Liminal Spaces

2019Internet aesthetic / photo genre / creepypastaactive

Also known as: Liminal Space Aesthetic · Spaces Liminaux

Liminal Spaces is a 2019 internet aesthetic of eerie, empty transitional locations like vacant malls and hallways that feel familiar yet deeply unsettling, originating from The Backrooms creepypasta.

Liminal Spaces is an internet aesthetic built around photos of empty, transitional places that feel eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling. The trend exploded in 2019 after a 4chan post introduced The Backrooms creepypasta, and it grew into one of the internet's most recognizable visual movements during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aesthetic taps into a psychological sweet spot between nostalgia and dread, turning mundane locations like empty hallways, vacant malls, and deserted parking lots into something that feels fundamentally wrong.

liminal space memesarchitecture aesthetic memesuncanny valley memespandemic era memesfound footage memes

TL;DR

Liminal Spaces is an internet aesthetic built around photos of empty, transitional places that feel eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling.

Overview

Liminal Spaces as an internet aesthetic centers on images of places that should be full of people but aren't. Empty school hallways at night, deserted shopping malls with the lights still on, hotel corridors stretching into nowhere, parking garages without a single car. The images share a few key traits: artificial lighting (usually fluorescent), a complete absence of people, low image quality or compression artifacts, and architecture from roughly the 1980s through early 2000s27.

What makes these images hit different from regular photos of empty buildings is the psychological tension they create. The spaces are recognizable. You've been in rooms like these. But stripped of their usual context, your brain flags something as off7. MIT professor Carlo Ratti describes this as a break from "spatial narratives," the story a given space tells you about what should be happening there7. When a school has no students or a stadium has no fans, the expected script falls apart.

The aesthetic draws heavily on concepts like kenopsia (the eeriness of abandoned places) and anemoia (nostalgia for a time you never experienced), both coined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows2. Many viewers report feeling like they've visited these exact rooms before, possibly in dreams, even when they know they haven't5.

The liminal spaces aesthetic traces its roots to a 4chan post from 2019. An anonymous user shared an image of a completely emptied-out HobbyTown store, showing nothing but yellow-toned walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp-looking carpet6. A second user responded with a short creepypasta describing what would happen if you "noclipped out of bounds in real life," a reference to a video game glitch where players pass through solid walls4. The response described an inescapable maze of rooms with "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms"4. This became The Backrooms, the single most iconic example of a liminal space.

The concept of liminality itself is far older. The word comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold3. Anthropologists and psychologists used the term for decades to describe transitional states, like rites of passage or periods between life stages3. But the internet took the academic concept and turned it into a visual genre7.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film *The Shining* is often cited as a precursor to the aesthetic. The Overlook Hotel, with its long empty corridors and cavernous ballrooms, maintained exactly the kind of suspended tension that liminal space images aim for6. The "mono-yellow" motif in The Backrooms directly echoes Kubrick's use of the same color palette4.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan (viral post), Reddit / Twitter / TikTok (spread)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2019
Year
2019

The liminal spaces aesthetic traces its roots to a 4chan post from 2019. An anonymous user shared an image of a completely emptied-out HobbyTown store, showing nothing but yellow-toned walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp-looking carpet. A second user responded with a short creepypasta describing what would happen if you "noclipped out of bounds in real life," a reference to a video game glitch where players pass through solid walls. The response described an inescapable maze of rooms with "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms". This became The Backrooms, the single most iconic example of a liminal space.

The concept of liminality itself is far older. The word comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold. Anthropologists and psychologists used the term for decades to describe transitional states, like rites of passage or periods between life stages. But the internet took the academic concept and turned it into a visual genre.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film *The Shining* is often cited as a precursor to the aesthetic. The Overlook Hotel, with its long empty corridors and cavernous ballrooms, maintained exactly the kind of suspended tension that liminal space images aim for. The "mono-yellow" motif in The Backrooms directly echoes Kubrick's use of the same color palette.

How It Spread

After the 2019 4chan post, liminal space content spread fast. The first major spike in interest came in March 2020, right as COVID-19 lockdowns began. Suddenly, real life looked like a liminal space. Times Square was empty. Shopping malls were deserted. The pandemic made millions of people personally experience what had previously been a niche internet aesthetic.

Reddit became a central hub. The r/LiminalSpace subreddit hit over 500,000 members by November 2022. A companion subreddit, r/LiminalReality, also attracted a dedicated following. On Twitter, the automated account @SpaceLiminalBot, which posted liminal space images on a schedule, racked up over 1.2 million followers. TikTok's #liminalspaces hashtag crossed two billion views.

The aesthetic branched into video content and interactive media. A found footage short film series set in The Backrooms pulled over sixty million views on its first episode. Several video game projects launched using the aesthetic, and A24 announced a feature film set in The Backrooms. Japanese director Genki Kawamura and Toho began developing another film based on the 2023 game *The Exit 8*. The 2022 horror film *Skinamarink* and the Apple TV+ series *Severance* both drew from liminal imagery, with *Severance* creator Dan Erickson specifically citing The Backrooms as a visual influence.

The 2013 game *The Stanley Parable* was retroactively recognized as an early example of liminal space design in gaming.

Platforms

RedditTwitterInstagramTikTokPinterest

Timeline

2019-Q1

Term 'liminal spaces' gains internet prominence

2019-Q3

Dedicated subreddits created for collecting and discussing

2020-Q2

Becomes widespread during pandemic isolation

2021-01-01

Liminal Spaces reached mainstream popularity and media coverage

2022-01-01

Brands and companies started using Liminal Spaces in marketing

2023-2024

AI-generated liminal spaces become popular content

2024-01-01

Liminal Spaces entered the broader pop culture conversation

2025-01-01

Liminal Spaces is still actively used and shared across platforms

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Liminal space content typically follows a few conventions:

1

Find the right location. Transitional spaces work best: hallways, stairwells, empty malls, hotel lobbies, parking structures, school corridors. The space should be one that people normally associate with crowds or activity.

2

Remove all signs of life. The power of the image comes from the absence. No people, ideally no personal belongings or evidence of recent use. The space should look like everyone just vanished.

3

Lean into the lighting. Fluorescent overhead lights are the classic choice. Harsh, slightly yellow or green-tinted artificial lighting adds to the unsettling quality. Natural light tends to break the effect.

4

Embrace low fidelity. Many effective liminal space images have visible compression artifacts, slight blur, or the washed-out quality of early digital cameras. This mimics the look of photos from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which adds a layer of temporal displacement.

5

Post without much context. The standard format on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok is to share the image with minimal or no caption, letting the visual do the work. Some creators add ambient drone music or the hum of fluorescent lights for video content.

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the liminal spaces movement in a way few internet aesthetics have experienced. When real-world spaces like Times Square and major airports actually emptied out, the line between internet aesthetic and lived reality blurred. Researchers noted that the pandemic "made people more aware of transitional spaces and the emotions they evoke".

Academic attention followed. Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University published research in the *Journal of Environmental Psychology* connecting the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the uncanny valley effect, typically applied to humanoid robots but applicable to architecture that looks almost-but-not-quite right. Peter Heft explored the concept in *Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture*, drawing on Mark Fisher's theories about eeriness and the "failure of presence" that occurs when expected activity is missing from a space.

Mili Kyropoulou, an assistant professor at the University of Houston's College of Architecture and Design, explained to *Popular Mechanics* that "the human brain is wired to make sense of the world through contextual associations," and liminal spaces break those associations in ways that trigger cognitive dissonance. MIT's Carlo Ratti added that this dissonance, while uncomfortable, "can also spark creativity".

The aesthetic influenced mainstream entertainment. Beyond the A24 Backrooms film in development and the Toho/*Exit 8* adaptation, the visual language of liminal spaces seeped into music videos, fashion photography, and advertising. Related aesthetics like Dreamcore, Weirdcore, and Poolcore emerged as offshoots, each taking the core idea of familiar-yet-wrong spaces in different emotional directions.

Fun Facts

The specific shade of yellow in The Backrooms image became so iconic that fans call it "mono-yellow," a term also used to describe the color palette in Stanley Kubrick's *The Shining*.

The original Backrooms image is believed to be from an emptied-out HobbyTown USA store, though the exact location was never confirmed.

The term "noclip," central to The Backrooms lore, comes from a cheat command in id Software's *Quake* engine that lets players walk through walls.

Sports architect Michael Lockwood told *Popular Mechanics* that truly liminal feelings require familiarity, saying the effect doesn't work for spaces like freighter ships because "my body doesn't relate to the thing".

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coined two words that became central to how people talk about liminal spaces: "kenopsia" (the eeriness of places left behind) and "anemoia" (nostalgia for a time you never knew).

Derivatives & Variations

Backrooms (horror fiction set in liminal spaces)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Vaporwave (aesthetic sharing some liminal qualities)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

AI-Generated Liminal Spaces (machine learning creations)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Liminal Space Photography (documentary-style collections)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Liminal Horror (combining aesthetic with horror elements)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Frequently Asked Questions

Liminal Spaces

2019Internet aesthetic / photo genre / creepypastaactive

Also known as: Liminal Space Aesthetic · Spaces Liminaux

Liminal Spaces is a 2019 internet aesthetic of eerie, empty transitional locations like vacant malls and hallways that feel familiar yet deeply unsettling, originating from The Backrooms creepypasta.

Liminal Spaces is an internet aesthetic built around photos of empty, transitional places that feel eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling. The trend exploded in 2019 after a 4chan post introduced The Backrooms creepypasta, and it grew into one of the internet's most recognizable visual movements during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aesthetic taps into a psychological sweet spot between nostalgia and dread, turning mundane locations like empty hallways, vacant malls, and deserted parking lots into something that feels fundamentally wrong.

liminal space memes architecture aesthetic memes uncanny valley memes pandemic era memes found footage memes

TL;DR

Liminal Spaces is an internet aesthetic built around photos of empty, transitional places that feel eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling.

Overview

Liminal Spaces as an internet aesthetic centers on images of places that should be full of people but aren't. Empty school hallways at night, deserted shopping malls with the lights still on, hotel corridors stretching into nowhere, parking garages without a single car. The images share a few key traits: artificial lighting (usually fluorescent), a complete absence of people, low image quality or compression artifacts, and architecture from roughly the 1980s through early 2000s.

What makes these images hit different from regular photos of empty buildings is the psychological tension they create. The spaces are recognizable. You've been in rooms like these. But stripped of their usual context, your brain flags something as off. MIT professor Carlo Ratti describes this as a break from "spatial narratives," the story a given space tells you about what should be happening there. When a school has no students or a stadium has no fans, the expected script falls apart.

The aesthetic draws heavily on concepts like kenopsia (the eeriness of abandoned places) and anemoia (nostalgia for a time you never experienced), both coined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Many viewers report feeling like they've visited these exact rooms before, possibly in dreams, even when they know they haven't.

The liminal spaces aesthetic traces its roots to a 4chan post from 2019. An anonymous user shared an image of a completely emptied-out HobbyTown store, showing nothing but yellow-toned walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp-looking carpet. A second user responded with a short creepypasta describing what would happen if you "noclipped out of bounds in real life," a reference to a video game glitch where players pass through solid walls. The response described an inescapable maze of rooms with "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms". This became The Backrooms, the single most iconic example of a liminal space.

The concept of liminality itself is far older. The word comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold. Anthropologists and psychologists used the term for decades to describe transitional states, like rites of passage or periods between life stages. But the internet took the academic concept and turned it into a visual genre.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film *The Shining* is often cited as a precursor to the aesthetic. The Overlook Hotel, with its long empty corridors and cavernous ballrooms, maintained exactly the kind of suspended tension that liminal space images aim for. The "mono-yellow" motif in The Backrooms directly echoes Kubrick's use of the same color palette.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan (viral post), Reddit / Twitter / TikTok (spread)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2019
Year
2019

The liminal spaces aesthetic traces its roots to a 4chan post from 2019. An anonymous user shared an image of a completely emptied-out HobbyTown store, showing nothing but yellow-toned walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, and damp-looking carpet. A second user responded with a short creepypasta describing what would happen if you "noclipped out of bounds in real life," a reference to a video game glitch where players pass through solid walls. The response described an inescapable maze of rooms with "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms". This became The Backrooms, the single most iconic example of a liminal space.

The concept of liminality itself is far older. The word comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold. Anthropologists and psychologists used the term for decades to describe transitional states, like rites of passage or periods between life stages. But the internet took the academic concept and turned it into a visual genre.

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film *The Shining* is often cited as a precursor to the aesthetic. The Overlook Hotel, with its long empty corridors and cavernous ballrooms, maintained exactly the kind of suspended tension that liminal space images aim for. The "mono-yellow" motif in The Backrooms directly echoes Kubrick's use of the same color palette.

How It Spread

After the 2019 4chan post, liminal space content spread fast. The first major spike in interest came in March 2020, right as COVID-19 lockdowns began. Suddenly, real life looked like a liminal space. Times Square was empty. Shopping malls were deserted. The pandemic made millions of people personally experience what had previously been a niche internet aesthetic.

Reddit became a central hub. The r/LiminalSpace subreddit hit over 500,000 members by November 2022. A companion subreddit, r/LiminalReality, also attracted a dedicated following. On Twitter, the automated account @SpaceLiminalBot, which posted liminal space images on a schedule, racked up over 1.2 million followers. TikTok's #liminalspaces hashtag crossed two billion views.

The aesthetic branched into video content and interactive media. A found footage short film series set in The Backrooms pulled over sixty million views on its first episode. Several video game projects launched using the aesthetic, and A24 announced a feature film set in The Backrooms. Japanese director Genki Kawamura and Toho began developing another film based on the 2023 game *The Exit 8*. The 2022 horror film *Skinamarink* and the Apple TV+ series *Severance* both drew from liminal imagery, with *Severance* creator Dan Erickson specifically citing The Backrooms as a visual influence.

The 2013 game *The Stanley Parable* was retroactively recognized as an early example of liminal space design in gaming.

Platforms

RedditTwitterInstagramTikTokPinterest

Timeline

2019-Q1

Term 'liminal spaces' gains internet prominence

2019-Q3

Dedicated subreddits created for collecting and discussing

2020-Q2

Becomes widespread during pandemic isolation

2021-01-01

Liminal Spaces reached mainstream popularity and media coverage

2022-01-01

Brands and companies started using Liminal Spaces in marketing

2023-2024

AI-generated liminal spaces become popular content

2024-01-01

Liminal Spaces entered the broader pop culture conversation

2025-01-01

Liminal Spaces is still actively used and shared across platforms

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Liminal space content typically follows a few conventions:

1

Find the right location. Transitional spaces work best: hallways, stairwells, empty malls, hotel lobbies, parking structures, school corridors. The space should be one that people normally associate with crowds or activity.

2

Remove all signs of life. The power of the image comes from the absence. No people, ideally no personal belongings or evidence of recent use. The space should look like everyone just vanished.

3

Lean into the lighting. Fluorescent overhead lights are the classic choice. Harsh, slightly yellow or green-tinted artificial lighting adds to the unsettling quality. Natural light tends to break the effect.

4

Embrace low fidelity. Many effective liminal space images have visible compression artifacts, slight blur, or the washed-out quality of early digital cameras. This mimics the look of photos from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which adds a layer of temporal displacement.

5

Post without much context. The standard format on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok is to share the image with minimal or no caption, letting the visual do the work. Some creators add ambient drone music or the hum of fluorescent lights for video content.

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the liminal spaces movement in a way few internet aesthetics have experienced. When real-world spaces like Times Square and major airports actually emptied out, the line between internet aesthetic and lived reality blurred. Researchers noted that the pandemic "made people more aware of transitional spaces and the emotions they evoke".

Academic attention followed. Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University published research in the *Journal of Environmental Psychology* connecting the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the uncanny valley effect, typically applied to humanoid robots but applicable to architecture that looks almost-but-not-quite right. Peter Heft explored the concept in *Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture*, drawing on Mark Fisher's theories about eeriness and the "failure of presence" that occurs when expected activity is missing from a space.

Mili Kyropoulou, an assistant professor at the University of Houston's College of Architecture and Design, explained to *Popular Mechanics* that "the human brain is wired to make sense of the world through contextual associations," and liminal spaces break those associations in ways that trigger cognitive dissonance. MIT's Carlo Ratti added that this dissonance, while uncomfortable, "can also spark creativity".

The aesthetic influenced mainstream entertainment. Beyond the A24 Backrooms film in development and the Toho/*Exit 8* adaptation, the visual language of liminal spaces seeped into music videos, fashion photography, and advertising. Related aesthetics like Dreamcore, Weirdcore, and Poolcore emerged as offshoots, each taking the core idea of familiar-yet-wrong spaces in different emotional directions.

Fun Facts

The specific shade of yellow in The Backrooms image became so iconic that fans call it "mono-yellow," a term also used to describe the color palette in Stanley Kubrick's *The Shining*.

The original Backrooms image is believed to be from an emptied-out HobbyTown USA store, though the exact location was never confirmed.

The term "noclip," central to The Backrooms lore, comes from a cheat command in id Software's *Quake* engine that lets players walk through walls.

Sports architect Michael Lockwood told *Popular Mechanics* that truly liminal feelings require familiarity, saying the effect doesn't work for spaces like freighter ships because "my body doesn't relate to the thing".

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coined two words that became central to how people talk about liminal spaces: "kenopsia" (the eeriness of places left behind) and "anemoia" (nostalgia for a time you never knew).

Derivatives & Variations

Backrooms (horror fiction set in liminal spaces)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Vaporwave (aesthetic sharing some liminal qualities)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

AI-Generated Liminal Spaces (machine learning creations)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Liminal Space Photography (documentary-style collections)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Liminal Horror (combining aesthetic with horror elements)

A variation of Liminal Spaces

(2019)

Frequently Asked Questions