What Is Liminal Horror? The Viral Trend Behind Backrooms And Exit 8 Explained
by Joe Roberts · /FilmFollowing the release of 2025's psychological horror "Exit 8," and with A24's "Backrooms" set to bring liminal horror to the masses, many will be wondering about this emerging sub-genre and its online origins. "Backrooms" is directed by Kane Parsons, the VFX artist behind the "Backrooms" web series, which became an internet phenomenon in 2022. That series was, in turn, based on an image posted on multiple message boards in the 2010s, which depicted an empty office bathed in sickly yellow fluorescent light. This image and the online lore it spawned have become prominent examples of the liminal space aesthetic and its offshoot, liminal horror. But what exactly do these still burgeoning stylistic movements actually mean?
In February 2026, a "Backrooms" trailer promised a faithful translation of the viral internet sensation. But this won't be the first time online horror aesthetics have appeared in movies. 2023's "Skinamarink" had a distinct look heavily informed by online horror works, with grainy images of a dimly lit suburban home conjuring feelings of unease and creeping dread. LEGO bricks strewn across a carpet, wood paneling barely lit by a pallid glow. It was all familiar and yet somehow disturbing in a way that suggested something had gone terribly wrong.
Just what that something was remained unclear, but that was sort of the point. Liminal horror is all about exploiting that elusive, vague sense of unease that comes from the clash between familiarity and the unknown. But there's even more to it than that. Liminal space and its adjacent horror sensibility speak to deeper feelings of lost hope that will almost certainly come to define large parts of horror filmmaking over the coming decade. So, if you don't know what liminal horror actually is, now's the time to brush up.
Liminal horror is about more than just creepy abandoned rooms
The term "liminality" refers to being in a transitory state between two things and comes from the Latin root "Limen," meaning "threshold." This can be psychological, as in a halfway state between sleep and wakefulness, or it can refer to actual spaces: train station platforms, airport gates, hotel hallways. These are all spaces designed to transition us from one area to another and, in that sense, feel somewhat ethereal. This has sparked an entire aesthetic devoted to exploring the liminality of physical spaces.
The liminal space aesthetic emerged alongside a series of similarly foreboding and darkly nostalgic styles such as Weirdcore or Dreamcore. All of these were born online as millennials reckoned with their nostalgia for a time that, in the age of social media and technological dominance, simply no longer existed. Meanwhile, successive generations were becoming fascinated by an age on which they just missed out. Today, millennials who feel somehow cheated out of the world they were promised during their youth find themselves aligned with Gen-Zers experiencing what's known as Anemoia, aka nostalgia for a time they didn't even live through.
The liminal horror sub-genre is just one expression of this state of affairs. Like Weirdcore, it embraces liminality by using familiar environments while simultaneously subverting the feelings typically associated with such environments: images of play areas with no children or videos of indoor water parks that seem to go on forever. In this way, they are emblematic of a somber wistfulness that recontextualizes the joy of youth as an unfulfilled promise. Liminal horror often goes beyond the liminal space aesthetic by incorporating elements of more traditional horror, such as the monsters that stalk the endless hallways in "Backrooms" videos.
Liminal horror will soon go mainstream and it's already started
Liminal horror often overlaps with other online horror aesthetics. You will, for example, see a lot of analog horror in the liminal genre — something the "Backrooms" looks set to embrace with several sequences that look as though they were filmed with a 2000s-era camcorder. Again, the aim of all of this is to elicit a nostalgic feeling tinged with sadness or darkness. Therein lies the liminality. Liminal horror seeks to suspend us between nostalgia and unease, immersing us in familiar surroundings while placing us at the threshold of terror. It's incredibly effective if done right, and it looks set to become more popular as online aesthetics move into the mainstream.
Take something like "Exit 8," the Japanese psychological horror based on the 2023 video game of the same name. "The Exit 8" was developed by Japanese indie studio Kotake Create and released back in 2023. It sees players navigate a near-deserted underground metro station in Japan, where they must avoid environmental anomalies to make their way through the seemingly endless passageways. Described on its Steam page as "a short walking simulator inspired by Japanese underground passageways, liminal spaces, and back rooms," the game captured the nebulous yet somehow specific vibe of liminal horror, which in turn found its way into the movie adaptation.
We'll see more and more of this in the near future. Films such as the aforementioned "Skinamarink" and the standout 2024 horror "I Saw the TV Glow" were the first signs of online horror aesthetics — including liminal horror — making their way into the mainstream. Now "Backrooms" will bring them further to the fore, giving mass audiences a full liminal horror experience.