Welcome to The Valley. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the new horror movie Backrooms since I saw it in theaters a couple weekends ago. I’ve been recommending it to everyone, consuming the reviews and discourse, and diving back into the original internet lore. My algorithms are now stuffed full of liminal space images and videos, and I couldn’t be more pleased. In fact, I feel seen.
When I say that I didn’t find Backrooms scary so much as affirming, I don’t mean that I have some special immunity to horror (evidence: I had to close my eyes during most of the trailers before the film). What I mean is that the backroom settings that were supposed to feel unsettling felt, well... familiar.
Later that week, I searched my Google Photos history, asking it to pull up any pictures that captured “liminal spaces,” the aesthetic that forms the foundation of Backrooms’ horror. There were over a hundred photo results. Most of them were from after 2020. A lot of them were from my time living in Northampton, Massachusetts, since moving here in 2023.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when or where I first “noclipped” into the backrooms. It might’ve been the day I got my first Covid vaccine in the empty Sears at the Fox Run Mall in Newington, New Hampshire. Where once I shopped for pillows, a National Guardsman jabbed a shot into my arm, and I exited through back hallways once restricted to retail employees.
Or was it the first (second, third…) time I had to go back into the office after March 2020? We were sent home to work remotely for "two weeks,” a stint that has somehow stretched into six years. I remember wandering the vacant office spaces where I used to gather with coworkers every day, watching the desk where I spent forty hours a week for four years slowly get dismantled. Just motion-censored fluorescent lights and silence.
But my surroundings took an even more surreal turn when I decided to move out to Western Mass in 2023 to reset my life once again. Responding to Craigslist ads for cheap studios and one-bedroom “loft” apartments, brokers and landlords tried to convince me to dwell in oddly shaped rooms tucked above commercial businesses in downtown Northampton.
I picked the most livable space out of them (read: the one with the fewest ladders to nowhere) and moved in. Since then, I feel like my life in Northampton, much like my physical surroundings, has only become more uncanny.
Maybe it’s all the mill buildings. Nearly every time I sign up for a workshop, a yoga class, or just go looking for some vegan pizza, I find myself in labyrinthine, half-finished buildings, staring down long corridors with too many doors.
And sometimes, when I go to art shows and performances in Western Mass, things look like this…
And sometimes, when I go to a co-working space, a bookstore, a comic shop, or even just a regular doctor's appointment, things look like this…
In Western Mass, the liminal spaces aren’t just limited to indoors…
Especially not when some of the college campuses, like UMass Amherst, look like this…
Education occurs here.
Three years into living in Western Mass, I often wonder why it still feels so odd out here. The vacant spaces. The poor signage. The environments that constantly make me ask, “What?” and “Where am I?” and “This makes no sense!”
Is it the free-spirited, “anything goes” vibe of the Valley? Is it the lingering effects of pandemic closures and economic struggles? Is it the million dispensaries, and everyone is just high? Maybe it’s the influence of the Five Colleges. The transience, the queerness, the in-between-ness of being tucked between mountains. I think all of these things pool together to create the overall liminal feeling of the Valley.
I’m finding it hard to feel settled at home here. Yet, I also find a sort of nostalgic comfort that liminal spaces like the Backrooms provide. It’s in the fact that Friendly’s still exists out here (I thought they all went bankrupt!) and I can order a clown cone, or that the outside of the Holyoke Mall looks like it’s frozen in 1986.
In Backrooms, when Clark first discovers the secret area behind his furniture store, he keeps walking forward into that unsettling, yellowed place, trying to make sense of it. What is it? Why is it here? Why is he here? He starts mapping it all out, trying to find its limits.
I feel a similar, “what’s around the corner” thrill here in Western Mass. I can walk down the street and see something I’ve never encountered before—a new piece of strange graffiti, a flyer for a pelvic wellbeing retreat, an abandoned bus, or a secret party in the basement of a pizza place—and end up somewhere entirely unexpected, for better or worse.
In my Google Photos search for liminal space photos, this picture from inside my own Northampton apartment also turned up in the results:
I think that’s me under that sheet, testing out a Halloween costume, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. I might have just been the one who took the photo.
There’s a scene in Backrooms where the camera pans down through layers of space. We watch a childhood living room get increasingly surreal and distorted until there is nothing left but a void. It suggests that perhaps the Backrooms are just the manifestations of deconstructed memories. The way spaces warp as time moves on and the details begin to fade.
The more time passes since I got vaccinated in an abandoned Sears, or since I was sent home from the office for "two weeks,” or since I ran away into this uncanny Valley, the more my mind distorts the details. I think I take these liminal photos just to remember how strange it all felt and still feels.
So, as unsettled and lost as I continue to feel, maybe I do belong here, caught in the liminal in-between of Western Mass. Time will tell.