All internet users know what it’s like to be trapped in a liminal space. This week, we talk about the liminal horror of the internet and why liminal space horror is so resonant right now.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose write-up with none of the jokes.

First, we define liminal spaces. In their most literal form, liminal spaces are transitional areas like airports, hotels and hospital waiting rooms. Online, though, the term has come to mean any space that feels mundane but slightly wrong. This wrongness usually comes from spaces designed for people (cinemas, shopping malls, offices) being conspicuously empty. It begs you to ask: what happened here?

A bunch of internet liminal space content plays on the theme that our childhood is in decay. You’ll see abandoned Blockbusters, Toys R Us stores, playgrounds and classrooms, captioned You can go back but nobody’s there.

The liminality in these images comes from the transition between now and then. So if you see a Blockbuster that's been abandoned, it's sort of frozen in time. It represents the transition between the 2000s and the 2020s.

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While there are no Backrooms (2026) spoilers in this episode, we do apply our theories to the movie’s themes. When trying to describe the liminal space that the main character explores, he says, “It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog before and asking them to draw it.” The Backrooms are a shoddy reconstruction of its inhabitants’ memories. Faces are warped, and scenes (like coming downstairs on Christmas morning as a kid) are disconcertingly stripped to their bare bones.

Backrooms is set in 1990, full of long shots of old car radios, retro TVs and clunky cameras. But the director was born in 2006. The nostalgia is a reconstruction, already fragmented, built from spare images and approximations of an era the director never lived through. It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog before and asking them to draw it.

In the 90s people still felt optimistic about the virtual world as an almost physical space, which is why a lot of internet terms are spatial — think of terms like “cyberspace” and “digital footprint”. The internet felt like a portal to a utopian realm. You could even call it a bridge. A liminal space, but a comforting one.

Now it looks a bit more like the Backrooms. You can run endlessly through rooms filled with curiosities, memories, horrors and junk. Even time moves differently, folding in on itself, serving you a YouTube video from yesterday right beside one from 15 years ago. You’re stuck in loops and spirals, a labyrinth so big it feels infinite.

“You can loop endlessly through the Backrooms, an infinite plane, like the doomscroll. You never know what you're gonna get. You could get a horror, you can get a memory, you can get something nostalgic.”

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In this episode, we connect this to Mark Fisher’s argument that the cultural and political imagination has gotten locked into an eternal cycle, endlessly cannibalising its own recent past rather than projecting forward. The past online resurfaces mutated and contextless, or even warped by malicious recontextualisation (“Look at this lovely video of your city in 1982 — BEFORE ALL THE IMMIGRANTS RUINED IT.”)

We talked before in a previous episode (listen here) about how nostalgiabait content is especially effective at producing emotion, and therefore engagement. There’s a whole genre of AI nostalgiabait (“POV: you woke up in the 1970s”) that misremembers the past by stitching together whatever fragments it finds in pop culture — just like us, when we’re nostalgic for a time we never lived in.

The algorithm (and, for that matter, AI) is trained to trap you in a never ending loop. If you ask an LLM a question, it ends its answer in a further question, incentivising you to keep chatting. Just like the Backrooms, it always shows you one more door. You could always go a bit deeper.

For more about 2000s nostalgia and retrofuturism…

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