You shift the bags in your hands, freeing one to open the door you’re swiftly approaching. Leaning forward, you fumble into the handle, brow furrowing as you push with more force. All your effort earns you is the beginnings of a bruise on your forearm. You realize the door says “Pull”. One exasperated eye roll later and you defeat the barrier once known as door without a second thought. It takes you a second to register where you find yourself… Wait a minute, now that you think of it, doesn’t the mall have automatic doors? Where did that door take you? This is the opposite of the well-lit concrete desert of a parking lot that should exist here!
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This is a taste of the eerie ambient terror that can be felt due to liminal spaces. According to Dictionary.com, liminal space can be defined as: a state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way. Liminal spaces are poised to easily become uncanny and uncomfortable the more transitional they are. For example, this image here showing an office building in transition between organizations; empty, but only briefly. You can see the lights in the building are on, but it looks dark outside, potentially during the transition from day to night, or the wee hours of the morning before daybreak. Being out and about during these times when most other humans are tucked away cozy in bed, or covering a night shift so things keep running despite it all, it can feel uncomfortable and eerie simply because it’s out of the norm.
Getting back to the image at hand, and that little yarn I was spinning about you…Can you imagine how disorienting it would be? To walk through a door and find yourself in this completely different place? And not only is it somewhere you’ve never seen, but it’s also at a weird time of day, not quite light or dark. There isn’t anyone around, at least not that you can see or hear. In the creepypasta subreddits people refer to it as “glitching out of reality” and finding yourself in “The Backrooms”. A few different video games have come out highlighting this particular brand of discomfort, if you’re looking to experience it for yourself…That is, if the audio I decided to pair with the image didn’t induce enough dread in you!
Hey Annnamarie,
Yes! You have induced enough dread in me from this image. It is the most eerie and uncomfortable thing I have seen in a while. And it certainly invokes a very uneasy, yet nostalgic feeling. I remember being in high school late at night when most of the teachers or students were gone and only the occasional janitor was seen, and it took me back to the feeling of disorientation I felt. I do know there is a whole genre of films and images that are aimed at invoking discomfort from overall normal images, and I always thought it was disconcerting. When I first saw the image, I thought it was a mental asylum or a prison, especially when paired with the sound you chose. This was a really interesting take on the assignment!
As someone who has been in and out visiting hospitals for almost the past year I definitely understand this image. You really get turned around in those buildings. You follow the signs, but sometimes the signs do not make sense or don’t tell you how far you have to go. You remember going to the third floor before so you take it again, but it’s all closed off and locked down and you don’t know why at first and then you realize that you’re in the wrong section and have to go across to another section and back to the former parking garage to get to where you were. Just an example of what’s happened to me.