Liminal Space: A place of motion and transition. Doorways, arches, gates, crossroads, rest stops on the highway. Borders and roads. Places where the veil is thin.
Proximal Space: “This Side” of the Liminal Space. Comfy bedrooms. Your home town. Holy spaces. Kitchens. Places where the veil is thick.
Distal Space: “Far Side” of the Liminal Space. Frontiers. Destinations. The wilderness, the grave. An amusement park. A mall. A ghost town. A monument. Places where the veil is deep.
there’s a constant feeling in nighttime horror of “this is an unnatural, liminal situation you’ve stumbled into. once you make it to the other end, or if everyone were to know the truth, you will be free of it.”
once the sun crests the horizon, however, there’s an unspoken shift in the underlying tone. this aberration of the natural order has come under all scrutiny and it is still there. you continue to cry for normalcy, but the world does not acknowledge what you believe it should be. no amount of truth or time will end this, and in my favourite of executions the very framing and narrative itself doesn’t acknowledge the dissonance.
it all comes back to alienation, in the end. always.
if nighttime horror evokes a sense of isolation through salvation being just out of reach, then daytime horror evokes it through the realization that it never existed to begin with. that the walls and locks were all paper-thin artifice. that this is now tomorrow. forever.
broad daylight in horror is seeing the yawning abyss and knowing there’s nothing to wake up to.
I think about this a lot because I grew up on the high plains.
I maintain that while the forest is terrifying because it’s dark and you don’t where you can be attacked from, the plains are more horrifying. Imagine seeing a creature just coming toward you on the horizon. You never lose sight of the abomination as it comes closer and closer. You know it’s there the whole time. You look around, and there is no where to hide. You can only run until you can’t run anymore.
