this sense, the question is not if the forest is a liminal space because certain dark forests and modern liminal spaces as the backrooms, are both manifestations of the Otherworld.
