Liminal space glossary: Backrooms, dreamcore, kenopsia and more

These words get used loosely, often as if they meant the same thing. Here are nine, with where each came from and what it covers. For the wider question of why such places feel strange, start with what a liminal space is.

What do the core words mean?

Liminal

From the Latin limen, a threshold. In 1909 the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep used it for the middle stage of a rite of passage, when a person belongs to neither their old position nor the new one. Online it describes a place, and the in-between state itself is often called liminality. In 2023 Dictionary.com added "liminal space" with an informal sense: any location that is unsettling, uncanny, or dreamlike.

Kenopsia

John Koenig invented it for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually full of people and is now quiet. It names the feeling rather than the place. There is more in what kenopsia means.

Backrooms

A piece of internet fiction. On May 12, 2019, a thread on 4chan asked for "disquieting images," and one answer was a photo of an empty yellow room, followed by a reply about falling into an endless run of such rooms. The community later called them Level 0, and wikis built out more levels beyond it. The versions do not always agree.

Poolrooms

Jared Pike's rendered images of endless white-tiled pools, listed as Level 37 on the Fandom wiki. They are computer renders, not photographs of a real place.

Noclip

A video-game term for passing through walls or floors that should be solid. In the Backrooms story, a person noclips out of reality in the wrong spot and lands in the yellow rooms. The word carries the idea that the place is a glitch in the world, not a destination anyone chose.

Which genres grew up around the pictures?

Dreamcore

An aesthetic that draws on playgrounds, malls and other childhood spaces. Writing in i-D in 2021, Rachel Finn described the mood as meant to turn uneasy, like a dream sliding into a nightmare. Plenty of empty playgrounds are just empty playgrounds, so the label says more about how a picture is framed and shared than about the place.

Weirdcore

A neighbor of dreamcore, and the two are often named together. Both pull in half-remembered childhood rooms and collage, and the labels are loose enough that one picture can be filed under either.

Analog horror

Horror that borrows the look of old broadcasts and warning tapes. It took off with Kris Straub's Local 58 in 2015. Kane Pixels' Backrooms series, which looks like a 1990s VHS tape, is a well-known later example.

Mallsoft

A subgenre of vaporwave from the early 2010s. Musicians built albums from slowed easy-listening samples, footsteps and air-conditioning so that the result sounded like overhead speakers in an empty mall. Cat System Corp's Palm Mall (2014) has been called perhaps the definitive mallsoft album, and many of its fans are too young to have seen a mall in its prime.

Questions