#liminal horror

My guilty pleasure right now is watching luxury hotel reviews and I found this british guy who keeps accidentally clipping into the backrooms.

It occurs to me with the Backrooms movie that Mary doesn’t have a proper ending. As in, yeah she survives, but in the end she kinda just ends up just stuck in a clinical room. Waiting. She doesn’t really get to process her trauma, she doesn’t really get to be free of the Backrooms, she doesn’t really get an ending to her story. She’s just stuck in transition. There’s no proper ‘ending’ to the film either. The film itself was stopped right at the threshold of something greater. It’s making you wait.

Mary is in a permanent stage of liminality, always at the threshold but never able to move on.

Clark was at that stage- which is why he was able to live so long in the Backrooms. He was unable to take that step, he was in the same state as Mary until she helped him. He ‘made the next step,’ (or in this case, stepped back) he was not longer in a state of transition, he made a choice and stuck with it. Which is why Still Life Clark killed him right after. He no longer belonged there.

It’s why the scientists and ASYNC are so obsessed too. They’re now looking to make the next step in human history, believing this to be the greatest discover in history, but they’re unable to at the moment because they don’t understand it. They’re stuck waiting too.

The Backrooms is the Threshold of reality, one where you can’t make that next step. Because around that corner is going to be that same yellow wallpaper, on and on, forever.

A Message from the In Between [prints]

Commission for @bigcats-birds-and-books