Strange but Familiar Places: A Critical Analysis of Liminal Spaces

Liminal just suddenly became the prominent way of describing what is essentially the uncanny valley effect in the context of spaces and environments. It's really kind of a misapplication of the term, but, oh well, that's just an example how ideas spread and how language evolves.

It's called "Digital Horror"

I’ve been doing real estate photography since 2015 and have so many liminal space photos of apartments, pools, playgrounds and parks. I need to post more.

Minor correction/update: as of Dec 2023, the earliest currently known posting of the original "backrooms" image happened on April 8, 2018.

Very well done.

I feel like more of what people are feeling is the uncanniness of the places you have only seen full of people and lit but you are now seeing them completely empty and dark.

To be fair even whilst filming taking two different tech photos among the snow cabins I felt a lot of liminal space even with you in it, moving speaking, it seemed unnatural almost like you were layered into it, I loved that it challenged your sentiment from moments before.
I do get the nostalgia element and you're right, at the same time the warped music really amplifies the feeling. There's so much in it and it's all psychological, different for every person also,
At the end of the day it's just super fascinating personally i love the feeling of intense aloness with a hint of horror yet there's nothing particularly wrong or threatening, but mentally its a lost sensation.... the horror comes from knowing the deeper you go the more alone and disasociated you become and there's no retracing your steps.

this is a great video, watched it while eating apple jacks cereal and i’m completely alone at home. very atmospheric experience for me

As a 60+ year old Architect who writes fiction about unusual places and spaces, my discovery today of liminal space is compelling. Lot's of story ideas here. Thanks!

this vid was so cool

i luv liminal spaces

I used to be obsessed that screen saver on windows 97 with the brick wall maze and you could change the colour and pattern of the walls

I've long been a big fan of the road movie genre and I get a very similar vibe from a lot of these liminal space images... The image of the empty highway is very liminal in itself, but also themes of empty, abandoned or decaying locations that crop up in these films have a very liminal quality.

I think Paris, Texas is probably my all time favourite in the genre, as well as being one of my favourite films of any genre. Some of the shots in that movie quite literally give me chills for reasons I can't explain.

What camera did you use to make it look more liminal

My mind instantly goes to the insane asylum in Nightmare on Elm Street 5, which in the dream was a dark dimly lit maze of corridor after corridor, staircases, etc..

This makes the reddits definition make more sense. It is not just a trasitional zpace in terms of material but instead...anything, consciousness and unconsciousness, sense and insanity, clarity and confusion. We just don't know what to expect.

Farrel McGuire: you have a really good on point video on liminal Spaces. To your question, people responds to there Enviroment based on there needs. For example: For myself, I am a people person. Liminal places is "Creepy" because, the need be to Social is not expressed in a liminal space. Now the reverse situaction, a person that likes, and prefers Solitude, will enjoy Liminal spaces that for them is peaceful.

I’m not sure if anyone remembers it, but Stephen King wrote a short story back in the 70’s about the liminal space phenomenon (more or less. The theme was the same, although the term had yet to be coined.) The backdrop was an airport. The story was called “The Langoliers”. They made a movie with the same name back in 1995.

I think that liminal spaces can be considered art in the same way that photography is considered an art. It's applied technique and creativity in an attempt to create something entertaining or pleasing.

nice one, sir

Many examples provided in this video are in fact not liminal spaces. People have confused the term with stuff from weirdcore, dreamcore and eventually it all blended in together. Pictures of nostalgic homes or nature at dusk/dawn aren't liminal because they aren't spaces where people normally would be but aren't. (Homes don't count because they're often empty when the people inhabiting them go out, it's much more jarring if the space is something like an airport, subway or gas station.)

Watch Steven Kings The Langoliers movie. Every other scene in the airport is a liminal space. The movie is about being stuck in the past.

I’m not sure why I find liminal spaces comforting. Most of the common liminal space images you see are from a time I either haven’t experienced, or was too young to remember, so it can’t be nostalgia creeping in. I’ve been trying to find the answer to this question I keep asking myself, and I can’t find anything. Maybe I’m just weird.

I was kinda surprised when I clicked on this video and the first scene was my old school lol

I do liminal space photography on film. Every roll of film I shoot comes out with a couple of them even if I don't mean to. Often my Polaroids display them too. They're inherently appealing and attractive to me. They feel like both an ending and a new beginning; the point where everything of the old is stripped bare before it begins to be reconstructed into a new life.


Oh yeah, technology connections has a good video on how to make that exact lamp there into a "milk glass" lamp, should give less glare on the camera with it in the shot.


Oh and a note on outside spaces inside, for the most part it began in earnest in the 1970s in post-moon landing defiance of the system since what we were promised was not delivered and why bother being in society let's just go live in the woods. It was later co-opted in retail and such locations in the 1980s as well as being a large inspiration for 1990s Factory Pomo. Some of my personal core memories of outside inside architecture come from Walt Disney World, specifically EPCOT during and before the Millennium Celebration because they had a lot of that.. for example, the old Land food court, the Inovention house for fire safety, some of the vingetts in Space Ship Earth, etc. and it has spawned a life-long love for them. There's spectacular examples of this at the Furpoc hotel in Cromwell, with one of the areas in the convention center resembling a garden party. While doing the upcoming remodel on my house I am enclosing the pool and everything in the yard closer than that, but leaving the exterior face of the house (with some aesthetic touch-ups, of course) as outside....now inside.

I didn't know about this until stumbling across this video by chance. But I've been engaging in seeking out 'liminal spaces' for years, I now realize. My city during the day is filled with nonstop activity. You hear constant noise, cars and cyclists everywhere, the tram rampaging across it's tracks with it's typical noise and roaring busses passing by.
Then, at night... Silence, emptiness.
I would regularly go out after midnight to just walk the empty streets of the city. Just me, the streetlights and that one beat cop doing late night shifts lol. It was serene in a way.
I've witnessed heavy snowfall that would be gone in the morning without a trace, I've gone on a run in the pouring rain soaking those empty streets. During lockdowns when he had curfews, local people would sit at their windows for far longer than they used to and stare out to the streets. We'd often wave to eachother. Strange times.

As someone who really really really enjoys liminal spaces, I can certainly say the most attractive element to me is the lack of anything actively going on. I as a young adult lived most of my life up until now not knowing I had ADD, the entire world felt like it was a step ahead of me and like time was this unrelenting force that would run away on me the moment I got absorbed in anything, these spaces are the perfect opposition to that. I feel like I could gladly step into an empty, preserved world of uncanny (or new) representations and nobody to answer to and just live there forever. These images are like an escape I never had, and never new I wanted until I found them.

I don't know if this creator will see this, but I wondered if the music that cued up around nine minutes... Is this a clip of that album about the decline of the cognitive functions of a human suffering from dementia? And obviously I can't remember the title or artist. Help me comment section, you're my only hope....other than Google

Looking at your other 3 videos, I am liking your content. Subscribed.

Wow. Well produced, interesting, and informative video! I agree and I think Nature's Liminal Spaces are the most terrifying of all Harkening back to primeval days where the fear of the unknown was much more prevalent in the day-to-day lives of humanity. For me, Liminality has to do with a populated place being unpopulated, thus leaving a sort of spirit remnant. I.E energy signature. Almost like a haunting...I can pick up on the feeling of residual energy and it feels mournful to me, almost as if the usual life that animates the place is dead. Natural places make me feel like, in the absence of humanity, that ancient or primitive energies or beings are taking back the land. Thing we don't understand, filling in the gaps of our lost presence. Enough rambling for one night...too many sleep paralysis nightmares lately have me in a supernatural sort of mood lately.

...for me, being alive is a liminal space. It's an uncanny passage of uncertainty and worry between the nothing before I was born and the nothing after I die...and I can't trust anything I see to be safe.

This dude sounds like Tony Hawk.

You know, whenever I see a picture of a Liminal space with the nostalgia aspect to it, I legit start crying because it just reminds me of a time I’ll never get back.

Great video! Very much agree with everything you said. Well done. Oh also, what is the song playing at the outro? It sounds amazing

Well done, and I agree with pretty much everything said. I too find the liminal images and aesthetic on the one hand somewhat creepy and unsettling but on the other hand oddly comforting, cozy, nostalgic, and I find it's often linked with a rather specific time period, from like the 80s to the mid 2000s. There's definitely a familiar, dreamlike quality to them that's just hard to pintpoint. I also agree on the outdoor spaces inside thing, and I find that very cool somehow.

I have always found liminal spaces so comforting. I never understood people feeling uneasy or unsafe. Well, maybe uneasy, but in a good way.

I was born in 1986…these liminal spaces are simply a deja vu for me. A lot of those pictures contain architecture, designs and things that simply don’t exist anymore or do but are abandoned forever. Everything mid 2000’s is now sterile and straightforward. Think McDonald’s in the mid-90’s to McDonald’s now. We feel like we’ve been there and these are snapshots of our memories. Even though we’ve never seen them before

Well done

A new level in photography...I couldn't see the strokes of paint or sketch like art...but realistic memories scenes or kind of it...

Like The Langoliers

Hands down, the best video of the topic in the history of YT.