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’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).
This made me remember the game Norco, which is fantastic and fits in this genre.