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

Everyone is too happy around this guy

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

558

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. 

•

u/Crazy-Present4764 11h ago

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

•

u/Complete-Tangelo1532 8h ago

Thats the name of my porno!

'Reading Trash Alley'

It isn't good, its fuckin' trash

•

u/Mostly-Moo-Cow 8h ago

I hate movies set in PA.

•

u/Complete-Tangelo1532 8h ago

Dude, spoilers.... and rims!

•

u/HVAChelpprettyplease 44m ago

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

•

u/MaximumSubtlety 8h ago

Why read when you can rent?!

May ai interest you in Trash Alley™

•

u/littlecomet111 9h ago

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

•

u/Cruel1865 11h ago

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

•

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.

•

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

•

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.

•

u/hobbycollector 2h ago

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

•

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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

u/night_wing33 9h ago

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

•

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.

•

u/Waverly_Throwaway 7h ago

What's a mall?

•

u/FreeOGPoohShiesty 6h ago

Survival instinct right

•

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

•

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.

•

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.

•

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.