The Lamplighter [Edition One]

The Lamplighter

March 2023

Edition One

Liminality

Just silence8 and all its

consequences

Liminality & Cosmic

SEPTEMBER 2021 / JON BLACK

The In-Between On Liminal Spaces

Liminality is a powerful word, one we often seem to appreciate intuitively rather than consider rationally. Despite, or perhaps because, of that, it can mean many different things to different people, especially depending on one’s primarily lens into liminality. With that in mind, here are some discipline-specific definitions.

In relation to Psychology, it defined as a space in our lives where the old self-narrative does not fit any longer and the new narrative has not yet emerged.

In architecture it is the transitional threshold between two fixed states in cultural rites of passage or between two dissimilar spaces in architecture from which principles can be drawn for the design of a transformative space. The characteristics that define liminal space include layering, dissolution, blurring, and ambiguity and have the ability to transform the occupant of that space as they move through.

In reference to Popular Culture, on the surface, liminal spaces can be defined by their in-between3-ness. Places like airports, hotels, and train stations can be described as liminal, but it can also describe existential feelings of being neither here nor there. In the context of the pandemic, liminality takes on a metaphorical meaning, as we sit in our homes contemplating what life was like before and what it will become again in the future.

The term liminality (From the Latin, limen, a threshold) was first used in 1909 by ethnographer and folklorist

MARCH 2023 / ISAAC TORRES Dread

Liminal space is an idea that has grown in popularity recently and I find it interesting to consider where these ideas come from. Liminality is a term that has existed for decades, but the modern take on the word has crafted its own definition pulled through the wringer of our culture and defined by the dread of our existence. Similarly to how cosmic9 horror has terrorized horror fans for the past century. Both are rooted in ideas and spaces beyond ourselves. In relation to each other, my biggest question is, (pg. 2)

How Has Existential Horror Evolved In The Modern Era?

Arnold van Gennep in his book Rites of Passage, focusing on liminal rituals in small-scale traditional societies. This strong focus on liminality in the context of Rites of Passage continues throughout its early anthropological use.

The concept was reinvigorated by British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, who began exploring its role in other kinds of societies (for which Turner coined the term liminoid, a distinction which has not generally caught on) and examining its impact on those experiencing liminality in a way which prefigured its adoption by psychology. Anthropologist Agnes Horvath further refined the use of liminality in the discipline by pointing out problems with the concept as used by Gennep and Turning, including

identifying liminal/liminoid as a false dichotomy and questioning their portrayal of liminality and liminal14 experience as universally positive phenomenon.

Jungian psychologists (and to a lesser extent, other schools of psychology) were quick to pick up on liminality’s applicability to individual, internal growth and development as well as external social relations. Once seeded in two academic disciplines, to concept of liminality rapidly spread to other academic disciplines including folklore, literature, and architecture.

While the ideas of liminal space and liminal experience had already been filtering through to popular culture, the internet drastically accelerated the process, to the point (pg. 8)

Photo from Jimmy Emerson, DMV on Flickr

And regarding existential horror, how has our ever-changing culture affected our fears?

The things that scare us have definitely changed since the early 20th century.

In early tales of cosmic horror, the subject of these stories revolved around magic and death and things beyond comprehension. These lovecraftian horrors were about things so much bigger than ourselves that we could not understand them, and that scares us. Especially during the 20s and 30s when information was not so widely spread, there were so many ideas that seemed so much larger than the common man and that was terrifying. The unknown, as it often does, scared those who couldn't understand it.

One short story by H.P. Lovecraft that I find really interesting, and fairly telling of the times, is Cool Air that was published in 1928. The story follows an unnamed narrator who moves into an apartment in New York City. He meets his upstairs neighbor, a strange and reclusive physician. The narrator, fascinated with the doctor and his practices, returns to talk and learn from him. But it becomes more and more evident that the doctor has an obsession with defying death. The strangest practice that the doctor holds is that he keeps his apartment at

56° Fahrenheit using an ammonia-based refrigeration system. Progressively, the doctor's health gets worse. One day, the system breaks down and the doctor begs the narrator for help. He does what he can, but in the end he is unable to fix the system in time. He returns to the apartment and finds the doctor's body rapidly decomposing and a smeared letter revealing that the doctor had been dead for the past 18 years.

The idea of an estranged doctor making an effort to defy death is not uncommon. But what makes this story interesting to me is what inspired the theme. Lovecraft wrote this during a time he had lived in New York City himself, and the idea of a corpse living in a frigid apartment came from his own sensitivity to the cold and his disdain for air conditioning which was becoming more wide spread.

This inspiration is so fascinating because it is the result of a writer's disdain for something we now consider so mundane and even necessary. Yet still, at one point, air conditioning was something new and uncomfortable to some. It was strange enough that some saw fear in it's invention.

This was a rather extreme example, but it does show how times change and how our concerns shift. Now, our concerns have turned have turned more inward. Our fears reflect the consequences of our actions. Consumerism and gentrification and work culture, etc. The things that scare us now aren't on a cosmic scale, but they are the ideas that force us to face inward.

The current trend of liminal spaces takes our sense of nostalgia and it rips the

life out of it. Empty shopping malls and lifeless office buildings. Things that fill us with a sense of deja vu11 because despite recognizing these spaces, the fact that these often bustling and lively spaces are now empty and uncanny make us feel uneasy. Something about seeing these spaces now devoid of life feels unreal.

Existential horror is no longer about the unknown, but the absence of the known. We fear the familiar becoming unfamiliar. In the age of information, we are much more aware of our practices, and so horror has come for our intelligence and twisted what we know until we are left shaking.

I only wonder what terrors await across the pages of this creation. What will make you shiver?

Photo

Shot from Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2022)

Photo from u/kingrat127 on r/liminalspace

And with liminal scares and sensorial Found Footage on the rise, I thought that this might be a good time to dive into how this 2000 novel redefined modern horror.

Despite its reputation as an inaccessible eldritch2 tome, House of Leaves is actually a deeply personal novel rooted in the author’s own life. That’s why it’s best to discuss the origins of this Russian doll of a story before we can understand how it impacted the genre as a whole. Originally distributed locally in the 90s as a series of incomplete chapters and posts on Mark’s personal blog, House of Leaves was already something of a phenomena long before it was even published.

Having learned that his father was diagnosed with cancer, Mark decided to pour his complicated feelings on the matter into an experimental narrative that would eventually evolve into House of Leaves, with his sister Anne (commonly known by her stage name Poe) later developing the concept album Haunted, which ties into the multi-layered plot of Mark’s novel.

Written over the course of a decade, House of Leaves tells the story of Johnny Truant, a young tattoo artist who comes across a bizarre manuscript containing an absurdly long review of a documentary that doesn’t exist. Known only as The Navidson6 Record, this documentary supposedly follows filmmaker David Navidson and his family as they discover that their suburban home is somehow larger on the inside, with rooms and hallways slowly expanding into infinity. Meanwhile, the book also contains a novella’s worth of letters and other random documents, some of which tell the story of Johnny’s mother as she endures incarceration in a mental hospital (The Whalestoe Letters), as well as frequent interjections by confused editors.

How House of Leaves Has Redefined Modern Horror

February 2023 / Luiz H. C.

Pablo Picasso is often credited with having said that good artists borrow and great artists steal. Obviously, the Spanish painter wasn’t referring to plagiarism, but instead insinuating that ideas grow when they inspire other artists to make them their own. After all, all art is part of a larger cultural ouroboros –an ever-growing creature that perpetually eats its own tail.

The fun part of this infinite cycle of influences comes when we try to identify pivotal moments in culture that appear to have been “stolen” from repeatedly. And when it comes to the horror genre, there is one specific work of literature that had a hand in everything from the rise of Found Footage to the success of recent horror phenomena like the Backrooms12 creepypasta and even Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink. Naturally, I’m referring to Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an experimental novel that you’re probably already familiar with even if you’ve never heard of it.

Naturally, this complex novel deals with several different kinds of horror at the same time, from the architectural terror of the House’s non-euclidean anatomy to the omnipresent “Minotaur” that pursues explorers within this ever-expanding maze. There’s also the Lovecraftian madness that envelopes these characters as they become engrossed in stories within a story, questioning reality every step of the way. Even before its completion, the book was already talked about online, with its unique blend of fiction and reality possibly influencing Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez during the production of The Blair Witch Project . At the very least, there’s no denying that the directors were tapping into the same fascination with hypermedia present in Danielewski’s work. After all, The Navidson Record is basically a literary description of a Found Footage film, so it makes sense that this portion of the novel would end up inspiring elements of actual movies like the shifting asylum of Grave Encounters and impossible wilderness of Yellow Brick Road . It’s also no coincidence that the title track of Poe’s Haunted played over the credits of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 , a movie which serves as a direct critique of the found footage format directed by a real documentarian. (pg. 4)

This last one was so influenced by Danielewski’s imagination that you’ll find numerous references to House of Leaves in nearly all of the YouTube ARGs that popularized the faceless character (which is how I first encountered the book). Even videogames would end up “stealing” from the novel, with fully manipulatable 3D environments being ideal for the depiction of architectural horrors. The folks over at Remedy Entertainment are probably the biggest example of House-of-Leaves-influenced developers, with Alan Wake taking inspiration from the novel’s multi-layered narrative where fiction bleeds into reality, and their more recent Control playing with the idea of infinitely expanding interior space. The 2019 title even features a particularly memorable sequ- ence that basically serves as a love-letter to the book’s description of a psychedelic haunted house. The concepts pioneered in House of Leaves have become so ubiquitous to the horror genre that, at this point, it’s safe to say that many artists are referencing and “stealing” from the book without ever having read it. For example, it’s unlikely that The Backrooms’ Kane Pixels ever read the novel, but his trippy videos still perfectly capture the book’s liminal atmosphere by adapting ideas that have permeated popular culture in the two decades since House of surprisingly emotional narrative. That being said, recent

House of Leaves’ digital origins and epistolary structure would also go on to influence the rise of original internet horror content, all the way from Ted the Caver to The Dionaea House. These primitive online legends would blend fiction and reality in order to terrify readers, eventually leading to the creation of shareable “creepypastas” like Cameraheads, The SCP Foundation and even the infamous Slender Man.

1959

The Twilight Zone

Rod Serling’s distinctive approach gave Twilight Zone a unique character that always keep it among the best-remembered of all classic television shows. Not only but it set high goals for itself, and it took lot of chances - and not chances in the phony, trivial sense in which a lot of more recent series “take chances” by resorting unnecessarily provocative or indecent material that actually guarantees them attention and acclaim.

The Twilight Zone took chances experimenting with many different kinds of stories and material, and by aiming provide high-quality entertainment while simultaneously giving you something think about. As a result, there were a episodes that didn’t quite click, and that odd or even dull. But when it workeddid a great deal of the time - no television show then or now was more imaginative.

Many episodes relied primarily on well-written and well-conceived story, while others, like “The Invaders”, relied heavily on excellent acting performances (in case, by Agnes Moorehead). There occasional light-hearted episodes like “Once Upon a Time”, which was also a nice show case for the great Buster Keaton.

It’s too bad that these anthology-style series went out of fashion, because a number of them were of high quality. The best science fiction, like the best of any genre or art form, appeals to the imagination, not to the senses, and imagination is what “The Twilight was all about.

— Snow Leopard

House of Leaves’ digital origins and epistolary structure would also go on to influence the rise of original internet horror content, all the way from Ted the Caver to The Dionaea House. These primitive online legends would blend fiction and reality in order to terrify readers, eventually leading to the creation of shareable “creepypastas” like Cameraheads, The SCP Foundation and even the infamous Slender Man. This last one was so influenced by Danielewski’s imagination that you’ll find numerous references to House of Leaves in nearly all of the YouTube ARGs that popularized the faceless character (which is how I first encountered the book).

Even videogames would end up “stealing” from the novel, with fully manipulatable 3D environments being ideal for the depiction of architectural horrors. The folks over at Remedy Entertainment are probably the biggest example of House-of-Leaves-influenced developers, with Alan Wake taking inspiration from the novel’s multi-layered narrative where fiction bleeds into reality, and their more recent Control playing with the idea of infinitely expanding interior space. The 2019 title even features a particularly memorable sequence that basically serves as a love-letter to the book’s description of a psychedelic haunted house.

The concepts pioneered in House of Leaves have become so ubiquitous to the horror genre that, at this point, it’s safe to say that many artists are referencing and “stealing” from the book without ever having read it. For example, it’s unlikely that The Backrooms’ Kane Pixels ever read the novel, but his trippy videos still perfectly capture the book’s liminal atmosphere by adapting ideas that have permeated popular culture in the two decades since House of Leaves was published.

In fact, there are literally hundreds of other scary stories that share some DNA with House of Leaves, both consciously and unconsciously, and it’s likely that we’ll keep getting more of these in the years to come (which I’d argue is a good thing). While some of these stories are not even meant to be that scary, like Gil Kenan’s gateway horror flick Monster House or Bill Watterson’s cardboard masterpiece Dave Made a Maze, others, like David Koepp’s Kevin Bacon vehicle You Should Have Left, attempt to dissect the idea of a uniquely haunted House in a serious dramatic setting.

Despite this, it’s curious to note that no other media has ever managed to replicate the sheer scale of the novel’s surprisingly emotional narrative. That being said, recent efforts have been more successful at emulating the book’s over - all atmosphere. Skinamarink in particular is a great example of how to turn the mundane comforts of home into a never-ending nightmare, with several moments harkening back to both the book’s “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” and what happened to Navidson’s daughter after she was swallowed up by the House.

At the end of the day, you don’t even have to like House of Leaves to appreciate its big impact on our favorite genre of stories. Love it or hate it, Danielewski’s opus is a once-ina-generation literary gift that keeps on giving, and some young filmmaker out there is likely discovering the novel as I write this, “stealing” ideas from it in order to revolution horror movies yet again. And as Stephen King once claimed, “the book with all the footnotes” is likely the horror genre’s closest equivalent to Moby Dick.⸋

roots of the House on Ash Tree Lane.

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the picture which science-fiction enthusiasts of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that industry might one day give them.

It is an ultimate statement of the sciencefiction film, an awesome realization of spatial future. As a technical achievement — a graduation exercise in ingenuity and making of film magic — it surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. In that sense, it is a milestone, a landmark (or a spacemark) in the art of A spacecraft resembling a vast cubist centipede glides noiseless through space toward Jupiter. Men walk in space, and tumble in death toward an eternal orbit. Weightlessness is shown to be an accustomed state.

— Charles Champlin

1980 The Shining

A metaphysical and narrative maze, Shining has been watched like so many films by Stanley Kubrick, through waves deliberation and reconsideration. Although initially reproached for its lack of conventional haunted house scares, the 1980 has beckoned audiences, critics, and scholars back to the eerie void of the Overlook Hotel, as if anyone who sees the film is fated repeat an ongoing cycle of examination speculation.

Kubrick refused to answer questions about his intended meaning, and in doing he preserved the great arcana about his work. But like so many films by the enigmatic director, The Shining is a conceptual arena that Kubrick discovered in the process making it, thus negating many of the specific, subsequent analyses or eureka moments that claim to have figured out what Kubrick

⸋After all, the influence of this deeply fascinating novel runs about as deep as the never-ending

gave The will best-remembered that, took a phony, recent resorting to mateattention by kinds aiming to while something to few seem as it television imaginative. on a while heavily that were “Once showanthology-style number science form, senses, Zone Leopard

2001: Odyssey

Odyssey is enthusiasts world that the scienceof the achievement and the anything milestone, film. cubist deep space, orbit. accusChamplin Shining

The many waves of Although convenfilm scholars Hotel, fated to examination and questions doing so, work. enigmatic arena process of specmoments Kubrick

had in mind all along. More even than 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film famous for inspiring thought and questions about its intentions, The Shining lends itself to the subjective perceptions and interpretations of the viewer.

Standing back and considering the macro concept instead of the micro details planted throughout, one will recognize that Kubrick’s ambition was to create the obsessive attention, maddening circularity, and fixations so commonly stimulated by the film. Rather than search for a decisive reading or interpretation of the specifics, consider instead why The Shining remains an open text, a cinematic maze to be explored again and again.

— Brian Eggert

1990 Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks is either the first tv show of the 1990s or the last dark movie of the 1940s. Either way, its all that you’ve heard it is smokily mysterious, sardonically funny, iconoclastic, self-consciously brilliant and utterly hypnotic.

Twin Peaks is a lumber mill town somewhere in the scenic Northwest (the show is filmed largely in Washington state). It’s television’s most pristine setting. One morning the corpse of a high school beauty queen is found along a rocky shoreline. The body is nude and wrapped in plastic sheeting.

Lynch wraps the show in stylish stitching with his production elements an effectively eclectic score that alternates between pure creepiness and blue jazz, and a camera technique that’s far more cinematic than television’s usual boxy approach.

If you like your television quick, tidy and rational, Twin Peaks isn’t for you. But the arrival of Twin Peaks on ABC is an event that will be remembered and discussed for years.

— John Carman

1997 Cube

It is a refreshingly simple premise that relies on the psychological interaction of its characters within a very specific scenario, with no messy subplot to detract from the puzzle; there are no pretensions in philosophy here and no answers other than those that may be calculated (some of this is not entirely accurate, which is a pity for mathematical pedants) within the film. Plot twists are presented, but none of these are dramatic; the entire premise relies on the mathematics... This plays with the audience’s sympathies, shifting our focus back to the conundrum at hand; an excellent move to re-establish Cube‘s raison d’être, should anyone have felt a distracting kind of empathy.

— Naila Scargill

2000 House of Leaves

The book has an amazing way of crawling beneath your skin and taking root. When I read it my sleep schedule, already astoundingly bad, became even more irregular and bizarro. I started looking at things differently. The world changed. Not in any big way, but there was a definite shift, and that’s the way this book works. It comes at you sideways. There are sections of this book I found so surprising and affecting that I had to put it down and give myself a minute to take in what I’d read and go over it in my mind. Every person I’ve ever met who has read this book has had something to say about it, something more personal than just “Oh yeah,

I liked that,” or “It’s overhyped.” There’s a visceral reaction this book can elicit, and I find that fascinating.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and she mentioned something David Mamet said once, something along the lines of “When you leave the theater wanting to discuss the play, that’s a good play. When you leave the theater wanting to discuss your life and the world, that’s art.” I like that definition, and I think it applies to House of Leaves. Conversations about this book never stay on the book, they branch out into other areas and interests, they can’t help but grow longer and deeper, not entirely unlike a five minute hallway.

— Jake Thomas

2001 Silent Hill 2

With Silent Hill 2, Konami has delivered a deep, long (10-15 hours) adventure that’s scary in a disturbing, eerie fashion. The game’s mechanics show an attempt to improve the genre’s general failings, and more importantly don’t get in the way of the game or the story itself.

As a PlayStation 2 game overall, Silent Hill 2 is graphically stunning, while providing a full production package of surround sound techniques and good voice acting to boot. Konami’s survival-horror game doesn’t break the genre’s mold so much as it modifies and eases up the rigid boundaries set early in the genre’s early games.

Konami’s effort is a damn scary game, entirely worth every last cent. It’s frightening, deep, clever, and tries to improve the genre, if just a little, and in the end, that’s all I really want in a survival horror game.

— Doug Perry

Håfström has a good time frightening the audience, but also is never hesitant to inject a strong sense of strange and surrealism. The latter injects some memorable moments in the unfolding of events, including a walk on a ledge, and a moment with a painting of is not just creepy and unnerving, but it’s complex and entertains as a sharp and well paced horror film with heavy overtones of grief, anguish, and horrors of the real world that we sometimes unfortunately can

2011 Grave Encounters

A large part of what makes supernatural horror so scary is that it tends to prey on our fear of the unknown. Which means a high level of unpredictability, both in crafting scares and because of the fact that the supernatural threat isn’t something that’s easy to fight off through conventional means. You can’t exactly bludgeon a ghost with a baseball bat. After a while, though, haunted houses and ghostly tales can feel recycled. Particularly if its one told through found footage, a subgenre of horror that tends to elicit eye rolls and yawns more often than not these days.

With 2011’s Grave Encounters, the very setup is one that seems familiar… at first. But it quickly becomes clear that filmmakers Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz had something a little different in mind, as well as a level of self-awareness. And with the film, they deliver on scares in a big way.

— Meagan Navarro

2011 Cabin in the Woods

Five college friends head off for a weekend at a remote cabin, among them a blonde bimbo (Anna Hutchison), a jock (Chris Hemsworth), a brain (Jesse Williams), a stoner (Fran Kranz) and a shy, virginal type (Kristen Connolly). Cut off from civilisation, they’re con-fronted by a mysterious evil and must battle to survive until dawn.

It sounds like the oldest horror story in the book but from the first scene of The Cabin in the Woods it’s clear that the director, Drew Goddard, and his co-writer, Joss Whedon, are bent on turning the formula upside down.

Ever since Wes Craven’s original Scream (1996), plenty of smart-alec filmmakers have set out to ‘’deconstruct’’ the horror genre. But this film goes about the task in a bold, fresh way - using fanciful allegory to pose questions about the ultimate purpose of horror, and what we gain from the ritual of watching youthful victims being tortured and killed.

— Jake Wilson

2012 Welcome to Night Vale

It’s hard to overestimate the uniqueness of Welcome to Night Vale, the podcast that took the world—or at least the iTunes Store—by storm a few years back. The community radio broadcast from a fictional desert berg is as thoroughly strange as it is addictive.

A big part of the podcast’s fun comes from the huge variety of paranormal and supernatural experiences it features. Yes, there are aliens and secret government conspiracies, but there are also angels living in an old woman’s house on the edge of town. And mysterious hooded figures haunting a dog park. Simply put, the canny and the uncanny mix and mingle so closely in Night Vale that the line between them eventually just disappears. Yet Fink and Cranor play this mingling for laughs as often as they do for chills, and their knack for comedy saves the podcast from feeling cumbersome or self-serious. To their credit, the Welcome To Night Vale creators never forget that science fiction and camp live just a few doors apart on the same road.

— Joshua Pederson

2017 The Endless1

The Endless isn’t like many other horror films of 2018, as it’s often wrapped in glib and deadpan humor. Knowing that they lack the budget to catch the eye of the viewer with bells and whistles, the mantle falls on Moorhead and Benson to deliver as actors. Sometimes their act can expose the bells and whistles the film lacks, causing amateurish overtones to creep in, however, their dedication to the material continually shines through. The biggest lesson of The Endless is how we can allow our lives to loop around in one shitty cycle until we cop out. The other subtle takeaway for young filmmakers should be that as long as you have a good idea, good writing, and good acting, then the budget can often be inconsequential. Either way, The Endless is a triumph of micro-budget, Sci-Fi, and dedicated filmmaking.

— Robert Daniels

The Endless isn’t like many other horror films of 2018, as it’s often wrapped in glib and deadpan humor. Knowing that they lack the budget to catch the eye of the viewer with bells and whistles, the mantle falls on Moorhead and Benson to deliver as actors.

2017 Channel Zero: No-End House

No-End House is driven by its atmosphere. There are occasional philosophical musings about what this house all means. (One character’s clunky observation: “What do you dream about when you’re trapped inside a dream?”) But the show also takes advantage of a new kind of audience that’s willing to reject the plot-heavy, spoon-fed nature of most TV mysteries and give these hours over to something of a twisted luxury. There’s a monologue worth of horrors alone in one sight of what the malicious forces in this world have for dinner.

— Steve Greene

is a darkly satirical and surreal commentary on gender roles, the loss of oneself to parenthood, societal expectations and commercialised ideas of happiness. Though the premise seems one-note in the beginning, Finnegan and co-screenwriter Garret Shanley expertly layer this parable’s crit-iques, keeping the stakes high and the

tuated by the child’s piercing screams and Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s ominous score. fully measured way, further helped by great cularly from Poots, whose warmth elevates

2022 The Backrooms

At its heart it’s such a simple concept — a vast unorthodox floor plan, stairs and exits that only flow into another bizarrely unwelcoming area, mundane objects in strange positions, and no people to be found anywhere despite surroundings that by their appearance could and perhaps should be well populated. Make exploration of that space seemingly repetitive, and endless and the result is a short that manages to be exquisitely chilling while on the surface seeming to be so slight and unbothered.

— I_Ailurophile

2022

SKINAMARINK

Skinamarink does something rarely, if ever, done in horror. In a very smart, inventive, and downright offensively terrifying way, the movie turns its gaze upon the audience. It’s an absolutely distressing note to leave this film on, but deeply powerful in the primal fear it insights in the viewer just as the movie is coming to a close. It asserts that no, you are not a safe and innocent bystander, you have a reason to stay scared. You will be thinking about this movie after it’s over, when you lay your head down to sleep and your brain thinks maybe there’s something in the corner of your bedroom. It might not ever fully leave you.

Skinamarink is a downright evil film that isn’t afraid to stalk the emotional core of your nostalgia until it morphs into something unrecognizably petrifying. And, thanks to a strong filmmaker’s visionary execution, there is no doubt it will be celebrated as a singular horror achievement for as long as the genre prevails.

— Lex Briscuso

Shot from Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (2019)

Shot from Mikael Håfström’s 1408 (2007)

What is your earliest nightmare

that you remember?

I was around four years old. I remember it being sunset as I was going through a large garden that I wasn’t familiar with. I would wander through that garden for what would feel like hours before eventually stumbling to my backyard. By this time, it would be pitch black outside as I would enter the house through an open backyard door that wasn’t there on my house. I’d walk through the place, calling for my parents, but the house was empty. I’d then find my way to my own room before hearing footsteps from downstairs. There was something about them that seemed wrong. The footsteps were utterly terrifying as they got closer and louder, being loud as car horns as they got to my bedroom door. Then, I’d wake10 up.

— DrSpecter

A dream in which I wake up in my room and notice a large torso sized spider in the corner. I scream for help and my parents burst in. My mom takes me into the living room and sits me in front of the TV, tries to calm me by playing cartoons but there is only static on the channels. I can hear my dad fighting the spider, and it sounds like he is losing.

— Ethan H.

Being covered in frogs. Specifically in this nightmare they are toads, but through them an overall fear of frogs and slimy amphibious creatures has developed. In this nightmare there are almost no specific visual details but feelings that stayed with me once I had been able to wake up. I am along, I am covered in toads who are leeched to my body with endless tongues trying to get into my body. There is a stench, which can only be described as whatever the worst thing you’ve ever smelt could be. There is also a lack in setting, as if I existed in a world of darkness15, wet, and cold.

— Lily

S.

Is there a specific time/place that makes you feel nostalgic?

Very early morning (3am to 6am) and late night (midnight to 1am) makes me nostalgic. I have a lot of little moments I remember that have happened during those times. Like getting on the road early for family trips. Or walking somewhere with friends or getting home really late.

— Max B.

Springtime in the woods is what makes me nostalgic. I grew up in a wooded area and would always play outside in the treeline across the street from my house. I don’t know why Spring in particular makes me nostalgic, but those two conditions never fail to bring that feeling to me, despite which woods they may be.

— DrSpecter

My Aunt and Uncle’s basement is the strangest, but coolest thing. Aesthetically it almost looks like an early 2000s arcade down there. With an Olympics themed pin ball machine, a miss Pac-Man machine, a bar table with a bright neon open sign behind it, a working traffic light lamp, several cardboard cutouts of characters they’ve made for festivals at the community center, and a shuttle ball game. It makes me nostalgic because I remember so much hanging out there as a kid. Role playing at the bar table, answering “phone calls” with the disconnected rotary phone they had, and just having fun in a basement that looking nothing like a regular family basement. It was a very imaginative place.

— Allison

Is there a place that frightens you?

I’m afraid of dark park ing lots. I don’t know why, but I always get jumpy and nauseous when in them. I always hurriedly have to get to my car and leave.

In a way a lot of places frighten me, mostly cause in the back of my head I sorta fill in dark spaces or a place around the corner with figures that are watching but I makes dark place like basements or dark hallways at night scary even now that I’m older. A really scary one was always my elementary school hallways later in the day when the lights were off... The gym and the changing room had scary vibes too. I think it was because they were to old. When the gym was empty5 the wood floors would creak and it felt too quiet and you’d just have the feeling to speed up to get to the door across the way.

— Max

B.

I think of the basement of the house my aunt and uncle used to live in. But specifically with the lights off. The basement was unfinished with a concrete floor, exposed insulated and wooden support beams so it was already a little creepy to me as a kid. But when the lights were off, it was like a pitch black, industrial hellscape. Not to mention the games me and my siblings and my cousin would play. He had this mummy he made out of ace bandages and cotton stuffing. So we’d turn off the lights, pop a spooky sound FX CD into the boombox and pretend we were descending into a cursed mummy’s tomb. While my cousin would be hiding with the mummy somewhere in the dark waiting to scare us. And then we’d scramble around for the light switch. Both terrifying and thrilling.

— Allison

thought would happen. It terrifies me because a timeline of events could be really good or really bad and you won’t know until you’re living through them. And not having all the information sometimes leads your imagination to fill in the gaps with terrible ideas leading to worse conclusions. And then you’re left in a cycle of dread and anxiety.

— Allison

What is your greatest fear and why?

These days the only thing that really fill me with dread is the existential kind. I’m aging, your aging, in 100 years I & everyone else will be dust & a footnote to our families history as a newer generations forget who we were & what we did.

— Elmo C.

Being in a Tsunami. They’re random and you often can’t run from them in time, plus the whole objects sunken in water thing — I’ve always thought that in a past life I probably died in some way involving water and that’s why I have the irrational fear of those things.

— Madison

My greatest fear is being alone/lonely in life and being left behind/forgotten. As much as I’m used to it, it has brought so much sadness with me. The fear if being alone and unimportant to someone used to be comforting because it meant what I do is inconsequential but as I’ve grownup and learned more about my childhood trauma I’ve come to fear living and dying alone. I can’t think of much else that would bring as much pain as I seen in that future.

—StrawberryHarpy

I’d say my greatest fear is the unknown, the things that lie outside my control. The things I can’t plan for. The things that shake up what I thought would happen. It terrifies me because

Photo from u/randomusername675 on r/liminalreality

Across 2. A sinister adjective

3. Somewhere neither here nor there

9. The scale of our greatest fears

10. a ceremony for the dead

11. A familiar feeling

12. A liminal space built by Kane Pixels

14. occupying a position between two states

15. In the absence of light

Down

1. a vast description

4. A bad dream

5. A space free of decor

6. The record of the events of Ash Tree Lane

7. A pagan celebration

8.

13. The tales of eldritch horrors

Varieties of Liminal Space and Experience

In the natural world, there are caves, natural springs, running water, shores. “We’ve Got to Close the Beaches” If the shore is considered a liminal space, Jaws can be seen as quest to defend liminal space, and those who use it for their vacations, from an external threat that could otherwise create a hard border between the realm of land and sea.

As artifacts of human agency, there are borders, bridges, crossroads, airports, bus terminals, hotels, theaters, and performance spaces.

Borders do not get enough attention as liminal spaces. This includes between “civilization” and “the wild” but also borders between political or socio-cultural groups. The treatment of these as liminal spaces in science fiction and fantasy is so ubiquitous that we often don’t even think of it as such. These borders between worlds of the mind are where new ideas and possibilities emerge, where danger and opportunity can be found, and where adventure happens.

Seen from this perspective, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, almost the whole damn things, from the first footstep outside of the shire until the return, are liminal journeys. Which raises a curious question, if liminality persists long enough with no clear end in sight, does it cease to be liminal and, instead, become the new normal. Is that why, in Tolken, peaceful interludes like the visit to Rivendell or Beorn’s freehold feel like liminal spaces within liminal spaces?

From astronomical phenomena, there are solstices and equinoxes, dawn and dusk (literal “twilight zones”). Comets and meteor showers (interruptions of the established order of the nighttime sky). Eclipses (the intrusion of darkness into daytime is extremely liminal… and possibly terrifying).

Our holidays; in almost every calendrical system, the equivalent of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are seen as liminal (the period between the death of the old year and the birth of the new). Other holidays have strong liminal aspects. These include the great pre-Lenten festivals (Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fiesta de las Flores y de las Frutas, Fastelavn, etc.) where the border between the regular year and the restrictions of Lent are marked by a celebration of excess. It also includes days when the barrier between the living and the dead is thinned or removed (All Souls’ Day, Dia de Los Muertos, Midsummer Night/St. John’s Day, Twelfth Night, Walpurgisnacht). Some of those are also seen as periods of liminality between the mortal realm and the Lands of the Faerie (or equivalent).

Our phases of life, such as adolescence being a prolonged period of liminality, trapped awkwardly between childhood and adulthood. Teenagers are trapped in prolonged liminality. I believe this is why “coming of age” stories are so popular.

In art as in life, the liminality of adolescence is often paired with liminal rites of passage. In The Hunger Games, the games function as a rite of passage of the most absolute sort, with the only outcomes adulthood or oblivion. In Shadow & Bone, the Unsea (in the books) or Shadow Fold (in the TV series) is a tangible and very lethal liminal space separating the world’s nations from each other. So as the young protagonists brave the perilous journey through either the Unsea or Shadow Fold, it also become a rite of passage into adulthood.

phenomenon.

Profane is an excellent examination of this

Eliade’s landmark book The Sacred & The

terms liminality or liminal space, Mircea

space. While he does not explicitly use the

and subject to different rules than, mundane

worship as liminal spaces, separate from

itself. And many religions treat places of

Religious ritual is often a liminal space

of Passage such as initiations.

physical liminal spaces like caves for Rites

liminality itself. Mystery Cults made use of

liminal character, she is the embodiment of

to the afterlife. Persephone is more than a

for a period of time before transitioning

of the dead are believed to linger on earth

mythology. In many cultures, the souls

soul’s journey to the afterlife in Pharaonic

Gabriel. Purgatory is a liminal space. So is the

hear the Quran dictated by the Archangel

mission. Mohammed visiting a cave to

the desert before formally beginning his

the covenant. Jesus spending 40 days in

the Ten Commandments and establish

Moses climbing Mt. Sinai to receive

their foundational accounts:

liminality and liminal space are central to

Just starting with the Abrahamic Faiths,

Frankenstein’s Monster and its countless analogs inhabit the liminal uncanny valley occupied by the imperfect creation of an imperfect creation. The only real exception I can think of are zombies, at least in their modern post-Night of the Living Dead incarnation. Traditional zombies are different matter. If you want a pre-NotLD zombie flick that oozes liminality, check out 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie Vampire fiction seems especially aware of its inherent liminality. Whether something to be sought or something to be avoided, “the embrace” is often portrayed as Rite of Passage, a moment when on is neither truly human nor truly vampire, the death of an old life and the beginning of a new. Anne Rice does a very good job of

Most of supernatural horror’s enduring archetypes are liminal. Vampires, ghosts, and other intelligent undead are neither truly living nor truly dead. Werewolves are neither fully human nor fully beast.

There is also relationship between the liminal and the supernatural in folklore and fiction. Because liminal spaces are places where the normal order is suspended, things can happen there that can’t happen anywhere else (summoning the Devil, or various trickster entities at the crossroads, for example). Conversely, liminal spaces can hinder or even bar the supernatural for exercising powers it would otherwise normally possess (vampires’ inability to cross running water).

In formal Rites of Passage, rituals and order events are rigorously detailed and may occur under the supervision of an elder or master of ceremonies with almost dictatorial powers. In some ways, the role of therapist/ psychologist in liminal psychology mirrors that role. In broader usage of liminality, however, the idea of a prescribed order of events or master of ceremonies may be irrelevant or even nonsensical. That there are few rules to liminality only makes the ones that do exist even more important (notice that the punishments for violating the few rules of ancient liminal festivals such as Saturnalia were often incredibly harsh).

There is also liminality in our Faith.

multiple, sometimes interlocking ways.

Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle uses liminality in

therein lies both its glory and its downfall.

reads like one giant liminal space…and

Chambers’ The King in Yellow sometimes

a journey through the liminal. Robert W.

madness-inducing revelation, represents

“all is not as it seems” and the final, horrible,

argued that space between the first hint that

In Cosmic Horror/The Mythos 13 , it can be

liminal better than the books.

the TV series highlights the sense of the

Vampire Mysteries . Though, in my opinion,

So, too, does True Blood/The Southern

capturing this in The Vampire Chronicles

Note that the idea that liminality is simultaneously destructive and creative (like the dance of Shiva and Vishnu) is inherent to Gennap’s three phase model.

Postliminal: When the individual is reincorporated into society reflecting their new status or experience gained through undergoing the liminal rite.

Transitional: The truly liminal moment of transition, when an individual undergoing liminal experience is neither one thing nor the other.

Preliminal: A kind of metaphorical death, as old statuses and ways are broken and left behind.

Unlike mundane space, in liminal space there are very few rules. Gennep posited that liminal experience or ritual had three distinct phases:

But what are the rules of liminality?

compiling The Golden Bough

I would be very curious what he would make of the word’s evolution over the following half-century, and why kind of conceptual leaps he might have made with the word’s greater flexibility. The anthropologist Sir James Frazer died in 1941, and his most fertile period was around the turn of the century when “liminal space” wasn’t even a blip on the radar. I am very curious what he might have done with the concept of liminality if could have been part of his mental universe while

Alternate History but, I wonder in particular about a modern understanding of liminality might have impacted the world of two well known scholars. For Jung, liminality was an individual phenomenon, the process in the psyche’s development when it could not return to what it had been…but did not yet know what it would become. Jung passed in 1961.

that in 2021 liminality is broadly understood concept even if its release into the wilds of popular culture has either expanded or muddied its meaning – including the idea of a liminality as aesthetic and a focus on mood and atmosphere. It has found an especially potent home in the realms of urban folklore and creepypasta, most notably the “Backrooms” and their purported (liminal) ability to be reached by no-clipping through regular reality. Perhaps it’s only because the other panel I’m moderating at Fenon this year is on

The model for liminal event or rite is easily portable to liminal space, with two boundary zones wrapped around a core area of pure liminality.

Woodcut titled Midsummer 7 Night Bonfire by Roger Fry