The new film Backrooms has been praised as a “Liminal Horror film”, but what exactly does that mean?
The word liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold.”
These are spaces of transition where you feel untethered from reality. These liminal environments usually look mundane (like a child’s playroom or a standard hallway) but feel wrong or incomplete. These threshold spaces are also the ideal setting for an effective horror story.
Here are three memorable Liminal Horror films.
[imbd.com]It’s a hell of an opening scene. An unnamed man wakes up in a strange, metallic room shaped as a perfect cube. He climbs through a hatch into an adjacent room, inadvertently triggering a hidden razor-wire trap that instantly slices him into bloody cubes. Without a single word of dialogue, this opening masterfully sets the film’s creepy, claustrophobic tone. Cube follows six strangers who awaken in a giant, unending maze of booby-trapped, cube-shaped rooms. With no memory of how they got there, they must pool their distinct skills to survive. With a very modest budget and a cast of believable victims, the ’90s cult film shows how you can do a lot with a little. With Cube, the characters are in a classic liminal “in-between” state. They are cut off from both their previous lives and any concept of an outside world, leaving them to navigate a space that feels completely contained and designed to kill them. The result is an effective cult sci-fi film that makes humans feel like rats trapped in a maze.★ ★ ★1/2
[imbd.com]A marriage, a house, a job, a child; they’re the things we are all taught to want from life. Playing like a particularly bent episode of The Twilight Zone, Vivarium takes each of these aspects of the American dream and turns them into a nightmare. In a story that newlyweds should probably avoid, we follow a young couple who become trapped in a labyrinthine suburb controlled by ominous forces. It’s only a matter of time before their captors force them to raise a mysterious human-looking child, whom we discover is anything but human. Mixing elements from Eraserhead and Leave It to Beaver, this is a film that doesn’t aim to scare, but to unnerve and unsettle us by taking the ordinary aspects of life and filling them with dread. Released during a time when most viewers were in lockdown, Vivarium shows how the most ideal seeming exteriors can be the setting for a disturbing Liminal Horror ★ ★ ★1/2
[imbd.com]Finally, there’s Exit 8, a horror film that does a lot with a little. Inspired by the viral indie video game of the same name, we get a strange story about a man trapped in a looping subway corridor who must find anomalies to escape. This is a great example of “Liminal Horror”. Where other horror films must conjure creatures or supernatural oddities to produce suspense, this movie finds horror in an ordinary, sterile subway corridor. Both the protagonist and the audience begin to obsess over minor details, such as the position of a poster, the number of tiles, or a flickering light. I found the horror of the ordinary in Exit 8 more relatable and unnerving than I expected. After all, we’ve all been lost somewhere at some point. (I’ve gotten lost in the London subways, which was both scary and exhilarating.) More specifically, this is a movie that uses the unbroken shot as more than just a gimmick. Utilizing continuous tracking shots, the camera methodically follows and circles the protagonist, mimicking the hypnotic vibe of a game. The end result should please and unnerve those who like their horror claustrophobic. ★★★1/2
