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How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of hyperallergic.com’s Time
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With a name meant to evoke the bicentennial of 1976, the mall made it four decades before finally closing like so many similar shopping centers throughout the country.
Key facts
- A long, red-carpeted hallway, perhaps at an airport, that reminds one of a Stanley Kubrick still, whether the numerous passageways in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the cursed hallways
- Look to the numbers alone: A Facebook group named “Liminal Spaces” has 228,000 followers sharing images, while “ Liminal Photography ” numbers 357,300. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit welcomes 136,000
- Tally Jr. in his foreword to the anthology Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016), edited by Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker
- In an image posted by Dave Columbus to the Facebook group “liminal photography” on November 11, 2025, the sheer eeriness of the abandoned mall is evident in all of its forlorn splendor
Summary
Had Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania not closed seven years ago, the shopping center — the third-largest in the world when it opened, with 200 tenants, would be approaching its 50th anniversary. It’s the sort of nexus that writer Matthew Newton describes in Shopping Mall (2017) as a “ghost mall”: “places where past, present, and future simultaneously collapsed.” In an image posted by Dave Columbus to the Facebook group “liminal photography” on November 11, 2025, the sheer eeriness of the abandoned mall is evident in all of its forlorn splendor. As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled “The Backrooms,” which first appeared on the message board 4chan. The purgatorial realm of “Backrooms” lore is composed of these non-spaces, a dimension of empty airport lobbies and hotel hallways, offices at night and closed grocery stores.