The first type of liminal space content is photography of spaces that actually exist. Some of the most common examples are hotels, hallways, public spaces that are empty or abandoned. The second type is created images of places that do not exist, but give the same sort of eerie feeling. Real estate listings and urban exploration photography can provide sources for real images, but digitally created images tend to emulate imagery more associated with dreams, memories, or video game terrain.
Arguably, the quintessential liminal space is a hotel or motel hallway. These are liminal in the strict sense of the word; transition zones, in-between spaces that don’t have an independent life of their own.
Most spaces give cues to their purpose, what they were built “for,” and therefore how we are expected to behave within them. In many environments often appropriated for “liminal” aesthetics, these cues are mixed or contradictory. In a hotel, the furnishings are supposed to make the visitor feel like “home,” but a hotel isn’t home, it is arbitrary and impersonal.
This kind of aesthetic or landscape has become inescapable in horror art. As an art movement, it borrows a lot from surrealism, but instead of objects or figures, the subjects are landscapes, spaces.
They are built environments with an unclear purpose. In the case of real photographs of places that exist, this ambiguity is captured incidentally. They are places you aren’t supposed to stay in, that you aren’t supposed to think of as places. We can see this with “liminal” pictures drawn from real estate photos of empty houses. We understand that these empty spaces are empty temporarily; they are waiting for an occupant to move in, but if we are invited to imagine existing in these spaces instead of simply passing through them, they take on an unreal and eerie quality.
In the case of created or imagined spaces, their eeriness can be created more intentionally by toying with the principles of architectural design. Spaces are designed to give cues to how we are supposed to behave in them; they attempt to influence our behavior.
A supermarket is mazelike, windowless, and crowded with stimuli that are vying for our attention; they are perpetually lit with white, unnatural light, providing no cues to the passage of time. This is because the store owners profit more if you lose track of time inside the supermarket.
Liminal spaces are essentially spaces that, intentionally or unintentionally, violate our sense of knowing what to do within that space based upon the cues provided by how the space is designed.
In one of the “liminal space”-based games I played, Pools, a sense of eeriness and fear is created by violating conventional rules for how spaces are designed. Because of building codes and other rules, real-world structures have very consistent characteristics. Pools was replete with architectural elements that violated these rules: doorways that were too low or narrow, stairways with no rails overlooking endless voids, room geometries that were confusing with poor sightlines, lighting that seemed too bright or too dim for the space, ceilings that are too high or too low, and of course, few cues for how to navigate the area.
“Poolrooms” are compelling and popular liminal spaces because this sense of unclarity can be created so easily: swimming pools are very specific kinds of spaces that occur in very specific contexts and for very specific purposes. They are encountered in indoor contexts, but never unexpectedly. For safety reasons, as well, their placement and design follow some very rigid, consistent rules.
This is why “poolrooms” feel eerie: they are violating so many rules we implicitly understand about built environments, while at the same time, they feel pleasant, even natural. Water bodies in nature are found everywhere, submerging and intersecting with parts of the terrain, so poolrooms don’t violate what we know about water.
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