What Makes a Space Liminal, According to Kane Parsons

People throw the word liminal around a lot. Abandoned malls, empty airports, fluorescent-lit corridors at 3am. But Kane Parsons — the director behind the Backrooms films that turned a creepypasta into something genuinely cinematic — draws a tighter line than most.

A living room, by itself, is not a liminal space. It's a destination. People go there on purpose. They sit, they stay. That intentionality is exactly what liminal spaces lack.

The word comes from the Latin limen — threshold. And that etymology is doing real work here. A liminal space is a between-space. Somewhere you pass through, not somewhere you arrive.

Parsons's phrase for it is "connective tissue locations." That's a good one. Think about the parts of a building that exist only to get you somewhere else — hallways, stairwells, parking garages, the corridor between the gate and the plane. Nobody goes there to stay. Nobody hangs art on the walls of a hospital corridor because they love the corridor.

The r/LiminalSpace community has built an entire visual vocabulary around this: photographs of school gyms on summer break, empty swimming pools, motels with the doors open. The architecture of transition, stripped of the people who were supposed to be transitioning through it.

That emptiness is the point. These spaces were built to be full of movement and aren't. That gap — between what the space expects and what you find — is where the unease lives.

Here's where it gets interesting. Parsons makes a distinction that most people miss.

A living room is not a liminal space. Except when it is.

His example: the living room on the last day in your childhood house, the day before the move. Same room. Same walls. But everything has changed about what the room means. The furniture is gone or stacked wrong. The light feels different. You're not really there yet, and you're already leaving. That's liminality — not from the architecture, but from the moment.

So there are at least two vectors. Architectural liminality: hallways, transit spaces, connective tissue by design. And contextual liminality: any space that a specific moment in time has made transitional. The architecture stays the same. What shifts is your relationship to it.

Hauntology — the cultural theory Mark Fisher wrote about — circles the same territory. The feeling of being haunted by a past that won't fully release you. Liminal spaces trigger something similar.

Architecturally, hallways are the clearest example Parsons gives. They're almost definitionally liminal — built to connect, not to contain. Nobody lives in a hallway. Nobody eats dinner there. A hallway with no one in it is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and still feels wrong.

Scale that up and you get the Backrooms aesthetic: endless office carpet, fluorescent hum, no windows, no exits, no people. The genius of the original Backrooms meme was that it took the most mundane commercial architecture imaginable — the kind you walk through in an office building without looking up — and made it infinite. Made it inescapable.

The wrongness isn't horror-movie wrongness. There's no monster. The wrongness is purely spatial: you are somewhere that exists only to be left, and you cannot leave.

Parsons isn't just theorizing. He's building these environments, or finding them, for actual productions. Understanding which qualities produce the feeling matters practically.

If you want a space to feel liminal on camera, destination rooms usually don't work — even stripped bare. A bedroom with no furniture reads as empty, not transitional. But a corridor, a stairwell, an empty parking structure — the architecture itself carries the implication of movement, of somewhere else to be. You don't have to do much. The space does the work.

Contextual liminality is harder to shoot. You have to earn it through what came before. The moving boxes. The stripped walls. The last look back. Without that narrative setup, the living room is just a living room.

For anyone trying to understand why liminal spaces hit the way they do, Parsons's framework is one of the cleaner explanations out there. Not mystical. Not overwrought. Just: these spaces were built for passing through, and the feeling comes from that.