What Are Liminal Spaces? The Aesthetic, Explained

An empty hotel corridor stretching into the distance under buzzing fluorescent lights. A shopping mall at night, all the shutters down. An indoor swimming pool with no one in it, tiles glowing turquoise. A school hallway in the summer holidays. None of these places is frightening, exactly. And yet photographs of them make many people feel strangely uneasy, as if they half-remember being there in a dream. This is the aesthetic of liminal spaces, one of the most haunting genres of the internet.

What are liminal spaces?

A liminal space is a place of transition: somewhere you pass through on the way to somewhere else, such as a corridor, a stairwell, an airport, a car park or a waiting room. These spaces are designed to be busy and temporary. Photographed empty, often at odd hours or in flat artificial light, they feel out of context, like a stage without actors. The liminal spaces aesthetic collects these images and the mood they create: nostalgic, lonely, calm and eerie at once.

Where it came from

The word comes from anthropology. In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep described “rites of passage” in which people move from one stage of life to another through an in-between, or “liminal” phase (from the Latin limen, threshold). The anthropologist Victor Turner developed the idea in the 1960s. The internet borrowed the term for physical spaces that feel like thresholds.

The aesthetic took shape around 2019. In May that year an anonymous post on the image board 4chan shared a photo of an empty, yellow-carpeted office room and invented “the Backrooms”, an endless maze of such rooms that you could accidentally “no-clip” into from reality. The idea became a huge online horror story, later expanded in a popular YouTube series by Kane Parsons. The same year, social media accounts dedicated to liminal space photos gathered large followings. In 2020 the pandemic made the aesthetic suddenly real, as offices, schools, airports and malls around the world stood empty.

The codes

• Places: corridors, stairwells, hotel hallways, empty malls and car parks, airports at night, indoor pools, playgrounds, waiting rooms, petrol stations.
• Light: flat fluorescent light, sodium-orange street light, harsh flash, or the strange glow of dusk.
• Colours: faded yellows, beiges, institutional greens and pool turquoise.
• Feeling: no people, slightly low-quality photography, a sense of “I’ve been here before”.
• Sub-genres: “poolrooms” (tiled pools), “the Backrooms”, and the dreamier dreamcore and weirdcore.

See the mood

The references

Film and art: the corridors of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the empty interiors in David Lynch’s work, and the lonely spaces of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

Internet: the original Backrooms post and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms videos; liminal space accounts on social media; the empty-world video games that inspired them.

Why it caught on

Liminal spaces tap into a kind of collective memory. Many of the most-shared photos come from the 1990s and 2000s architecture of suburbs, malls and schools, which a generation remembers from childhood, giving them a dreamlike familiarity. Psychologists also point to the “uncanny”: our brains expect these places to be full of people and noise, and when they are not, something feels wrong. In a strange way, the images are also calming: empty, quiet, with nothing asked of you.

The debate

Some purists argue that the label is now used for any empty room, losing the specific feeling of transition. Others note that the aesthetic often romanticises declining malls and suburbs, places that closed because of real economic change. And its horror side, through the Backrooms, has grown into a genre of its own.

Where it is now

Liminal spaces have moved from niche forums into mainstream culture, inspiring video games, music videos, fashion shoots and interior design that deliberately evokes empty pools and corridors. Kane Parsons’s Backrooms series was picked up by the film studio A24 for a feature adaptation. And fashion editorials increasingly use empty institutional spaces as their backdrop.

Related aesthetics

Dreamcore / Weirdcore · Vaporwave · Frutiger Aero · Corporate Memphis

Learn more: hear from more voices

Two of the most-watched explorations of liminal spaces and why they affect us.

Sources: Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909); Victor Turner’s work on liminality; coverage of the Backrooms and liminal-space photography (2019–2025). Videos are embedded from YouTube and remain the work of their creators.