You don’t have trap me in a fantasy liminal space, reality is my backrooms. Okay that was cheesy but you know what I mean. Yes, I know I’m doing the “Omg this is just like fictional thing!!!” Haha funny meme. But I have to say the reality under capitalism (especially as a neurodivergent person) feels like an uncanny horror dimension to me. Where I’m surrounded by surreal AI advertising, ugly missmatched unplanned cities, gardens and lawns that have been shaped to mimic nature but don’t quite resemble it, people going through their fake motions living their fake lives that they insist I take part in, stay in character until I get the same stockholm syndrome they have and start to like it here.
Reality? Reality is our personal horror dimension that I’ve been trapped in all my life and you won’t let me leave no matter how much I insist that none of this capitalist nightmare is healthy. Oof, once again I sound like a cheesy “this is society” meme but I have no other way to verbalising it outside of sounding like a jaded teen.
Anyway, internet horror movie was good even though I’m not usually a horror fan and found it a little “This is totally deep because psychology is involved and mentally ill people can’t be saved from themselves” vibes. The actual liminal spaces and still lifes were cool as fuck. Reminded me of SCP.
I know it’s trite by this point, but a lot of film critics have pointed out that horror isn’t so much about what is scary on the surface (even though a good horror movie has to be scary to be thrilling and exciting), but rather they’re representative of the generalized anxieties and maladies of the people and time they’re made in.
I feel that kind of “uncanny feeling, everything feels familiar but at the same time all spaces are alienating and I feel I don’t belong here despite this place looking mundane on the surface” is a more generalized feeling than we realize, and movies like backrooms tap into that. Of course, neuro divergent and disabled folk are much more deeply aware of the alienating and hostile nature of urban spaces in late stage capitalism, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t catch on to it, even unconsciously.
The horror of the backrooms is the horror of walking past a bunch of rowdy teens and suddenly you become very aware of how you walk because youre afraid they’ll call out your weak ankles and even after you’ve walked past them you still focus on your walking and now it spreads to how you breathe and oh god
Idk backrooms looks cozy to me. No people in there to bother me
I like how in folklore, passages to other realms are all like, deep in the fuming craters of the earth, or on the tops of the highest mountains, or in rings of standing stones & mushrooms.
But now its just like “Oh yeah, that shit’s in my closet”
On the other hand folklore also has stuff like “if you see a bunch of naked hotties dancing in a circle in the forest, check their backs for holes before you join them.”
I’ve seen people argue that the whole backrooms meme came into existence because of malls closing down, and i know my share of similar abandoned buildings in my area, but i like your psychological take on it. I don’t think such liminal spaces would be able to produce the same amount of dread if it was only an anthropogeographic experience, these architectures have to connect with us on a deep emotional level to be suitable horror settings or they’d just be abandoned buildings, and that happens through the experience of alienation under late stage capitalism, which neurospicy queer people get hit with extra hard.
I think a lot of the urban exploration and dead malls stuff is rooted in the same despair and alienation brought on by capitalist economies in decay. I used to fall asleep watching that kind of shit like 10 years ago lol.
I mean, it’s definitely a topography created by late stage capitalism.
I now wonder how much horror in previous decades was created by the death of labor / offshoring of heavy industries that led to a ton of abandoned places like the Rust Belt, Appalachia or the Ruhr Area in Germany, or to the devestation that was brought about by capitalism brutalizing the USSR and many of its allies at the end of the Cold War. Spontaneously, i can think of Night in the Woods, and of a campaign setting for Werewolf: the Apocalypse set in Appalachia, and there is also a minor horror subgenre of post-shock therapy Eastern European spaces (think Hostel).
Spontaneously, i can think of Night in the Woods, and of a campaign setting for Werewolf: the Apocalypse set in Appalachia, and there is also a minor horror subgenre of post-shock therapy Eastern European spaces (think Hostel).
This made me remember the game Norco, which is fantastic and fits in this genre.
I grew up playing Marathon, Myst and other nineties 3d games, which were full of inexplicable spaces and odd approximations or riffs off of real settings. I always had my eye out for interesting real places to twist and dreamify in level editors.
Seeing corporate and institutional settings mutated into serving dream logic is actually very pleasing and stimulating to me. Much better than the other way around.
Idk, I think in Myst it meant something and in real life it means nothing. That makes me sad.
I used to dream about the church I was taken to when I was young. I distinctly remember the gym layout, but I don’t know what’s behind every door in real life. I can remember white hallways, a second floor hall overlooking the gym below… A hall connecting to the sanctuary, and bathrooms.
There were not velociraptors in real life, but there were in my dreams. Probably reflective of my desire to escape that environment.
Sometimes I dream about attending school, but the layout is different from any place I can remember. Sometimes I can’t find my class, sometimes I can’t find a working bathroom. I remember more about navigating those confusing environments than I remember the actual curriculum.
I’m glad most of my career was remote, work from home. Otherwise I’d probably be dreaming about corporate offices, lol.
You’re right about the capitalist nightmare. I hope humanity can get its shit together and turn this oppressive society into something better.
Thanks for sharing. 🙂
I think a lot of people have these dreams about being lost at school, apparently just as a response to feelings of anxiety. But why is it so often school? (In your case, it’s also a church.) I subbed at the same high school I had attended years earlier, and I was struck by how amazingly hostile the environment there was. It’s so much like a prison, but it’s pretending not to be a prison, it’s a postmodern prison where a few wrong moves will put you on the path to real prison. It’s dark and gray, there’s a lot of people there who are pretty indifferent to you, it smells gross (chicken-fried steak smells from the cafeteria, mixed with chocolate milk), a lot of the doors are locked because everyone knows that there could be stochastic terrorism happening there at any moment, there are cops around, the teachers and administrators have an agenda that isn’t always exactly humane, the bathrooms feel even more dangerous, the sporting events are so weird because they’re the only thing that really excites large numbers of people (where there’s also a higher-than-normal chance of violence or bloodshed). It just goes on and on. Capitalist society is itself a prison for the proletariat, so maybe these are proletarian dreams, an unconscious reminder that we are all right now in prison?
I don’t think it’s even that deep, but is more like an echoing Tetris Effect. For years and years you’re trapped in this stressful environment where you have to rush from one place to another and you have to navigate it and be on time and it is “important” that you do this successfully every time, so it makes memories with the right kind of stress associations for dreams to pick up and go “ok let’s rehearse this stressor so we’re better at doing the thing that’s probably important to survival or whatever” and then it’s just jumbled up and incoherent because that’s how dreams are.
I have never been diagnosed as neurodivergent but I feel you.
Yeah I immediately thought after I posted that it might be a bit rude of me to blame all of capitalism on neurotypicals
well you can be a neurodivergent capitalist, but it normally requires that you used apartheid money as venture capital to fund paypal
Oh yeah forgot about that guy…
Genuinely sorry to remind you of him
I mean isn’t neurotypical-ism a social construct meaning that you are okay with capitalism destroying humanity and the planet? So yeah, blame neurotypicals.
The Backrooms movie really nailed the vibe of the weird interior spaces you tend to see in dreams, and I appreciate it for that if nothing else.
Hell, backrooms look like relief from capitalism!
… But I have to say the reality under capitalism (especially as a neurodivergent person) feels like an uncanny horror dimension to me.
it absolutely is for me. i had to learn the hardest way possible that living in a suburban sprawls – or even suburban-ish environments – causes psychotic breaks for me that end up with huge hospital bills.
it sucks to know that i’m dependent on dense urban cores to keep me sane.
Life is a funny clown mirror version of a functional society, and it makes my autistic ass wish I had matching jester’s privilege, but noooooo I still gotta pay my real clown bills with a bullshit performance at work just like everyone else.
You should watch den brysomme mannen (the bothersome man). Its been a good long while since ive seen it, but what you’ve written reminds me of it. I should rewatch it. I have the file somewhere (with English subs no less!). Its dark. Its a comedy but a dark one, a bitterer gelekhter kinda film. But I remember it being good.
Man, just living with schizophrenia is horrific enough. Not from discrimination, not a lot of people know or can tell with me. (So far) But like, my brain creates the horror dimension and overlays it on top of the Actually Existing Horror Dimension, and it gets to be a bit much. Am I paranoid, or is there a government agency using AI to sift through my online traffic? Am I paranoid or are there cameras watching me literally everywhere? When those get proven true, then the other delusions start looking that much more plausible. Maybe I really did die and go to hell.
Sorry if I hijacked. But you’re so right, we don’t need additional horror when we’ve got this capitalist horrorscape.
You didn’t hijack at all, thats totally on topic.
I’m not schizophrenic, but I did have get a bout of mania and depressive psychosis from a poor reaction from SNRIs once and that was terrifying enough so I can’t imagine how scary it must be to go through what you described.
Yeah. I’m schizoaffective bipolar type so I get the manic and depressive episodes too. It’s certainly scary, sorry you had to go through that; I wouldn’t wish psychosis on my worst enemies. (Except maybe RFK Jr on his path to put medicated ND people into forced labor…)
