Why Liminal Spaces have a soft spot in horror for me & in Defense of adding Monsters to the Backrooms

Gods, I love liminal spaces. I tend to talk about them a lot, and may have an article similar to this somewhere… wait… let me search… nope, nothing comes up when I look up ‘liminal’. I’ve written so many articles that sometimes I need to check. I get passionate about topics a lot and want to talk about them over and over! Anyway, glad to see this subject from me isn’t being repeated.

The isolation aspect is pretty creepy to me. Tons of people have that fear of dying alone, and being lost forever. Liminal spaces emulate that. They’re a transitional area, but what if you were caught in that transition from point A to point B forever? Sort of like being lost at an airport (which is a liminal space). Never returning home or arriving to where you’re going, that’s eerie.

However, I have a different opinion than some on Twitter with regard to a particular internet phenomenon that’s been taking of lately, large in part due to Kane Pixel’s videos. If you haven’t checked them out, take a look here:

Monsters feature in their video, which is really neat. You can see the monster, even if briefly, and the noises are particularly eerie. There is much debate on the internet as to whether or not the monster-additions to the backrooms were good or bad. Personally, I love them and think they’re a good thing. “Level 0”, or the first image of this article, depicts the vast emptiness of feeling alone. Per lore, there’s not really supposed to be monsters there (aside from special cases like Kane’s videos.)

A lot of people say adding the monsters ‘ruins’ the backrooms, but to me, it enhances it. The other part of liminal spaces is what really gets me: The feeling of not being alone, or being watched. Isolation is horrifying, but what’s more scary, to me, is the thought that you could be ripped to shreds by some horrors at any time. Sure, some of the lore can be shaky, as anyone can add to it (though there may be an approval process). But this allows the other aspect of fear (being watched in these spaces) to be explored.

Honestly, if you don’t present a powerful thing that can hurt you, is it really that scary? Sure, humans can be the most scary monsters out there, but we know that, it’s proven in real life on the regular. I give a big thumbs up to people and their monster designs and roll my eyes at people who whine ‘the backrooms are bad now/ruined’. People are expressing their creativity, there’s a mixture of mud and gems there. You may need to work to find something you like, but the entire premise is not trash because you may not like it.

So, in defense of the expanding backrooms, I think it’s a wonderful thing and gets people interested, at a young age, in horror. I get that some like just the isolation aspect, but to me, that’s not the scariest thing about either liminal spaces or the backrooms. The creep factor is that something could be watching, just off screen or out of sight, and waiting to drag you off.

Have a bonus picture I commissioned! I snapped a ‘liminal space’ picture when it felt eerie that there were no cars in the front of my apartment (they were doing road work). Then, I found a monster artist who slapped a monster right there. I call him ‘longboi’. He’s friendly to me, not to you.

Anyway, if you’re interested in someone who covers ‘backrooms’ lore, which is just a bunch of neat internet horror/eerie liminal space stuff, you can see my tiktok here.