1, kitty horrorshow. 2, dale bailey. 3, erica jong. 4, the end of the fucking world. 5, megan arkenburg. 6, barry curtis. 7, tracy k smith. 8, olivia gatwood. 9, mattias harenstam. 10, guillermo del toro. 11, james baldwin. 12, sylvia moreno garcia. 13, the mountain goats. 14, christina marie brown. 15, hollis brown thornton. 16, richard siken. 17, taylor swift. 18, john wiswell. 19, tori hamatami. 20, sarah kate osborn. 21, stranger things. 22, leah horlick. 23, the haunting of hill house. 24, libba bray. 25, phoebe bridgers. 26, mabel podcast. 27, becca stadlander. 28, unknown. 29, joan tierney. 30, steve berkoff.
is your house (or apartment, or rv, or a house you really like from down the street, or a house from a story) haunted? do you wish it was? for a small fee, i'll put ghosts in it for you!
i'm trying out a google form for commissions this time around rather than a first-come-first-serve model. this form will be open for a limited time. probably till around the end of may. i'll have a handful of commission slots to begin with, and i'll pull from the form response pool once more slots start opening up.
want a haunted house? fill out the form here! (reblogs are super appreciated to spread the word! 🫀)
Hello there! I'm trying out a form-based system for commissions this time around. Fill this out if you're interested in getting a haunted ho
So this has been kicking around in my head a while, and I woke up with some actual coherent thoughts on it that I'm trying to capture before I lose them.
There was a tumblr post I saw before that I have long since lost about how liminal horror should NOT have a monster and isn't just "oh you're alone somewhere".
And I couldn't agree more! But I haven't been able to articulate exactly why.
Liminal, as a word on it's own, means transitional. Liminal spaces are real things that are places where you are on the WAY to somewhere.
Liminal doesn't mean infinite spooky mazes, is my first point.
A liminal space could be hallways on the way to an office. Maybe you're trying to get some government bullshit completed. Maybe you're on the way to a doctor you're not entirely familiar with.
A liminal space could be the terminals in an airport, as you try to make it to your flight in time.
Or a highway you're driving on while looking for a particular exit.
Or a carpark as you look for where you had parked among seemingly identical cars.
You've been in liminal spaces so so many times.
The point is that the spaces themselves aren't what you're really paying attention to. You're thinking of what you'll do when you get there, or going over the things you'll need to keep track of when you arrive. The directions you have to get there, maybe.
So in your MEMORY, and especially your dreams, these spaces take on a peculiar quality. They're SLIPPERY. It's hard to remember any details of them, because you weren't really focused on them. It's just a miasma of "i was in a hallway" or "i was on a road". Maybe a few weird details jump out on you, but it only serves to blend together the rest of the journey.
So, when we elevate liminal spaces to HORROR, the first thing we do is lean into that. Impossible spaces because your memory genuinely does not care what any part of them is like save the ending.
Impossible spaces because we tap into that part of you deep down that is unsettled if you try to remember them, and wonders if maybe they really HAD been so weird when you were in them, and you just didn't notice.
This is getting longer than I thought, so may as well put in a cut!
So. I've explained WHAT liminal spatial horror is as well I was going to be able to, I think, but I haven't really articulated why a MONSTER feels like it kneecaps the entire premise.
Have you ever been lost in a liminal space? Keeping in mind that "liminal space" is a thing we all encounter constantly and not shorthand for creepy pastas.
Have you ever wandered unfamiliar areas that normally you wouldn't even be paying attention to, increasingly desperate that you won't get to your destination in time? Are you going to miss your flight? What if you can't get your government bullshit taken care of in time? Or your doctor's appointment will skip you and you already waited so long to get it. Did you already miss your exit?
That fear is what I'm focused on here.
It's hard to make you feel that fear in an artificial way.
Even if we give a character in a game all sorts of motives to reach a destination by a certain time, you only feel annoyed at the time pressure, not really *scared*. And although the person lost in a liminal space rarely can just give up and leave, YOU, the player of a game, can.
So liminal spatial horror tends to distill it down to a single fear: where is the exit.
Of course, simply "wanting to leave" is rarely pressure enough to *rush*. And I can see why adding a monster is a quick trick to add that 'going so fast you can't navigate' vibe to the experience.
What I'm saying here is that the time spent is the POINT. That you can slowly build up to that desperate pressure to rush.
You can emphasize that desperation a more subtle way, a way my favorite instances of liminal spatial horror do: bodily needs.
You are in a space clearly created by humans, and yet without a single human need met. There are no water fountains. There are no bathrooms. There are no vending machines. Nowhere to comfortably rest. If any of these things do exist they are empty or corrupt in some way.
The temperature, in my favorite experiences, is noted to be wildly incorrect. It's freezing cold. It's burning hot. It's not even remotely the temperature you'd expect an office building full of humans to be.
At first, this leans into this desire to reach a destination, ANY destination. Maybe you can't find the way OUT but maybe you can find out "The Truth"? Maybe if you keep going and going and going you can figure out why this place is LIKE this.
If a human made this space it had to be intentionally to torture people. How fucked up do you have to be to sink this many resources into doing something like this? How long did it take to make? Why did no one notice?
If a non-human intelligence made this space maybe you can find out WHY? Maybe... maybe they were trying their best but didn't realize how uncanny valley and dangerous it would be to a person?
If no intelligence was behind it at all, maybe you can find out HOW? Maybe it's a reflection of our collective unconscious, or the planet mimicking the increasing amount of man-made works on itself?
But as you continue on and on, as a real living human being in an impossible liminal space horror situation, you realize it doesn't matter how or why or when or any of the questions you dangled in front of yourself like a will-o-wisp driving you ever further in.
Because you realize you're going to die in here.
Maybe it'll be the thirst. Humans can only go a few days without water.
Maybe hunger will be what finally gets you. Its hard to tell how long you've been in here when any clocks you find in the hallways are all frozen to the same time and the sun hangs over the infinite highway like an immovable, swollen eye. But the hunger is ever present.
There's always exposure. Cold, hot, never anything between. How can you be freezing to death in an office hallway?
That isn't right.
That isn't how it should be.
Starving and freezing and dying of thirst is something that happens to people OUTSIDE civilization. It would make sense if you were lost in the woods but you can SEE sign after sign of civilization and other people for gods' sake!
How could this be happening? Why isn't anyone coming to help you?
And then we draw back, to you-who-is-consuming-this-fictional scenario. Because the point of horror is to get the person in the chair riled up, not just the character within the fictional premise.
Are you thinking about how often people starve and freeze and die of thirst in our own civilizations? Inches from the trappings of safety? With no help coming?
Are you thinking of how many desperate people navigate government mazes of plaster and brick and paper and online forms, driven forward by the hope of government aid or food stamps or HELP.
How many people hunker down in a freezing subway or under a bridge on the highway or other public space knowing that no one SEES them because they're all transitioning from one space to another?
You probably aren't. Not directly.
But we all know we're closer to freezing to death under a bridge or denied life-saving medical care in an office than we are to being a billionaire, right?
And there's something about that, deep in our gut, that resonates. That thread of reality in the safely fictional that keeps us coming back. Unable to articulate WHY but also thinking that liminal horror is somehow SCARIER than mere monsters.
We all know that deadly predators are unlikely to get us.
Adding a monster lets us move our too-real-fear to a safe target.
And it's valid to want to do that! To decide spatial horror is too much, to want to thin it out like adding ranch dressing to a too-spicy chicken wing.
But that's why I think that the monsters are an artificial add on. And not a part of spatial horror.
long term nuclear waste warning signs - black sails 4x04 - anatomy - control - the house that dripped blood, the mountain goats - nuclear waste warning physical markers - i am in eskew ep.1 - the enigma of amigara fault, junji ito
i've ported my spatial horror reclist to notion to make it easier to sort and filter! everything is arranged by type, subtype, and a key describing what kind of hauntings are present in the work, and you can filter by any of those things.
check out the list here, and feel free to send me more recs for it!
edit 10/20/2022: if you've sent me a recommendation and i haven't replied to it, don't worry! i like to wait until i have time to check out whatever media's been recommended myself to respond/add it to the list, and i've been swamped with deadlines lately, but i prommy i'm not ignoring y'all <3
