Read the full story at The Globe and Mail.
Most Canadians have encountered a liminal space without even knowing it. Think empty airport lounges, hallways in windowless buildings, abandoned strip malls. Now filmmaker Kane Parsons‘s debut film, Backrooms, brings these creepy spaces to the big screen.
The idea of “liminality” comes from anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1909. He used it to describe the awkwardness and uncertainty someone feels in the middle of a rite of passage. It’s the off-kilter feeling of being at the threshold of transition – a limbo between two states of life.
Fast forward to 2019: Users on online bulletin board 4chan posted photos of what they called liminal spaces, such as rooms or buildings used to transition from one area to the next, that appear eerie and unsettling when abandoned.
An anonymous 4chan user took the concept a step further, proposing a theoretical reality where liminal spaces went on forever. They called this fictional space “the Backrooms.”
In 2022, 16-year-old Parsons used 3D animation software to create a YouTube video called “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” in which a teenage boy falls out of reality, landing with his handheld camera in an endless labyrinth of liminal spaces inhabited by a violent monster. The video has 78 million views to date, and it’s the first in a series where scientists explore and try to research the Backrooms without getting lost themselves.
Parsons is now the director behind Backrooms, a theatrical adaptation produced by A24 in which British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor braves his own labyrinth of liminal spaces.
Photo caption: Renate Reinsve in a scene from Backrooms. Uncredited/The Associated Press