The Limits of Liminality
I love horror in all of its (fictional) forms: movies, books, internet creepypastas—you name it, I'm interested. That said, while my threshold for what is enjoyable is pretty low, the bar for stuff that actually scares, disturbs, or causes me to ponder its mysteries is extremely high. I think that partly this is a function of a few things, not the least of which is that things that are genuinely scary are hard to depict without seeming ridiculous. That's part of why most modern popular horror, especially cinema, aims for the ominous rather than the jump scare. It's easy to make someone flinch in surprise, but truly upsetting them, or burning an image into their brain often takes skill surpassing that of most filmmakers.
There's been a lot of talk about "elevated horror" in movies, and like most labels, you can probably figure out exactly what they're talking about even though the appellation itself is vague and never properly defined, other than to disparage either the elevated films as boring slogs, or the non-elevated ones as disposable trash, depending on your tastes. Like most genre labels and sublabels, it's usually the things that don't fit into any single category that wind up being my favorites, since they're less interested in letting you know what they're referencing than they are in rewarding you for having a breadth of knowledge about what they're riffing on.
It's funny that the studio most synonymous with the elevated horror label is A24, which really made its bones in horror on the back of a few movies that have a lot of slow burn, but go fairly wild in the home stretch. I'm thinking specifically here of Hereditary, but it also applies to The VVitch and Under the Skin, among others. I think the main difference between A24 and other studios is that they take horror seriously, even when it's goofy on its face, and that refusal to ever tip that they're in on a joke, or to acknowledge goofiness, has a way of underlining the horror of the absurd that really hits the target for me. It's one of the primary reasons I react so strongly to David Lynch's work, which is often hilarious and harrowing at the same time, but never openly invites laughter or levity. It commits completely to what's onscreen, and embraces how terrifying it is to be face to face with a thing that seems both cosmically evil and comically absurd.
This is also, I think, why the idea of liminal spaces have become such a mainstay of modern horror. If I said "Imagine something really spooky...like a hallway" you'd rightfully roll your eyes at me, but the idea of the eeriness of liminal spaces is so ingrained in the public imagination now that even the meaning of the term has shifted from referring to a passage between two places to its own space defined by its emptiness of design or obvious purpose, and can refer to practically any area that is big and empty (0r almost empty). A lot of the specifics of this vein of horror can be traced back to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, which imagines a documentary about a haunted(?) house that at first seems to have slightly more space inside than out, and finally encompasses an enormous expanse that is so indefinite that multiple expeditions set out and fail to map it, and whether or not anything otherworldly exists within this otherworldly environment is never definitely answered, although quite a bit is implied.
No one has ever seriously tried to adapt House of Leaves, which is probably for the best. I love it a lot, but what makes it special would be lost in another medium. It's better to take some of the more fertile ideas of the book and use them to create something else. That's one of the reasons I got so hype about the trailer for The Backrooms film (from A24, of course) that dropped earlier today. I've always appreciated the aesthetic achievements of the short internet videos I'd seen, but it looks like they've really drilled down into the things that make me squirm about the concept: the seemingly endless, purposeless place that does not belong where you find it. I sent the video to multiple people, breathlessly exclaiming how surprised I was about how good it looked. It helps, of course, that they cast Chiwetel Ejiofor, who brings gravitas to everything he graces, and whom I cannot help but associate with the audiobook for Susannah Clarke's Piranesi, which also explores the terror of being trapped in a strange and seemingly endless space.
An important part of the cinematic language of the liminal is that the camera has to feel like a person experiencing this space. In many cases this means literally using a low-fi handheld camera with video artifacts popping up to convey the physical presence within the space. There's something about watching a video that someone shot of a place that should not be that is just inherently unnerving in a way that a jump scare or shocking twist ending just are not.
I mentioned in a previous one of these that we had to move and were hoping to find a new place, which we did shortly thereafter, only about 5 blocks away from our current apartment. We signed a lease in early March and have until the end of April to move our things over. We have been shuttling things over and building new furniture, but part of the lease agreement was that the previous tenant would have until the end of March to relinquish the garage, where he was apparently storing his things. This was fine and we more or less thought nothing of it, until today, when the property manager knocked on the door while my partner was putting away some glassware and turned over the garage keys, asking her to come look at it with him. Here's the video of what they found:
Unbeknownst to us, the property manager, or the building owner, the previous tenant had converted the garage to a living space and was subletting their unit while living down here, apparently for years. They installed a toilet and wood laminate flooring, and amongst the many questions I have, the foremost is: what is that toilet hooked up to? In any event, it turns out that our new apartment comes with an attached liminal parking space.
How's that for a shocking twist ending?
