r/interestingasfuck • u/Dismal-Display-370 • 18h ago

Everyone is too happy around this guy

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u/Dr_McPogi 17h ago

Look here, guy.... I don't know what liminal means.

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u/Bridgebrain 16h ago

Imagine, if you will, walking into the back hallway that connects stores in the mall and the trash bins out back. The area is purpose built, utilitarian. The walls are sloshed with different ages of stains, there's a little bit of random litter, not anything big enough to be worth bending down and picking up yourself. The lights are bright and buzz annoyingly, because they're cheap and durable and the customers will never see them. There are doorways everywhere but they're all locked. 

Anything happens.  One of the lights flicker. Someone opens one of the locked doors (to also go throw their trash). A breeze comes in from the trash area and makes the paper scatter. You are immediately out of a utilitarian space, and for a moment, in a horror movie, about to be horribly murder by a ghost or a slasher. and then the moment passes and you go to throw away the trash. 

And that moment happens every time you go there, building more and more dread, even though it's completely benign and nothing really has ever happened there. 

And then the Internet picks it up and makes a whole genre playing off that dread, because other people have been walking through the empty office after hours, and others have been at amusement parks alone doing the dry run, or walked around their empty house after moving out, and felt the same strange dread build for no particular reason. 

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u/Crazy-Present4764 11h ago

Never thought I'd enjoy reading about a trash alley.

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u/Complete-Tangelo1532 8h ago

Thats the name of my porno!

'Reading Trash Alley'

It isn't good, its fuckin' trash

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u/Mostly-Moo-Cow 8h ago

I hate movies set in PA.

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u/Complete-Tangelo1532 8h ago

Dude, spoilers.... and rims!

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u/HVAChelpprettyplease 44m ago

This is what we had instead of reading rainbow or shining time station. We were poor.

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u/MaximumSubtlety 8h ago

Why read when you can rent?!

May ai interest you in Trash Alley™

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u/littlecomet111 9h ago

You should try the Green Bay Packers sub Reddit. Heyoooo!

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u/Cruel1865 11h ago

This is amazingly well articulated. I dont think I could ever describe it as accurately as this.

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u/BeautifulBlueNight 10h ago

That is a very, very on point description!

Especially the part about an amusement park speaks to me. 😅 I worked 4 years at a theme park, there is something particular about walking through it when it's closed. Be it the morning before opening or in closing days for maintenance, it's a special feeling.

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u/Dripdry42 9h ago

I find them comforting… i guess i lean more toward the Camp Miasma than Backrooms crowd… i find liminal spaces uniquely soothing, with some occasional creepiness. I ADORE showing up to big events when im the first one there

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u/Valcyor 4h ago

I waited overnight in an abandoned terminal in an international airport due to the scheduling of my layover, and let me tell you, it was the most surreal thing ever. I thought it'd be a Backrooms experience, but no, I loved it.

Just clicking away on my laptop, looking up and seeing PDX's massive Terminal C stretching out for a half a mile before me, enormous vaulted roofs, departure signs, peoplemovers droning on... and for six hours it was all designed just for me.

10/10 would layover again.

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u/hobbycollector 2h ago

I hear North Korea welcomes western defectors and treats them better than their own citizens.

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u/cbessette 8h ago

Similar, I worked in a factory with 100 other people, but I worked a late shift for a while that would leave me in this huge building all by myself after dark. It was so weird walking around in this dark quiet place that was normally bright and full of people, noises.
It was like the mix of loneliness, boredom, slight anxiety.

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u/IronMew 5h ago

God, walking around your own home after emptying it out is one hell of a weird feeling.

So many memories all held between those walls, but nothing that used to be a part of your environment when the memories were being made is there anymore.

Everything is already gone, trucked off or thrown out, and the memories are all that's left. But as long as you can still see the place, be in it, you can refresh the memories, keep them alive. The walls prove that the memories were real, even as your own voice echoes against them.

As you tear your eyes away from the kitchen and walk down the corridor toward the door, you know that as soon as you close it for the last time you will interrupt that refreshing. The memories will now only exist in your mind, and since you can no longer go back to refresh them they will inevitably start fading. In time, most of them will be lost.

If we are but our memories, then as you close that door you're dooming a part of yourself.

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u/Fun_Context9979 11h ago

If you haven't already, check out The Why Files on YouTube. When i read your post, I could hear it spoken by the shows host, AJ Gentile.

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u/night_wing33 9h ago

You described this haunting feeling so eloquently… do you write horror?

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u/Can-Purple 4h ago

When I was younger I took way too much acid and went to the mall because I knew my buddy would be off of work there soon. I was sitting in the food court and he shows up and says "I just have to take out the trash then we can go, wanna join?" So I followed him trough these outdoor hallways and It was the craziest feeling ever. Like seeing the guts of a mall that was dying.

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u/Waverly_Throwaway 7h ago

What's a mall?

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u/FreeOGPoohShiesty 6h ago

Survival instinct right

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u/Bridgebrain 3h ago

A little, but mostly it's a reaction to spaces which feel lived in but no one's there. For the non-liminal version of this, accidentally walking into a empty homeless encampment in the wooded area in a city. Even though it's public and you have just as much right to be there as they do, your internals scream at you to get clear before they get back. Not necessarily because of a fear of the homeless (though "some crackhead with a shiv might take an interest in my wallet" is a part of it), or even trespassing (again, though a part is "this is where someone's living and I shouldn't interfere"), but there's an actively surreal quality to the scenario

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u/monster_syndrome 2h ago

It might be similar to how the uncanny valley works. An empty hallway or office building is so innocuous that your brain normally ignores it, but when it's empty and silent your brain is suddenly wondering why it's abandoned and if the lights have always buzzed like that or if that's the sound of something going wrong.

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u/LVLsteve 30m ago

This isn't describing a liminal space. It's describing dread and horror definitely, but not liminality. Liminal spaces are originally describing the time in a coming of age ceremony, where before the ceremony the participant is a child and afterwards they are an adult. During the ceremony they are neither, they inhabit an "inbetween" space where their status is undefined.

I can see why there is confusion, as uncertainty\the unknown is definitely a part of both ideas.

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u/LVLsteve 30m ago

This isn't describing a liminal space. It's describing dread and horror definitely, but not liminality. Liminal spaces are originally describing the time in a coming of age ceremony, where before the ceremony the participant is a child and afterwards they are an adult. During the ceremony they are neither, they inhabit an "inbetween" space where their status is undefined.

I can see why there is confusion, as uncertainty\the unknown is definitely a part of both ideas.

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u/Dr_McPogi 17h ago

And don't tell me to look it up. I did. I still don't know what it means.

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u/_Phil_McCracken_ 17h ago

No one knows what it means. 

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u/j33pwrangler 17h ago

It's provocative!

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u/Outinthedistance 17h ago

Gets the people going!

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u/Dysterqvist 12h ago

It insists upon itself

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u/DigitalUnlimited 7h ago

It's a perfectly cromulent word

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u/Meal__Team__Six 12h ago

It’s like laminar except spelled differently and with a different meaning

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u/exintrovert 3h ago

Laminar space could actually be a cool concept 🤔

Like a workspace where there is zero friction, clutter, or chaos. Everything moves in smooth, parallel lines with maximum efficiency and no turbulent mess.

Kind of like the synchronized fear-cheering of the NK spectators in the stands.

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u/smurfalidocious 11h ago

Essentially, a liminal space is an "in between" space. People find themselves feeling interesting or unsettling feelings when they come across one of these spaces and find it devoid of what is usually there. Consider: Dead of night, an empty supermarket parking lot. You're used to seeing it full of cars and people, but here, your only company is the moon and the stars and the trash pandas digging through the trash. You don't know what this feeling coming over you is; it's not quite deja vu. No, quite the opposite - it's a feeling of alienation, total unfamiliarity. Your mind reels a little bit at the intellectual disconnect. You know what this place is - you know what it's for, but seeing it bereft of the familiar evokes a sudden sensation of jamais vu - complete unfamiliarity with the familiar.

Some people find this sensation a dreadful one, filling them with terror. Others find it peaceful and relaxing. But any time you find a space in which you feel a sensation of something - dread, peace, anxiety - just from the way it looks, and that look is different from what you know, you've just experienced what the internet terms a liminal space.

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u/Neither-Luck-9295 49m ago

Damn, what a great description. The opposite of deja vu.

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u/sinwarrior 17h ago

Liminal space usually are space/area/location that people are not meant to stationary/habitats/dwell/linger around. 

Example: on a elevator, escalator, airport, library, underground subway, ferry port, a bus stop, a mall, a pool, a stretch of road, a maze, Etc

As you can infer from the examples above, all these locations all share one thing in common: they are places you're meant traverse/travel by and not stay there. 

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u/peach_trunks 16h ago

Libraries don’t fit, neither do pools

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u/FellowSaganist 15h ago

Get a bigger space?

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u/[deleted] 14h ago edited 14h ago

[deleted]

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u/Azur0007 14h ago

You leave your bed too. Liminal doesn't mean "something you leave eventually".

Liminal space is just space thats not a destination but rather a in-between area which you pass through to get somewhere else.

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u/sinwarrior 12h ago

i did thought of that, but couldnt edit my response cuz i made that reply during break time at work lol.

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u/Civil_Emergency9010 13h ago edited 13h ago

A library is a place. It is a destination you travel to and interact with. All places you eventually leave until the place where you die.

What you described in your other comment are non-places: areas that is meant to be moved through and not interacted with.

I disagree that liminal spaces are all transitory non-places, although many of them are. I think that liminal spaces are dreamlike and the name comes from the concept of liminal perception, and the way that we sometimes become aware of spaces in our dream and how they are strange and off balance somehow. In that way also many non-places are subliminal when we move through them, especially if they are filled with other people. When they are empty and the subject of a photo it brings them above the threshold to where we notice them, and long hallways disappearing around corners and seemingly going on forever is very dreamlike and disorienting, same when the place seems abandoned but the lights are on, and the lights are old flickering fluorescents when everything is LED now.

When I watched OPs video it also gave me liminal space vibes and I can’t quite identify why. It’s unusual to see a space populated with people and feel like it’s liminal. I definitely think the bare windowless walls are part of it, and maybe the colors. Perhaps it is similar in some way to spaces I experienced as a young child but don’t specifically remember. Someone else commented that it looks a lot like a sports arena, but is just different enough to be uncanny, and I think that must be part it too, especially the wall up against the court where normally bleachers would be.

Anyway, I think both places and non-places can be liminal spaces, even if mostly they are non-places.

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u/SovereignGenius 16h ago

Interesting. So how would that relate to the word subliminal?

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u/Kevlar_Bunny 16h ago edited 15h ago

I was going to say they were unrelated but according to google they do share a root. I’m also not a linguist guru. From what I’ve gathered- Something liminal is just at the “threshold”, like that one thing is the whole point and its only value is to get you to the next point. It’s supposed to take you somewhere or something is coming to you. B is liminal if you’re trying to go from A to C. B is that long stretch along Montana when you’re traveling to Seattle. Nothing to do but drive until you get to where you’re actually going. For whatever reason people tend to find this eerie, even something innocuous like a long flat stretch of road. For me it’s the shower, I could be just getting in, I could be just getting out, but the whole time the only thing to do is shower things until I’m ready to leave. I hate showers, they make me anxious and I lose track of time in there in a bad way.

Subliminal is just under that threshold. It’s still important to the moment but it’s not supposed to be the main focus. You don’t even notice it, but it’s still present to the moment.

So going by cultural zeitgeist standards they’re not related, but their inception comes from a common root concept. It’s basically how we perceive our environment.

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u/SovereignGenius 15h ago

Thanks! I appreciate your insights.

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u/Kevlar_Bunny 8h ago

Yeah! I’m not that into liminal spaces as a horror subject so I think some people described the concept a lot better than I did.

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u/Arthropodesque 15h ago

There are no identifying characteristics. It could be anywhere. No distinct style or art.

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u/Civil_Emergency9010 13h ago edited 13h ago

I think they are more related than this.

A lot of what people consider “liminal spaces” are spaces that typically have a lot of other people and distractions and focuses going on, or at least are places that you would normally pass through while thinking about your destination or something else.

When all of that distraction is removed and you become aware of the space itself, when it goes from subliminal to supraliminal, it can be unsettling.

I think that some people find this horrifying or uncomfortable because suddenly becoming aware of your surroundings is something that happens when your subconscious registers that something is wrong and you become conscious of it, but haven’t identified the threat or cause yet. It makes me wonder if people with poor situational awareness find images of liminal spaces to be creepier or more unsettling than people who are generally more aware of their surroundings.

I also think it is related to dream spaces and the way that images of liminal spaces can remind us of dream spaces that we don’t have strong memories of or of reminding us of dreams where we became aware of our surroundings. Images of liminal spaces often have dreamlike qualities.

Anyway, I think so much of what gives people “liminal vibes” from these spaces has to do with crossing the threshold between subliminal and supraliminal.

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u/PhilipWaterford 10h ago

Once worked in a factory with enormous corridors. 7km in total iirc. They once painted the walls in anti-loitering paint. Disgusting colours. It's difficult to describe.

It backfired though as top management hated it so much it was repainted in something more acceptable.

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u/Azuras-Becky 7h ago

I thought it was just zoomers discovering that offices are horrible.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

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u/goddamnspeziscringe 17h ago

Some would describe it as places that look out of place, uncanny. There’s a genre of horror that’s recently come up about these spaces that are off. Like stairs in the woods or a shopping mall which you’ve always seen as full, completely empty during the day.

So for this video it’s uncanny to me cause the court is just one sided and it’s flanked directly by a wall, probably due to construction constraints and that there will never be a large enough crowd for two opposing teams to cheer for their side.

And it’s uncanny to us cause we’re so used to seeing what a ‘normal’ court would look like

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u/reluctantseal 12h ago

It's commonly used to mean uncanny, but that isn't actually what it means.

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u/fsutrill 11h ago

Have you seen Severance? The hallways. Spaces that connect “real” spaces- transitional places.

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u/KenTitan 12h ago

IDK what everyone said but you ever go somewhere that feels like there should be people or a crowd and you go there and it's dead/empty but for some reason everything is still operating as if the crowd is there?

like the lobby of a hotel is bustling, but when you get to your floor, it feels like no one else is on that floor?

or when you go into a movie theater and it's crowded, but then when you're leaving for some reason everyone is gone (staff is the back and cleaning other theaters) and the lobby is empty?

finally, you're sitting in a hospital waiting room by yourself and all is a sudden it's too quiet, no one is around, not even the rhythmic beeps and alarms. tv is on, but it's been on silent.

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u/Witty_Rhubarb_4217 12h ago

Imagine a hallway or a waiting room or a pool, but completely empty. Default, too perfectly painted and set up to the point of it having an aura of false existence around it. It’s a place meant for transitions, caught in a moment of total stillness. If a place was a human this would be a silicone valley of it, uncanny yet normal. Something that makes you feel everything is off yet it feels nostalgic regardless of your memories. Something that feels like a simulated reality thats trying to trick your brain into loving it. Sorry it's kind of difficult to describe 😅

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u/tune__order 9h ago

A liminal space is neither here nor there, an in-between space.

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u/orchidloom 5h ago

Liminal as a space means a transitional space like an airport or hallway, but people use it also to describe an aesthetic:  a place that seems vaguely familiar, slightly nostalgic, but not quite recognizable. Like a place they’ve been before but can’t remember where it is or what it was.

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u/LisaMiaSisu 14h ago

It means a place that is so boring it makes you not want to stay there. Prisons and hospitals would fit this description.

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u/The_Tooter_Snooter 15h ago

There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to not knowing what it means

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u/enchantedhonk 5h ago

That's the fucking truth

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u/BlueEyesWhiteSliver 16h ago

An area that is meant to stage the presentation of another object, person, or structure but is missing.

Kinda like looking at a trophy case but there’s no trophy or a stage with lights but there’s nothing on the stage. The effect is meant to be creepy and disturbing, not anticipating an entertainer or winning that trophy.

Dark hallways leading off, a creepy room where things feel missing.

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u/_Phil_McCracken_ 13h ago

The first time I distinctly remember being hit by that feeling was in an empty church at night. 

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u/Live-Laugh-Fart 16h ago

Check out the liminal space sub

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u/AlexTheBex 12h ago

Like backrooms, maybe

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u/No-Ad8720 9h ago

Think waiting room...

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u/Kindly_Shoulder2379 9h ago

its the thing above subliminal

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u/internet_humor 7h ago

🎵Take it!!! To the liminal

One moooore tiiiime 🎵

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u/Spiritual-Crab-2260 7h ago

simple version is: the back of a Hollywood set.

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u/VectorB 2h ago

I recommend the game Superliminal.

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u/Mysterious_Archer228 2h ago

Very simple way to put it. Liminal spaces are spaces that seem familiar but something seems off. They make you feel uncomfortable even though there is nothing inherently wrong with the space except for things are not how our brain wants to expect them to be. This is the reason the Backrooms lore became what it is. It was from one picture that was a liminal space.

It’s like the uncanny valley feeling and concept

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u/HoochbachDunloppy 1h ago

And because I don't know, I'm gunna take it as disrespect. 

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u/Kriieod 16h ago

It's the uncanny valley but for structures.

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u/SillySpook 14h ago

I'm not your guy, buddy.

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u/The-Yar 8h ago

It's a nonsense term for a space that is lacking something, usually it just means a place that is normally crowded but is empty.