What Is Liminality?

On today’s episode, Gio Pennacchietti joins Virginia and Germán.

In 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons uploaded a video to the internet titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” This was not the first time that the internet had been exposed to the “liminality” as a form of horror, but it was the first time that it went viral. With people trapped in their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in this internet niche space skyrocketed. Now, four years later, then-twenty-year-old Kane Parsons took his idea of the backrooms and released it as a feature film with prestige production company A24. It has proven to be one of the most financially successful films of the year and maybe the year’s most thematically interesting film.

Liminality, however, is much bigger than horror or Backrooms and its surrounding lore. We now have stuff like poolrooms, dreamcore, wierdcore, nostalgiacore, the return in popularity of aesthetics like Frutiger Aero, the mall as a place of horror, people on Instagram doing expeditions to “the most liminal places,” nostalgic 90s PC gaming horror. The list goes on and on.

But why is this stuff considered scary, and why has it become an internet phenomenon at all? What are its precursors, and what does the popularity of this stuff say about art and the world we live in? Here to help us answer these questions is Gio Pennacchietti. Gio is an artist and an author, and has gained popularity online as one of the sharpest minds thinking about art in the modern world.

The episode is embedded below. For your long-term convenience, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Further reading:

• Gio’s Substack
• Gio’s art
• Gio’s X account
• House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
• “the aesthetics of the End,” by MythoAmerica