Creepy horror hit Backrooms and the internet phenomenon behind it recently have pushed the term “liminal space” into common vernacular, but the use of surreal “in-between” locations in movies is nothing new.

YouTuber-turned-director Kane Parsons’ film — now streaming on HBO Max — finds Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve wandering compulsively through seemingly abandoned office spaces that are terrifyingly… beige. These fluorescent-lit rooms, which can be interpreted as symbolic manifestations of the subconsciousness of the person navigating them, are defined by their gruesome banality, even when they’re defying the laws of physics, functioning within the unpredictable realms of dream logic or siccing scary monsterish entities on you. 

Unsurprisingly, Parsons’ work prompted comparisons to David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, directoral innovators who created, manipulated, and scared the living pants off us with purgatorial spaces long before Backrooms gave us a zeitgeisty term to describe them. Which is why we compiled the following list of some of the creepiest liminal spaces in cinema history. Watch ’em and be disturbed:

• Stalker

  Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s eternally-discussed quasi-sci-fi slow-cinema excursion puts three men on an arduous trudge through the Zone, a surreal wasteland of undisclosed origin that’s been cordoned off by the government, in search of a fabled room that will grant them wishes. Along the way, the men have heady philosophical debates. Is the Zone a rift in the space-time continuum? Purgatory between life and death? A place created by aliens? Notably, the Zone is in color and “reality” is a grim shade of muddy taupe. What does any of this mean? You tell me. Stalker is a near-blank slate on which viewers can project their own, well, stuff. Interpretations vary by the person, maybe even by the viewing. There’s none more liminal, perhaps. 

  where to Stream stalker

• The Fire Walk With Me film, the OG TV series, the head-exploding 2017 revival — all the otherworldly drama in David Lynch’s cult-fave franchise inevitably leads to the Red Room, a.k.a. the Waiting Room or the Black Lodge, with its luxe curtains and chevron floor, seemingly populated only by the Man from Another Place, and those passing through to… other dimensions? I think? Lynch had no interest whatsoever in explaining himself, and perhaps never had an explanation for it in the first place, considering how he’s a storyteller who seems to follow the darker paths of his intuition. Don’t question why, just watch and immerse yourself in the unreal sensations. See also: Lynch’s films Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and Inland Empire — the guy LOVED him some liminal spaces.

  where to Stream Twin Peaks

• Alex Garland’s film finds Natalie Portman leading a military squad into the Shimmer, a chunk of jungle surrounded by a force field and populated with overgrown mutant plants, nightmarish predatory animals and God Knows What Else. This one’s definitely indebted to Stalker, with its use of a quarantine “zone” and a physical journey functionally representing a psychological one that concludes with a big, long, terrifying look into… the mirror. The horror!

  where to Stream Annihilation

• Even the briefest consideration of Charlie Kaufman’s filmography prompts us to wonder if the guy lives his entire life in a liminal space: Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche New York — these films find the empty spots inside the human psyche and fill them with comedy, yearning, despair and other complicated emotional fodder. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is his most underrated work, a dream-logic examination of a fractured relationship (between inspired stars Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) that’s like Meet the Parents meets Stalker.

  where to Stream I’m Thinking of Ending Things

• Between the Overlook Hotel and whatever inner/outer space Dr. Bowman finds himself in at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick is the master of profoundly disturbing cinematic liminal spaces. Why choose to highlight The Shining over his sci-fi benchmark? Because the story plays out in a variety of liminal spaces: Room 237, the blood-filled elevator, the endless hallways covered with psychedelic carpeting, the bar with the ghostly bartender, the blizzard-cloaked hedge maze. The film’s meticulously arranged mosaic of purgatories coalesces into what may be the scariest movie ever made.

  where to Stream The Shining

• Think about it: the guy who didn’t know his entire existence was fodder for a reality TV show was trapped and going nowhere until he found the literal edge of his reality and walked through the door to the real world. He lived his entire life in a liminal space, a cruel and unusual form of torture enacted by the most evil human manifestation ever, a — gasp —TV producer. And we’re left pondering everything from the phoniness of “reality” television to psychological theory to the existence of God.

  where to Stream The Truman Show

• Quite possibly the grossest film ever made, Joel Potrykus plops his protagonist Abbie, played by Joshua Burge, on a couch for so long, the guy pretty much becomes one with it, prompting us to contemplate the unholy melding of human organic material with cheap naugahyde. This disturbed loser is trying to follow through on a dare — not get up until he reaches the fabled, glitch-filled 256th level of Pac-Man. Time passes, and passes, and passes, and Abbie just sits there in his own filth, hydrating himself with sugary soda and his own sweat, as Y2K apparently happens and the world ends on the other side of a grimy window. If the nausea doesn’t find you switching over to Bluey for a psychological cleanse, you’ll get to the end of the movie and wonder WHY in all caps, just like life itself does every day.

  where to Stream Relaxer

• Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots play a househunting couple who find themselves in a neighborhood full of identical homes flanked by astroturf beneath a fake, plasticky sky. Right: We suburbanites live in a liminal space! It’s all routine: wake, work, raise children, eat, watch TV, go to bed. Hell is time as a flat circle! Conformist society makes us this way and, horror of horrors, maybe we kinda like it! Or think we like it! Or just convince ourselves that we like it! Have a nice day!

  where to Stream Vivarium

• Cube

  Kafka and Sartre inform this high-concept hell-is-other-people sci-fi/horror fable in which a clutch of people make their way through a maze of cube-shaped rooms, solving puzzles and dodging deadly booby traps. Here’s the catch — the maze may have no end. It is therefore a metaphor for life, as we manage problem after problem after problem after problem until we’re dead. Have another nice day!

  where to Stream cube

• This adaptation of a “walking simulator” video game gives its protagonist the un-name of Lost Man, your first clue that he shall soon have a liminal space thrust upon him. He wanders the corridors of a train station, soon realizing he’s trapped in a loop, and must follow the rules –—and essentially solve spot-the-difference-type puzzles — in order to return to a stultifying reality of work, doomscrolling, loneliness and (this one isn’t present but is heavily implied) death. Our takeaway? Do something! Don’t be content to merely exist! Even though the world is cold and cruel and indifferent! Now HAVE. A. NICE. DAY.

  where to Stream Exit 8

• Would YOU follow Scarlett Johansson into an inky black existential void so she can eat you alive? Don’t answer that. Director Jonathan Glazer — who also made The Zone of Interest, which concocts a liminal space so upsetting I mention it with what’s best described as nuclear reluctance — helms this heartwarming story about an alien in ScarJo skin who preys on human males, using her feminine wiles to lure them into a nether-space that makes the Black Lodge look like Romper Room. Does the momentary transcendence of sexual orgasm generate liminal spaces? Is death itself a liminal space? Perhaps life itself is transitory? Actually, yes, yes it is. If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the liminal space under the bed.

  where to Stream Under the Skin

• You can’t watch powermad cretins travel downriver into insanity with invoking existential specters of thought asserting that life is a journey to nowhere. So this film presents a more symbolic liminal space perhaps, as Werner Herzog sends Klaus Kinski down the Amazon to the Glory of Nowhere, infested as it is with small chattering monkeys. Apocalypse Now did this too, and possibly Jungle Cruise if you’re feeling generous with your interpretation. Either way, the heart of darkness will pump black blood forever merrily merrily down the stream, and we’re merely travelers on the raft into the abyss. Sweet dreams.

  where to Stream Aguirre the Wrath of God

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.